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Drive-In Massacre (1977)

Dir: Stu Segall

At a California Drive-In cinema someone is taking a swing at the audience with a Katana sword and lopping vital body parts off.
Two Cops (Steve Vincent and Bruce Kimball) are assigned to the case and proceed to make a complete hash of tracking the killer down as the body count grows.
Is it the nutty Janitor?
Is it the teen hating Drive-In owner who sports an outrageously large black cross?
Is it……

Welcome dear reader to the world of really, really bad films.
Bad films, really, really bad films, are actually a pretty rare event with ‘worst movie ever made’ descriptions for example being strewn around with disgraceful negligence aimed at films that are not remotely that.
But now and again you do indeed happen upon one of these rare beasts, a truly bad film with almost no redeeming values of any kind and that, when it finally ends, you hate with a vengeance for wasting those precious moments of your too short life.
“Drive-In Massacre” is one of those films.

The Director would go on to make “Insatiable”, the late in the day, 1980, hardcore porn vehicle for Marilyn Chambers. It seems that he found his true calling and level three years too late to save us from a different kind of shafting here though.

It’s one and only real positive aspect is that it certainly delivers (Cop investigation aside…more below) a very pure Slasher film aesthetic early on, more so than “Halloween” and certainly more than “Black Christmas”, a good 3 years before this type of Slasher film would truly gain popularity as the 80’s dawned.

As such the few killings on show tend to play out like your classic 80’s Slasher death scene, far more than anything seen before (the closest before this came from 1974‘s “Silent Night, Bloody Night”) and at least the first two deaths are suitably graphic, bloody and nasty, with only the cheap FX diluting the effect.
A decapitation where we see the head actually slashed off and a lingering death via sword through the neck open the film very nicely.
And sadly they also close it. As from now on we are in the den of that beast…the dreaded…truly bad movie.

As mentioned, the deaths are few and far between and nothing ever comes close to those first two murders, a sword in the back is all we get to actually see the rest of the gore consists of a few messy aftermath shots.
As such we are left with endless dialogue exchanges, which would be dull enough without the pitifully dire sound recording to contend with.
It sounds like the actors were in an attic while the sound guy was in the room below, desperately trying to capture their muffled words. It’s truly horrendous.
The worst dialogue offenses occur during some tediously long police interview scenes with a mentally challenged, ex sword swallowing, Janitor (Douglas Gudbye) where muffled dialogue is once more the order of the day of course but is even more annoying here as these great blocks of speech are actually explaining half the plot and naming and describing possible suspects.
So I guess we should pay attention to these drab sequences, but quite frankly it hurts the brain to even try.

Another abuse of the ears comes from the horrendous musical score which seems to someone hitting two sticks together while falling on top of a Casio keyboard.

The entire Police investigation is boring actually, with the two dull Cops mumbling questions to various suspects before walking away and repeating it all once again somewhere else.
The questioning is so drawn out and repetitive that the film almost turns into a Police documentary n fact. No thanks! I want a horror film please.
Or perhaps this is all a clever plan on behalf of the makers. They may have put in these great slabs of tedious drabness, of repetitive nothingness, so if the film was ever shown at a Drive-In the 'kids' would have plenty of down time to make out!
Perhaps these God-awful scene are a sexual public service.

The extended investigation is so damn useless as well and opens up gaping plot holes.
If people are being murdered every night at the same Drive-In...how can they fail to catch the guy?
How come the Drive-In is even allowed, after these first murders, to carry on operating so normally in the first place?
And how come so many people still decide to go at all, given the wide publicity about the murders? Are we really meant to believe that so many people want to risk being butchered, cheap thrills or not?
Given the setting and et-up then this type of Slasher film can only really be set during one night. As quite frankly the place would be closed down and deserted after the first two sets of killings.
The fact that the entire Police operation simply consists of two middle aged, overweight, Detectives pretending to be a courting couple (complete with one of them dressed in a woman's dress and hat!) means that we have to conclude that the Police took the investigation as seriously as the filmmakers...which is not very seriously at all.
The residents of this California town should ask for a tax refund!

For a film called “Drive-In Massacre” the drive in atmosphere is mortally compromised by never seeing the screen (except for one brief scene near the end), and as such we only given (yet more) muffled speaking in the background to portray the movie being shown.
We also see very little of the ticket and concession buildings, so we lose all that trashy, neon flecked, junk food razzmatazz that was so much part of the Drive-In experience.
The cheapness of the whole enterprise also shines through in the fact that we see no one else at the Drive-In (all the cars seem empty!) except the would be victims and/or the Cops.
As such this stranding of the cars away from the actual Drive-In screen and atmosphere makes it feel like the movie should have been called simply "Car Park Massacre".
It seems this is a regular problem with Drive-In set movies, as even the more up-market horror film "Ruby" lacked any real visual Drive-In aesthetic,
As such it is perhaps "Targets" that remains to this day the ultimate Drive-In based movie.

With a lean running time, of roughly 70 minutes, it becomes almost suicidal for the screenplay (co-written by George ’Buck’ Flower, no less) to concentrate so much time the aforementioned Police questioning scenes and general walking around doing nothing passages, let alone to then have an entire stalk and chase sequence based on an obvious red-herring suspect, who we have never even seen before.
This machete waving loon rants and creeps for a good five minutes before the two dullard Cops show up to partake of a badly handled action/shoot out scene that has nothing at all to do with the Drive-In killings in the slightest!
This sequence has a nicely black-comic punch-line, but it's the wrong thing to concentrate on at this time in such a short film.  
In fact this concentration on the inconsequential happens with only 5 minutes of the film left, a time when the film should really be ratcheting up the tension and scares in the actual plot the movie is meant to be about!

And as for the big finale?  Holy Hot Dogs, what a confused non-event!
As such, despite a promising opening, we are left with a truly foul pile of putrid matter masquerading as a horror film that serves less purpose on God’s green Earth than a eye burrowing parasite in an African watering hole.
It may have been one of the first true examples of the Slasher sub-genre that would get honed to perfection a few years later…but being the first crap example of something that would get much better is hardly a triumph to shout about.
Avoid.