Punisher Saturday: Joe Jusko Punisher painting
At the Drive-In
I was watching the film Grindhouse the other week which is a celebration of low-rent movies that used to play in low-rent theaters. That movie is made up of two films; Planet Terror and Death Proof, shown back-to-back with faux trailers before and in-between. Since I’m of a generation who came of age after grindhouse cinemas had already start to disappear I thought to myself that I’d never actually seen a true double feature at the movies like Grindhouse is a love letter to. Then I caught myself — actually I have seen a double feature, two in fact.
When I was a teen there was a drive-in movie theater near the town I lived in. Before I had my driver’s license I’d hang around with some neighbor friends and would end up doing whatever it was they were doing. And a few times they’d be going to the drive-in to catch a feature so I’d end up tagging along.
That drive-in was located just east of town, off a highway in an open stretch of country. You could see the movie screen from the road and would pull off and onto a short gravel track where you’d drive up to the ticket booth. I’m not sure but I think tickets were for the carload, but I could be wrong. Regardless, after you paid you’d drive out into a field with all these posts sticking out of the ground situated in front of a large white metal movie screen. At the center of the field was a building that housed the concession stand as well as the projection booth.
We’d find a nice spot, park, get out and setup lawn chairs — I only ever remember watching from inside the car once when it rained. You could hear what was playing by a speaker attached to the pole with a long wire or via an FM station on you car’s radio. Since there were literally hundreds of posts and speakers planeted throughout the field it was a weird sort of stereo sound since the movie was playing all around you at once.
The drive-in was a social event more than anything and most teens whom would roam around car to car meeting up with friends. My guess is that if kids in my town weren’t out “cruising” city streets summer evenings they were at the drive-in back then.
The movies I remember seeing there were the spider-horror Arachnophobia, the druid-horror The Guardian, the thriller The Hunt for Red October and horror-anthology Tales from the Darkside the Movie all from 1990. Now I’m not sure as to what movies played when, but they played as a double bills.
Why did we chose to go see those movies? Easy answer — we didn’t. We saw them ‘cause that’s what was playing!
I remember sitting out in that field as the night would come on and everything would start becoming damp because of the humidity and dew. The time it rained meant that we’d scattered from our seats to the dryness of inside the car for a while until the shower passed and we went back out to finish the movie. I remember families sitting in the backs of station wagons watching the first film and leaving before the second, and that I fell asleep sometime during The Hunt for Red October and woke up just as the Soviets were attacking their own sub. And I remember heading home in the wee hours of the morning after we’d stay until the closing credits of the last movie started.
That drive-in had been open for decades before I ever went to it, but the year after I first went it closed not because of lack of business, but because a bypass was set to change the landscape around it. Nowadays, the place that used to be the drive-in is owned by a church, and a screen that once showed all the terrors b-grade movies could muster for decades now, on occasion, plays religious themed movies a few times each summer.
I only ever went to the drive-in twice but every time I cruise past it on the bypass and see the movie screen still sitting out in the field all alone I think of that summer and those movies I saw at there.
Batman (1989) Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson & Tim Burton behind the scenes
Blair Hype Project
This is a repost of an article Michael Summers originally wrote back in 1999.
ONCE UPON A TIME, AN INTERESTING, WORTHY MOVIE WAS BURIED UNDER AN AVALANCHE OF HYPE. . .
If I have a talent, it’s for mockery, sarcasm and ridicule. So, then, what am I going to say about the BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, a movie I actually liked? Because whatever complaints you might have about BWP, it doesn’t invite mockery. Satire? Sure. The new crop of sitcoms and SNLs this Fall will deliver truckloads of humorous take-offs on BWP. I could also see where someone might be misled (or exasperated) by all the hype this movie has generated. But the hype that doesn’t really have anything to do with the movie itself, and the movie itself is very impressive. It’s also difficult to explain the appeal of BWP without telling you what it’s not. By now, you already know the plot of the BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, and if you don’t, the less you know about the movie going into it, the better.
One thing you do have to know: DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE. THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT is not a horror flick! I was never horrified watching BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. I was scared, creeped-out, unsettled and very, very tense (more on that later), but BWP doesn’t have the full-on depiction of human suffering and bloody death required for horror. The “horror” is all once removed from the audience, hinted at in the re-telling of an old story, screaming in the dark, handprints on a wall, bits and pieces of. . . something not quite identifiable. That is the movie’s greatest strength, and one of the things that makes this movie worth seeing. It’s a testament to the people who made BWP that they can evoke a reaction by these hints and suggestions, scare us with what we DON’T see. So, in a day and age when any fear we can imagine can be brought to full life on the screen, BWP works by evoking that feeling you might have had as a kid getting chased by a dog at night, or hearing an unexplained thump, or being. . . well, lost in the woods.
Which brings me to my second DON’T-BELIEVE-THE-HYPE point: THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT is not a monster movie, or even a ghost story. A great deal of the tension and fear comes from the breakdown of group dynamics between the unhappy campers lost in the forests of Maine. The fact that there is SOMETHING out there raises the bar. The witch, or whatever it is that is hunting them, is not the primary source of conflict, as it was in a movie like JAWS, or ALIEN. It’s an “evil force,” and because the characters can’t see it, they don’t have anything to lash out against except each other. . . I’m getting too “wanky critic” here, so I’ll just cut to the third and final point.
Is the movie indeed “scary as hell” as one poster blurb claims? Yes, it is very scary. Actually, “intense” might be the better word. The movie works its way up to a level of tension and never lets up. In fact, at times it’s so tense that it’s almost not fun to watch. I felt a little rung out by the time the end credits rolled. It’s one of my reservations about the BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, the thing that makes it difficult to pronounce the movie just plain “good.” It’s innovative, a fresh, creative approach to the “scary movie” (as opposed to “horror movie”) genre. I saw THE SIXTH SENSE very soon after I saw BWP, and though SIXTH SENSE wasn’t a bad movie, all I could see was artifice and film craft; get a certain camera angle and lighting, cue the music up, and you can make an audience jump at the sight of a flower arrangement. But I’m well aware that innovative and interesting does not a good movie make. I also have a couple of regular complaints about BWP that have nothing to do with how the movie was filmed, namely what I saw as a distinct lack of “pay-off” at the end.
But those aside, you should see BWP. The movie is an “experience,” an experience every movie fan should check out. And see it soon, too. I guarantee you that this is going to be one of the most imitated movies in Hollywood over the next few years. You can bet on at least one shaky video camera scene in every monster movie and horror flick that comes out between now and the next STAR WARS. So see BLAIR WITCH PROJECT while it’s fresh and new, before increasingly cheesy movie tie-ins and exploitative sequels cheapen it, and before it becomes so bloated by the weight of its own hype that it’s impossible to simply see BWP for what it is: a very striking movie.
Japanese Outland (1981) poster
