American Drive-In

Year releasted: 1985

by Keith Phipps
September 13th, 2000

Not a celebration of the drive-in movie but a comedy set against its degraded late-period state, American Drive-In offers a look at the slice of low-life that turns up for a night watching movies under the stars. This includes a grotesquely obese family, a staunchly anti-drug mayor, a sweater-clad van enthusiast and his backwoods girlfriend, a projectionist who talks to his equipment, an egghead oblivious to his oversexed girlfriend, a middle-aged gay couple, and a group of malevolent greasers. Also on hand is a dwarf named Rocky (H.G. Golas) who seems to have shown up solely to admire his performance in the film being shown: Hard Rock Zombies, the previous directorial effort of Krishna Shah. As Golas cheers himself on and the fat family feasts on such traditional drive-in fare as hardboiled eggs and spaghetti, all manner of goings-on take place, seemingly chosen to help kill remaining drive-ins by confirming their reputation as hotbeds of sin and iniquity, as well as great places to enjoy chili dogs and cheese-filled pretzels. A hooker operates out of the back of an RV. A permed lothario pressures his girlfriend into performing oral sex. Two senior citizens are harassed for dealing drugs. The greasers employ CB radios to systematically terrorize nearly everyone in attendance. While a Nazi regalia-clad Golas rides a cow onscreen, below a near-rape erupts into a chilling act of vigilante justice, which in turn spawns an orgy of depravity and destruction. Despite the peppy American Drive-In title song ("Americans play / under the Milky Way"), it's a sequence unsavory enough to leave even the most hardened nostalgists thankful for the homogenizing influence of the multiplex.