“Warning! The Red Stuff On Your Hot Dot May Not Be Ketchup!” When you see a slogan like that on the cover of a movie with a big box and cheesy cover art, you more or less know what to expect. That said, I probably should have known better. I guess that’s what you get for listening to women, because today’s movie was my girlfriend’s idea (thanks, Mal). Another good warning should have been that the effects makeup was done by a guy called “The Duke of Disguise”. Sounds like the creepy guy who ran the costume shop down the street. Your parents always warned you to stay out of that place, but those Creature From the Black Lagoon masks were just so cool and you couldn’t help it. Then, when he told you he had some really neat stuff in the back, you just had to check it out. And that’s when you saw it. You saw the little creature.
But enough traumatizing childhood memories for one review. You’re going to need all your concentration to desperately try to catch snippets of dialogue so muffled and inaudible that it makes Guitar Wolf’s “Missile Me” album sound crisp and clear by comparison. I suppose it’s a blessing, really. Because you’re now spared the stilted, uncomfortable delivery of these community theater rejects, and left only to suffer through their wooden excuses for facial expressions. I guess I can’t push this off any longer. Here’s what we’re dealing with.
A young (and by young, I mean young like the teenagers in a 1950’s educational short) couple strip down to their turtlenecks, making out while watching a movie at the drive-in. The dude leans out of the car to adjust the volume and gets decapitated by a sword, and the chick gets speared through the throat with same. Now, I know what you’re thinking because I was thinking it at this point, too. The killings have a very H.G. Lewis vibe about them, and in case you haven’t been paying attention all these years, that’s a good thing. This might not be too bad, right? What do you think?
Because as cool as that last couple of minutes was, that’s all you get for quite some time. A couple of cops pop in to see the Kojak wanna-be theater manager, who I believe says something about “whang bangers”, whatever the fuck that means. Perhaps he was having a discussion with the police about his masturbation habits. That’s all I can figure, because I couldn’t catch a single other word in the whole scene.
Here we have another brief killing, where a couple even more geriatric than the first get skewered together while necking. They were mumbling something about her being pregnant, I think. Gee, it sure would be nice if we had any background on these characters to give us a reason to have any feelings about their impending doom besides “Shut the hell up and die, already.” Here’s another lesson for burgeoning filmmakers - don’t play your trump card on the first kill. People watch these movies for two reasons: boobies and gore. If you don’t have any of the former, and all of the latter takes place in the first five minutes, all you have for the rest of your movie is plot and character development. But you see, you’re making a slasher movie. Those things aren’t important. Hell, not only are they unimportant, they’re a detriment to your film!
And speaking of which, now all we have left are some very Sinister Urge-like scenes of our two detectives sitting at their desks saying things we can’t hear. Because apparently the boom mike was located in the next goddamn county. Combine this with Dragnet-esque stretches where the detectives visit suspect after suspect (except, y’know, not entertaining like Dragnet), and you have a recipe for, let’s not polish a turd here, stifling, unrelenting, skull-fracturing BOREDOM.
Having paid the Duke of Disguise all they could afford, the filmmakers abandon interesting things in favor of trying to pull off an actual mystery story. This consists of picking a red herring, having the detectives interrogate him for 15 minutes or so, and after all that time of trying desperately to get you to believe he’s the killer (which of course he isn’t, because there’s still about 16 hours worth of movie left), finally letting him off the hook to go running off after the next dead-end scene.
After an intolerable amount of this dizzyingly bad attempt at tension, we’re heaved head-first into a scene in a warehosue of a crusty old man menacing a young girl with a machete. Holy shit, it’s old Hank from Alpha Incident! Oh no, the cops shot him! Wait, he was the little girl’s dad? What the fuck does that have to do with anything!? If you said “nothing”, you guessed right!
Wait, what the hell? Now we’re back to the janitor of the drive-in going to confront Kojak guy about maybe being the murderer! Jesus, the movie developed spontaneous ADD! Now the cops show up and the janitor is speared to the wall and Kojak is gone! And now we get some fuckin’ John Laroquette wanna-be narrator telling us the killer was never found!? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU, MOVIE!? Those lame cops did all that work to convince us they were on the trail and then the movie just poops out and gives up before the end? I…urgh…ghhghh…ooh, fuck this movie.
I got a call from Chris over at Stomp Tokyo in the middle of watching Drive-In We Can’t Fucking Decide What To Do And There Isn’t Really Any Massacre So Don’t Waste Your Time. The reason I bring this up is that it inspired my only emotion aside from boredom and a mild irritation of the bowels during the viewing; sadness that in a few minutes, I was going to have to go back into the other room and start watching Drive-In Massacre again.
The Moral of the Story: That red stuff on your hot dog might not be ketchup. It might be blood squirted from your ruptured eardrums, strained to the breaking point while trying to hear the doubtless awe-inspiringly stupid dialogue of
Drive-In Massacre. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
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