DEAD END DRIVE-IN
When I first saw the poster for Dead In Drive-In, I pictured a slasher movie where the stalking boogeyman would make short work of his victims during a late-night double feature. Sadly, it was not meant to be. But I’m sure there’s some kid with an iPhone 10RS-XYZ rarin’ to go right this moment, ready to make the “ultimate ‘80s horror homage” based on that description.
It turns out Dead In Drive-In isn’t a horror movie at all. It’s kind of like they took Springsteen’s Born to Run lyrics, threw it in Mad Max’s nearing post-apocalyptic society and married it to a George Romero commentary on how nihilistic an unfeeling bureaucratic-controlled society is. And I’m fully aware how insane that last sentence reads, but goddammit, someone saw that description and gave the filmmakers $2million to make it.
What’s even more insane is how much I dug it. This is a film where the analogy is the action. There’s a fist-fight that happens halfway through, and a chase sequence at the end that (literally) ramps up to a sweet vehicle stunt, but for the majority of its 80-minute running time, the film’s tension lies in the Kafka-esque theme of forever being trapped in a concentration camp disguised as a 1980s era drive-in. In Australia.
Brilliant.