With summer here, even the smell of freshly cut grass can't evoke
memories like the stench of cinder, carbon monoxide and spilled beer.
Somewhere in that noxious cloud hangs burnt popcorn and pluming citronella
fuming so thick that the images on the drive-in screen are almost obscured.
But those images—Leatherface ("Texas Chainsaw Massacre," 1974) torquing his McCulloch ripping through the woods, Candice Rialson ("Summer School
Teachers," 1974) floating across the screen in a pair of '70s hot pants,
Claudia Jennings cracking spines as a Roller Derby Queen from Hell ("Unholy
Rollers," 1972)—cinematic meditations developed during the sick, sick
'70s. Images splattered against a torn white screen planted in the middle of
a cornfield just off some rural two lane blacktop.
The drive-in experience peaked during the late '70's—not unlike the golden
age of porn when they shot those things on film, slipping a story in between,
as they say, the naughty bits. In one fell swoop, around 1982, video killed
both the porno star and the drive-in movie. Sure, drive-in theaters are still
around. There's one not far from me out in the western suburbs of Chicago.
It's called the Cascade Drive-in Theater. Problem is, it went mainstream in
the mid-'80s just as the P.C. police were loading their guns and some
political shill was spouting something about family values. Right now the
Cascade shows mundane and sterile sludge like "Josie and the Pussycats" and
"Shrek."
Typical '70's drive-in double bills would feature movies like "God Told Me
To" and "Rabid." Or "Don't Open the Window" and "I Spit on Your Grave." "The
Pom Pom Girls" and "The Van." "I Eat Your Skin" and "I Drink Your Blood." If
you were really lucky, your local passion pit would put together a tasty
triple threat—"House of Hookers," "Vampire Hookers" and "Hooker's Revenge"
(aka "They Call Her One Eye").
If there is a common thread to all this drive-in mania it would have to be
the kinetic merging of sex and violence which, when you think about it, isn't
that different from mainstream Hollywood today. Ironically, 25-plus years later, DVD is reviving the best drive-in films out of the past and rendering them as the masterpieces they truly are. But enough of my ruminatin'...
Here's a sampling of drive-in flicks that gleefully warped us '70s kids back
in the day.
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