Drive-In Horror Show Pays Tribute To Bygone Era

Drive-In Horror Show is an anthology in the vein of Creepshow and Tales From The Crypt, and celebrates the long-lost beauty of the drive-in theater and all its bloody glory. The film is hosted by The Projectionist, his faithful assistant Billy Troll (pictured to the right), ticket taker Zombie Frank and the Teenage Axe Victim who works the concessions stand. They appear in between each segment and add a nice TV horror host kind of vibe to the whole thing. Kind of like an episode of Svengoolie. The first story, Pig, plays off as a cross between Hostel and I Spit On Your Grave, with feet planted firmly in both the torture and revenge genres. A frat boy wakes up after a long night of partying to find himself glued to the bathtub. Turns out he drugged and took advantage of the wrong girl. It’s the grittiest entry in the anthology and a nice, strong beginning. Going in a totally different direction, The Closet is like a very bloody episode of Goosebumps. Jamie is a boy who dreams of being an astronaut and loves his sci-fi television shows. He also has an asshole family who treat him like shit. They tell him his dreams are stupid and that he should be more like his sister. That all changes when a monster appears in Jamie’s closet and coerces him to bring it the family one by one, promising Jamie that life will be better without them. This one’s kind of a don’t-know-what-you’ve-got-’til-it’s-gone kind of thing. The third segment, Fall Apart can be likened to an episode of The Twilight Zone. It’s a bloody medical horror story, slows the pace down and gets under your skin more-so than the others. The Meat Man is another bloody Goosebumps type of story. All the neighborhood kids are talking about the meat man, a local killer who cuts off hunks of his victim’s flesh and wraps them in butcher paper to keep them fresh. A couple of the kids are even convinced that their own father is the meat man. I won’t tell you if they’re right or not, you’ll have to see for yourself! The final story is also, in my opinion, the weakest entry. The Watcher is a slasher starring Playboy Playmate and Survivor: Amazon winner, Jenna Morasca. Two couples go camping in the woods only to be stalked by “the watcher”. Maybe I’m just burned out on the slasher in the woods thing. It didn’t really do it for me. The rest of the chapters, and the in between segment antics of the drive-in staff definitely make up for it. All in all  Drive-In Horror Show will bring you back to a time when admission to a movie wasn’t $10.00 a piece and the outdoor screens ran red with blood.

Besides the DVD of the movie, there is also a companion DVD called Drive-In Horror Show Ghoulish Videos. It features music videos for songs from the soundtrack, behind the scenes footage featuring a zombie makeover showing you how to turn a man into a zombie in five minutes or less!, trailers for Drive-In Horror Show and other films, and a couple episodes of “Outer Rings”, the television show that young Jamie watched in The Closet. It’s a pretty cool collection of stuff, and it’s nice to see filmmakers putting as much effort into the soundtrack and extras as they do the film itself.  You can grab more info on this and the soundtrack HERE and you can hear my personal experiences as a teenage delinquent at the drive-in HERE.