218. Drive In Massacre

218. Drive In Massacre (1976)
Director: Stu Segall
Writers: John F. Goff and George “Buck” Flower from a story by Stu Segall
From: Chilling

A serial killer is murdering couples at a drive-in with a samurai sword. Two detectives have to stop him before this turns into a massacre.

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We open with a title card reading “On August 10th in a California Drive-In it all began...” This movie likes on-screen text. Not only does it have this odd prologue, we later see the police awkwardly holding a newspaper so we can read the headline, and it closes with text as well. Nothing’s added through the text, but if I highlighted only the parts of this movie that made sense, there’d be no post.

So we start with people coming to the drive-in. A couple shows up to celebrate moving into their own place. They decide to fool around, but the guy, possibly sincerely, possibly as a goof, interrupts things to get the movie speaker. He has to reach way out of the car to do and his head is cut off. His partner is then stabbed through the neck. Yeah, it’s kind of awesome. The movie never returns to that peak.

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Cut to the police station and the awkward paper. We meet our heroes, the two cops. Yes, they have names and one is even the co-writer of the movie, but they’re just the two cops. Who can’t act. Or investigate. Or provide comic relief. Newsflash, this movie kind of sucks.

The cops go to the drive-in to talk to the employees—Johnson, the asshole manager, and Germy, a slow guy that worked as a geek at the carnival. The drive-in, fifteen years prior, had been a carnival, and Johnson and Germy both worked there. When the owner decided to turn it into the drive-in, he kept them on. Germy used to be a sword swallower, which makes him a suspect, but he’s a little too simple to have done anything.

That night, another couple is making out, but there’s a pervert spying on them. They get stabbed, but Germy got the pervert’s license plate number so the cops check him out. They interrogate him for a little bit, but nothing’s revealed. The movie doesn’t know how to pace anything, though. We’re supposed to be suspicious about this guy, creeped out by the porn all over his walls, but the longer the cops question him, the more pathetic and sad he seems, such that we just want the cops to leave him alone. They find a blood-soaked rag in his car and take him in, but it turns out to be dog blood from a dog he’d hit the night before.

So the pervert returns to the drive-in, is spying on a couple where the woman isn’t into it, and the cops are doing their own stake-out. The pervert and woman both get killed despite the cops being right there, and the cops take the staff in for questioning. Johnson gets even angrier, the cops ask him why he didn’t tell them he used to be a knife-thrower, and Johnson fires Germy. Germy wanders around a fair replaying all the cops’ and Johnson’s comments about him in his mind, then goes to the drive-in.

Meanwhile, the cops get a call saying a guy with a machete just killed two people and has a hostage in a warehouse. We cut to this guy promising to kill “little girl” so she won’t be burdened with evil, but she slips away. It’s cat-and-mouse through the warehouse until the cops arrive and kill him. The kid says, “you didn’t have to kill him,” because it was her dad and he’d escaped the mental institution that morning. He’s not their guy.

The cops realize Johnson could be slipping out to kill people between reel changes and rush to the drive-in. Germy is preparing to confront Johnson for having hid all the boss’ swords. The movie at this point really wants you to think Johnson is the killer so that you’re surprised when you see him stabbed to death on the drive-in screen. The cops bust in, assuming Germy did it, only to find him dead as well. We cut to the final title card saying the killings have spread to other theaters and then a fake PA fires up and says there’s a murderer loose in the theater. Do not panic. THE END.

Did you forget to end your film? Try "Title Cards" and hope they can't read!

The movie should be really goofy. This is a silly plot that should be camped right the hell up. Instead, the flick never gains any steam. It just meanders from scene to scene, no real tension or motion ever developed. The movie can’t even decide on its tone—are the cops grizzled vets facing a difficult case, or the bumbling comic relief? On the one hand, they’re aggressive about chasing down leads. On the other, one of them dresses in drag during the stake-out and plays up his role as the wife.

Beyond that, the movie isn’t sure if it wants to be a mystery or a slasher flick. Is this about catching the killer or about waiting for people to get it? The decision’s never made so we get neither clues to find the killer nor a showdown with the killer. The killer’s never revealed at all, and the triple-twist ending doesn’t help. All it does is tell us that the writers and director never decided on who the killer was and thought they’d be clever by never revealing it. Instead, they made a real snoozer.

Which is ultimately the disappointment of this—it’s just boring. We start with a decapitation, which is hilarious, and then there’s another seventy minutes of movie to go. It’s not hilariously bad, but not particularly riffable, and not at all compelling. I’d suggest giving this one a pass. It’s just not enough of anything to be worth your time in any context.