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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Smoochers drive in but they don't drive out, 13 Mar 2003
I don't know why, but I enjoyed Drive-In Massacre. Certainly, it's a bad movie with many problems, but the filmmakers added a few little twists along the way and at least tried to give the movie a very special ending. Basically, what we have here is an unknown killer who practices his machete skills on the necks of smoochers at the local drive-in. You get the best and worst of the gore early on with an embarrassingly fake decapitation followed by a killing that I quite liked; after having a machete shoved through her neck, the female victim halfway falls out of the door of her car, and the blood begins to flow down the top of her head toward the ground. The other deaths aren't that spectacular, although a couple more beheadings come off a little better than the first one. Our list of suspects is a motley crew indeed. First there is the drive-in manager and all-around first-class jerk, then there is the intellectually challenged janitor-type guy. A third suspect appears later on in the form of a young guy who comes to the drive-in every single night to watch for girls. The two detectives working the case aren't exactly Barnaby Jones clones, and there isn't a lot of acting skill to help make them appear more professional, but they can be fun to watch sometimes. Their good cop-bad cop routine is somewhat amusing, but it doesn't compare to the witty repartee between the two (one in the garb of a woman) during a stakeout. Here's what I don't get. If I knew a couple was brutally murdered at the drive-in, I probably wouldn't be waiting in line for tickets the next night; after several consecutive nights of murders, I wouldn't even drive by the place in the middle of the day. In the setting of this movie, though, business actually increases significantly after the murders begin. As far as the presentation of the movie goes, I do have to complain a little bit about the lighting. Of course, a drive-in theater lot is usually going to be rather dark during the showing of a movie, but there were times when I could not tell what I was looking at. I have the impression that many viewers won't care for the warehouse scene toward the end of the movie, but I thought it was a quasi-brilliant move on the part of the filmmakers. I really enjoyed the presentation of the final murder, but I was a little disappointed by the conclusion of the film (especially since I could barely make out the shots very clearly due to terrible lighting). Some may disagree, but I liked what the filmmakers tried to do in the concluding half minute; the effort was certainly there. Drive-In Massacre somehow manages to succeed despite all the obstacles it constructs for itself along the way. It's a fun, campy little horror film, but I would guess that only those who love cheap horror movies of this type will get any enjoyment out of it.
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