Drive-In Horrorshow

Drive-In Horrorshow is especially good if you are in a "mixed" (i.e. horror-fan + horror-adverse) relationship...The shorts are creative and accessible, and show a great sense of humor. The Closet and The Watcher are just plain fun. The Meat Man is a grown-up look at all the crazy horror rumours we'd spread around as kids - this one was my favorite. And then, Fall Apart was horror with a bit of a soul. Socially relevant and terribly foreboding and creepy, with enough gore and stuff too to keep the more horror-fan types happy.

Apparently (according to husband) there are lots of great uses of horror archetypes too, but as a newbie I just thought it was fun and entertaining!

I really wanted to like this, not least because I'm a big fan of that vanishing and venerable phenomenon, the drive-in. Alas, I've come away with a mixed reaction.

The overall conceit---a postapocalyptic drive-in run by mutants, zombies, and the undead for a similar clientèle---is a fun one for a horror film. I've been left sitting in the last car present in a drive-in in the middle of the night, and a deserted one that's still running in real life is creepy enough, let alone one that's at the end of the world. Best, this fictional drive-in features what few real drive-ins do today---that staple of yesteryear, the B movie.

The problem is that we have some F movies included in this anthology.

In that category, I'd have to put the first film, "Pig." I believe the filmmakers fancy it to be in the company of such revenge films as "Last House on the Left" or "I Spit on Your Grave," but for a variety of reasons, the comparisons don't work. The film started on a hopeful, if low-budget, note (the frat's front door reads Delta Omega Alpha--D.O.A.). But that's just about the last I liked of it, except for the fact of how the woman managed to get the man into the position he's in--a nicely ironic touch. The actors do their best with what they've been given, which isn't much. The female lead has been given a load of vituperative histrionics, and the film quickly degenerates into a lot of shouted imprecations and ceaseless torture. The film suffers further from the fact that the timing of the first half is all wrong, and I started to get the giggles because of it. This vignette isn't scary, suspenseful, or triumphal---it's alternately gross, depressing, preposterous, and annoying.

"The Closet," about an unhappy boy of the Space Age, is rather better. The characters are over-the-top and unidimensional, but they are intended to be. Although one can see the end coming, it's nicely done. The boy playing the lead is surprisingly good for such a young actor. My main quibbles with the film are some poor pacing and some anachronisms (for example, glaringly, the cell phone; less so, the answering machine). Surely the writers know some people over the age of 50---they should have tried talking to them before committing images to film, especially since some of the set dressing (such as the lighted globe) was really good.

"Fall Apart" isn't big on action or plot, but it isn't meant to be. (My one argument with that fact is the plot threads that start and then go nowhere. Why?) The main character is likable enough, and he meets a terrible fate, which is the point of this one. It's a gross-out effects film, which starts creepily and builds to total nastiness, and the effects are well done. Unfortunately, the budget seems to have gone largely to making those effects; the small budget shows excessively elsewhere.

Of all the films, "Meat Man" may be closest to the creepy films and mags of the drive-in's heyday. It's certainly close to the real sorts of scary tales and rumors we told each other as children. The script, direction, and editing are crisp and well paced. The way these kids think is spot-on. Even the preposterous game they play with the freezer is on target---it's exactly the kind of game (that makes no sense to adults) that kids would invent. The child actors do a wonderful job portraying the brothers. Overall, I liked it. (But what did I miss at the beginning? What was with the Frankenstein monster in the bushes?)

Finally, "The Watcher" is 99% unwatchable. If Dark Carnival, the film festival I saw this at, had stuck to its schedule, and shown this one last, I'd have gone home after the few shots of some spectacular scenery, and caught one of my TV shows instead. The makers claim it was inspired by such classics as TCM, but there is nothing here of what made TCM a landmark film in the genre. The characters are unengaging, and there isn't a bright bulb in the marquee. These have to be THE stupidest characters I have ever seen in a film, and that includes the recent "Timber Falls." There is nothing scary or disturbing here, except perhaps the notion that "starring" on "Survivor" is an entrée to the film business.

The bits in between the vignettes are not particularly funny, but the guy playing The Projectionist does so with enthusiastic, committed glee, and the concessionaire Teenage Axe Victim is an inspired touch. There are plenty of trilogy-formatted B films, and I think that "Drive-In Horrorshow" could benefit by becoming one, that is, lose the first and the last vignette.

Like many anthologies some segments are more enjoyable than others. Overall I found it to be fun. I did feel the effects look dated, I was rather surprised by the date made, because it looks like it was made in the 90s. It has that 90s camp feel to it as well. Entertaining though. I did enjoy the drive through set up with the shadow customers.

It feels a bit like Goosebumps, or Creepshow with a lower budget. So it's not quite as good as these, but if these shows are up your street then I think you could have fun with it. I did feel the last one was the weakest one of the segments, which is a shame to end on.

An anthology film with the segments bridged with supposedly humorous antics of ghosts and zombies who visit their own drive-in theater to watch movies about more ghosts and zombies. Why, you ask, do the undead go to a drive-in theater when they don't drive? Wouldn't an indoor theater be more to their liking? And such a drive-in! The film makers apparently had access to an actual drive-in theater but were not allowed to touch the projection equipment. So when it's time to show a film the print magically changes from 35mm to 16mm and an old pre-war Bell & Howell model 138 is switched on. The monster projectionist hasn't actually put the film IN the projector,but he gives the reel a spin and as we zoom in on the reel of 16mm film spinning like crazy the picture is somehow projected out of the big 35mm machine. And they do this goofy act for each of the segments as though the viewers won't notice. The films come in absurdly tiny cans which should hold a preview at most. Nit-picking? Maybe. But if there is one thing a movie maker should know it is what film is like. And these guys obviously don't. They can't act either. The ghost "manager" tries to do a funny/sinister accent as he tries to be a version of "The Cryptkeeper" but he isn't very good and drops his dialect repeatedly. Some of the undead actors don't speak at all so they thrash around trying to be over the top funny but just look silly. The performers in the story segments are so-so at best and none of the stories would scare anybody. I'd like to give these folks something for effort but considering they didn't even try very hard, I won't. I suppose you could sit through this if nothing else was on hand and you were really desperate for entertainment. Recommended only for those die-hard fans who want to see every last horror movie ever made.

"Drive-In Horrorshow" is a low-budget horror anthology made of 5 segments that have nothing in common, except that they all belong to a particular horror sub-genre. These segments are introduced by a ghoulish host that looks straight out of a b&w TV show, which nicely hints at the anachronistic nature of the segments, or rather their desire to encompass all eras of horror movies.

In no particular order, there's the monster movie, the torture movie, the slasher, the urban maniac and some sci-fi with men in black thrown in. This should make for a fun spectacle, but most of the segments go nowhere. The most blatant example is the first bit, "The Pig", which is 10 minutes of a raped girl torturing her tormentor in the bathtub until...he dies. There's no twist. This can also be said of the sci-fi segment, which reads like the 1st 20 minutes of a movie and then cuts. The slasher bit is simply 90 minutes of SOV backwoods slasher condensed in 20 minutes.

Although not original in any way, the "Meat Man" segment at least has endearing performances by the lead kids and some sort of twist, as does "The Closet". You get the feeling that the director simply wanted to pay respect to the many sub-genres of horror, but was simply out of ideas. As a homage, it works in a modest way, but as a movie, there is simply nothing to hold on to.

The grue is omnipresent, though surprisingly no so much in the torture segment. Even with 20 minutes segments, this mostly bored me. There's obviously a lot of heart, but no ideas. Next time, try a script.