[yasr_overall_rating]
In the near future, a teenage couple is trapped in a drive-in theater which has become a concentration camp for social outcasts. The inmates are treated to drugs, exploitation films, junk food, and new wave music.
It’s not supposed to happen this way. Nearly everyone describes Brian Trenchard-Smith’s “Dead End Drive-In” as in the vein of “Mad Max.” But “Dead End Drive-In” is better than “Mad Max.” Okay, maybe not “Mad Max: Fury Road” or the original, but certainly better than the second two. “Dead End Drive-In” is one of the best Ozploitation films I’ve ever seen. If my perspective is not authoritative enough, I should add that Quentin Tarantino is also a fan of this film.
From its opening text, informing the viewer that the film’s world takes place somewhere in the near distant future when the economy has collapsed and massive crime has swept through the city, “Dead End Drive-In” places us into what we can safely now call, an alternate version of the future. Everyone has big ’80s hairdos, listens to new wave, and there are still many drive-in theaters. You see, in an effort to control crime, a chain of drive-in theaters have been turned into concentration camps to hold young prisoners. And the roads around the theaters are heavily enforced government roads that do not permit walking of any reason.
The hero of this film, Jimmy “Crabs” (Ned Manning), borrows his brother’s 1956 Chevy to take his girlfriend Carmen (Natalie McCurry), out on a date to the local Star Drive-In and the two end up trapped at the theater. The police are actually the instigators of this trap and throw Jimmy a handful of free meal vouchers to spend at a nearby run-down cafe.
Brian Trenchard-Smith has imagined the futuristic world to a startling degree. The film, much like “Mad Max,” is careful to not give us too many visuals, backstory, or explanations for why the world exists in the manner that it does. The Star Drive-In becomes much more than a movie set – it’s a surprisingly sharp depiction of the director’s imagination, a place every bit as fantastic as the Death Star or Casablanca. There is one particular sequence where morning comes to the Star Drive-In and young prisoners wake from moving cars that is particularly memorable: the fog rising off what seems like endless cars, the slow pan up of the camera, I’m sure that in it was just a dumpy drive-in with a bunch of extras but in the world of the film the sequence becomes something other worldly.
Much like the backstory of the film, the plot of “Dead End Drive-In” is not going to overwhelm the viewer. This film is all about the tone with a nice dollop of action thrown in for good measure. Filmed on a meager $2.5 million budget, this is a movie that strains at the leash of what can be done, a movie made by a master of exploitation.
Available on Special Edition Blu-ray September 20th
