Dead End Drive-In (Brian Trenchard-Smith, 1986)

So many movies take place in post-apocalyptic wastelands or focus on a hero preventing an apocalypse, but enough of the before and after. What does it look like during an apocalypse? Not enough filmmakers have tackled the transitional period from pre- to post- even though the imaginative options are limitless and the ground is mostly untrod. We've seen the wastelands, dudes. Let's see what happens in the years leading up to them.

Ozploitation legend Brian Trenchard-Smith put his impressive visual skills to that purpose in Dead End Drive-In (cowritten by Peter Carey, who also cowrote Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World), a movie taking place in a wildly unstable world where the institutions are still in place but barely holding on. (Sound familiar? Yeah, buddy, we're almost living in it.) Lawlessness and potential collapse are everywhere, but you can still put gas in your car, go to work, see Rambo 8 in the theater, and buy pasta, though you may get harassed by roving gangs or authoritarian cops. And because it's the '80s (well, the '80s version of the semi-apocalyptic future '90s), we get lots of neon and big, crazy hair.

The movie opens with white text on a black background telling us about all the shit that went down prior to the beginning of the story. Massive instability is rocking the globe due to revolutionary uprisings, nuclear accidents, environmental disasters, food shortages, high inflation and unemployment, and stock market collapse. None of this fazes eternal optimist Jimmy "Crabs" Rossini (Ned Manning), a young fitness enthusiast and son of Italian parents living on the outskirts of Sydney, Australia.

The first non-text images we see are of Crabs ("Why do they call you Crabs?" "I thought I had crabs once. Turned out I didn't. But the name stuck.") taking a jog in the yellowish dusk near the power plant and into the city. He sees his girlfriend Carmen (Natalie McCurry) hanging out with some of her big-haired friends and stops to chat her up. A group of apocalypto-punks pulls up in their truck, and the ringleader demands Crabs' running shoes. He keeps his cool and starts ducking and weaving, but a well-timed appearance of the police scares the punks off. Crabs goes back to making plans with Carmen and then jogs back home.

The Rossini household is something to behold. Tucked away on an industrial side street, a large cement garage houses a pristine red '56 Chevy, a tow truck, a work bench, and a punching bag. A beaded curtain next to the tow truck leads into a small but visually eye-popping living space that's a riot of '70s furniture, '80s neon, and Italian Catholicism. Carmen immediately starts punching the bag after his run, exchanges friendly barbs with his musclehead brother Frank (Ollie Hall), and wolfs down some spaghetti prepared by his widowed Italian mother, who gives him the business about how small and thin he is ("just like your father") and how he'll never achieve his brother's size no matter how much he eats and works out.

After the meal, Crabs and Frank start their tow-truck shift. They arrive at a horrendous multi-car accident with dead bodies, dying people, and severed body parts everywhere. (These accidents have become more common in the slow societal collapse.) Frank claims the tow job to the already-on-scene police, though another tow-truck driver also appears and says the job is his. The two men argue until Frank pays off the cops and gets the gig. A second gang of apocalypto-punks, even more Mad Maxish in appearance than the first gang, show up in an attempt to scavenge the car parts before Frank can start towing, but Crabs holds them at bay. Meanwhile, a news truck pulls in and begins interviewing Frank, followed by the ambulances. It's a wild night.

These opening scenes establish such a distinctive look and tone, and I was sucked in immediately. We get the lovably oddball Australian sense of humor us U.S. types went apeshit for in the '80s, a world that's recognizable but unpredictably strange, great shot compositions, an active but not overbearing camera, a sense of place, and lots of detail. All this and the main storyline hasn't even happened yet.

The night after the tow-truck insanity, Crabs sneaks away in his brother's classic Chevy, picks up Carmen, and takes her to the drive-in. Ominously, an automatic electrified gate closes behind them. Even more ominously, half the cars at the drive-in are covered in graffiti and are missing tires, though the happy-go-lucky Crabs doesn't notice. Once they park, Crabs and Carmen immediately start getting it on, even though Carmen told Crabs he was being a "cheeky bugger" for implying they would be doing other things than watching the movie. While they're erotically occupied, someone steals two of the Chevy's tires. Crabs quickly dresses and catches up with the thieves, though his optimism briefly fades when he finds out the thieves are cops.

After complaining to the ticket taker, Thompson (Peter Whitford), at the box office and being informed the complaint will have to wait until morning, Crabs and Carmen eventually realize the drive-in has become a secret open-air prison camp and they're the newest prisoners. The Australian government has covertly transformed its drive-ins into permanent homes for undesirable dystopic youth, and Crabs and Carmen's poor choice for a date has seriously backfired.

The sprawling drive-in is a bit like an Australian Burning Man without the trust-fund hippie baggage, though, like the Hotel California, you can enter but never leave. (The filmmakers were able to shoot at an existing drive-in that had recently closed. It was demolished the following year.) The drive-in has become its own mini-city, with a hair salon in the women's bathroom, a working snack bar as hangout/town square/restaurant, a makeshift pool, homes and tents fashioned from car parts, a thriving drug and alcohol trade, sports played with wooden paddles and trash, nightly movies (mostly earlier films by Trenchard-Smith), and even a monkey for some reason. The imprisoned teens and twentysomethings sport a riot of '80s hair, including mullets, mohawks, spikes, sprayed and teased towers, and neo-rockabilly pompadours, and headgear.

Carmen, a runaway from her parents and wanted by the police, immediately accepts her fate as permanent drive-in resident, but Crabs is determined to break free once he gets his hands on two Chevy tires and some gas. He also becomes dismayed by Carmen's xenophobia once a few truckloads of Asian immigrants are brought into the camp. He may have a hot girlfriend, but she kinda sucks as a person. The movie goes for some social commentary here that is never explored in the depth it deserves, especially since none of the Asian characters are individualized or given any dialogue except for (briefly) one man, but what it does get right in these scenes is the observation that way too many white people would rather continue to live in divided misery than see nonwhite people as allies in the fight to change material conditions.

When Crabs' initial plans to escape are derailed, and when a xenophobic meeting of the camp's white people is called, Crabs decides to go big, and Trenchard-Smith's bona fides as an expert director of action are put on display. The concluding scenes, like most of the rest of the movie, are exciting and visually thrilling.

After a wild '70s and '80s in Australian cult filmmaking, Trenchard-Smith moved to Hollywood in 1990. He's worked steadily in the worlds of straight-to-video and made-for-TV movies (including the third and fourth installments in the Leprechaun series), but I wish he'd been given the chance to make some medium- and big-budget films for the big screen, especially in the '90s when it was still possible to do good mainstream work outside of CGI-heavy franchises. He's such a skilled visual filmmaker, and there's an alternate universe where he got to make some of the most interesting big-budget wide-release horror, sci-fi, and action movies of the '90s. You blew it, Hollywood.

I love this movie. There's something interesting to look at in every frame, the characters are intriguing, the story is unusual, the setting is fantastic. It all works, though the attempt at social commentary is a bit thin. That's easily forgivable, though, considering everything the movie does right. Check it out, you apocalypto-punks.

The Face at the Window (George King, 1939)

The Face at the Window is an enormously entertaining British murder mystery heavy on the melodrama and horror, with a sprinkling of mad scientist sci-fi mumbo jumbo, though the mad scientist is surprisingly a morally upstanding fellow and not the villain. The whole thing is ridiculous in the right way, and George King gives it a pleasing visual richness.

Opening in the most bone-chilling of locations, a bank for wealthy people in 1880s Paris, The Face at the Window begins with a bank employee seeing a horrible face at, you guessed it, the window, hearing a crazy howl, and taking a knife to the back. A clerk named Lucien Cortier (John Warwick) rushes to his aid, and the knifed man reveals the culprit's identity as The Wolf (a possibly beast-like serial criminal tormenting Paris) before promptly dying. The Wolf has also robbed a significant chunk of the bank's holdings during this attack, putting the financial institution in serious danger of closing.

Lucien explains what he saw to the wildly side-burned police inspector Gouffert (Robert Adair), though Lucien's proximity to the crime puts him on Gouffert's suspect list. Lucien and bank owner Monsieur de Brisson (Aubrey Mallalieu) both agree that the police are incompetent, and de Brisson tells Lucien he can have whatever he wants if he solves the crime before the police. This promise excites the young man and de Brisson's daughter Cecile (Marjorie Taylor), who have been carrying on a secret relationship since old man de Brisson won't let his daughter marry a guy like Lucien, no matter how much he likes the young man, because Lucien ain't got no loot. No status either. I tell you, he gets no respect (adjusts tie).

Enter the incredibly named Chevalier del Gardo, portrayed by the incredibly named Tod Slaughter. Del Gardo is a rich old snob who is about to place a large piece of his fortune in de Brisson's bank. De Brisson is worried that del Gardo will back out because of the robbery, but del Gardo has his sights set on marrying Cecile (whether she wants it or not) and getting Lucien out of his way, so he happily puts his dough in de Brisson's bank, saving it from closure. He asks for the old man's blessing, which disturbs de Brisson because of the age difference (are we sure this guy's supposed to be French?), but since the Chevalier just saved his bank, he tells the man he'll have his blessing if Cecile agrees to the marriage.

Meanwhile, people continue getting knives in the back after seeing a crazy face at the window and hearing a wolf howl, and del Gardo does everything he can to make sure the cops think it's Lucien, with the help of some unsavory associates. Speaking of associates, Lucien's mad scientist buddy Professor LeBlanc (Wallace Evennett) is achieving excellent results in his bizarre attempts to electrically stimulate recently deceased animals in order for the animals to complete the tasks they were in the middle of at the time of death. LeBlanc's plan, so crazy that it just might work, is to run the experiment on the next victim of The Wolf in hopes that the newly dead person will reveal the master criminal's identity. It's a good thing for all of us that our falsely accused bank clerk's best friend is a mad scientist with a heart of gold.

This is my first encounter with master thespian Tod Slaughter, and I hope it won't be my last. The Tod man has a devoted cult following, and I may soon be joining that group. Slaughter is a delightful ham who clearly takes great pleasure in playing terrible people. I enjoyed what he was delivering from his first scene, but the moment where he asks to pay his last respects to a recently killed character, contemptuously pokes at the body with his boot, and launches into a deep-throated maniacal laugh made me enthusiastically hop on board the Tod train. Primarily a theater actor in the late Victorian era, Slaughter's film work is mostly in collaboration with director George King. According to the Tod freaks, The Face at the Window is supposedly one of his more subdued performances. If this is the case, I can't wait to see Slaughter fully unleashed.

King makes the whole silly business look great, his actors all have expressive faces and know how to use them, and the film proceeds at an excellent pace that neither rushes things nor drags them on interminably. There are so many great little visual and character details, but I especially love the look and design of the pub The Blind Rat, a dank but sprawling dive bar where del Gardo hatches his dirty plans and finds willing criminals to carry them out. It's one of the great movie locations. Sure, the science experiment part of the plot is goofy as hell, but somehow King and his cast make it work by playing things just serious enough but not too serious. This is a fun movie, and I've been in need of fun lately. 

Damned River (Michael Schroeder, 1989)

I was not expecting much other than dumb stereotypes from a 1989 movie about white people in Africa that barely played in theaters, but Damned River took me by surprise. It's a tense and effective action-thriller-horror hybrid that's well paced and visually impressive, and it recognizes without any preaching or speechifying that white people who claim ownership of nonwhite people's land are not just morally bankrupt but also really annoying.

Set in the portion of the Zambezi River flowing through Zimbabwe, the movie opens with a young boy (Moses Ncube) playing in the mountainous terrain near the river. He spots a dead body floating past him that was pitched out of some falls. He runs to get help and several people living in the nearby village fish the body out while exchanging knowing and concerned glances.

This opening scene with its spectacular scenery, beautifully framed shots, crisp images, and skillful establishing of setting and community lets you know right away you're not about to see some straight-to-video trash (though I'm also a big fan of straight-to-video trash). You're in the hands of people who know what they're doing.

After this intriguing opening scene, four twentysomething Americans arrive for a Zambezi rafting trip. Though all four are movie types, they're distinctive from each other and mostly likable, and the actors playing them give natural performances. The group consists of three experienced whitewater rafters, lawyer Carl (Chopping Mall's John Terlesky), Carl's girlfriend, aspiring photojournalist Anne (Dragnet and Remote Control's Lisa Aliff) (she was also Miss Virginia in 1983), and novelist Luke (Christine and Night of the Comet's Marc Poppel), and rafting novice and party animal Jerry (Bachelor Party's Bradford Bancroft). Carl is your basic athletic milquetoast nicest-guy-in-the-frat type, Anne does double duty as the smart, detail-oriented type and the bringer of sex appeal, Luke is the sensitive artist constantly quoting Lord Byron, and Jerry is the wisecracking comic relief who would probably not be hanging out with this gang of overachievers if the movie did not require at least one joke about partying every three minutes. It's the law of the '80s.

Our intrepid rafting heroes take in some sights with local Mavuso (Leslie Mongezi), who will be assisting their river guide on the trip. He quickly wins Luke over after recognizing one of his Lord Byron quotes. The dude loves Byron and wants everyone to know it. The next morning, everyone, including the hungover Jerry (too many kamikazes) meets the river guide in the hotel lobby. He's a longhaired American ex-pat rugged pretty boy from Idaho named Ray (The Stepfather's Stephen Shellen), and he's all business, which already clashes a bit with Jerry's all-party attitude.

While in the lobby, Ray has a murkily explained altercation with an Afrikaner named Von Hoenigen (Louis van Niekerk) and some Zimbabweans who work for him, and he has a second murkily explained altercation with Von Hoenigen right before the group embarks on the rafting trip. This second altercation causes Mavuso to quit abruptly, leaving our gang alone with the very intense Ray. I have my theory about what is happening between Ray and Von Hoenigen, but the movie never explains in any satisfying detail what is going on between the men. I'll refrain from blabbing about my take in case you decide to watch this one.

Ray is a humorless and hard-to-read dude, but he seems like a skilled river guide at the beginning of the trip. As the days go by, however, Ray becomes increasingly more unhinged until he finally takes up permanent residence in Psycho Town, and our rafting gang's lives become deeply endangered. "I was the first one on this river!" Ray frequently exclaims, which is such a white guy thing to say about an African river.

The first few days of the trip before Ray goes completely bonkers are Jerry's time to shine. I'll give you just a sampling of his party animal wisdom. When Ray instructs them on handling the rapids, he tells them to do something or other or they'll be in serious trouble. Jerry responds, "I don't know anything about serious trouble. I only know about serious partying." When reminded of the length of the trip, Jerry says, "I can't believe I agreed to go seven days without MTV." When Luke drops his first Lord Byron quote, Jerry laughs it up and says, "What the hell are you talking about?" After Luke tells him he was quoting Byron, Jerry says, "Who's he? A rock star?" During Luke's 15th (or maybe just fourth) Byron quotation session, Jerry yells, "Nerd police! You're busted!" and dumps a bucket of water on Luke's head. Jerry has a good time, and we have a good time with him. I miss characters like Jerry, even though they are walking screenwriters' conceits.

Damned River ratchets up the tension little by little until there's nothing but tension, which turns into nonstop action in the final third. The whole thing is pretty enjoyable, with the major exception of an unpleasant rape scene that's a too frequent part of these kinds of movies. The filmmakers also prioritize the effect of the rape on Carl instead of Anne, which is pretty bogus but unsurprising considering the kind of world we inhabit. There were so many other ways to show Ray's creepiness.

That criticism aside, Damned River is a solid movie that blends a lot of satisfying movie clichés with its own distinctive weirdness and puts it all in a visually compelling landscape full of mountains, rivers, raging rapids, waterfalls, crocodiles, and hippos. I'm not going to make a case for the movie being some lost masterpiece of cinema, but, as Larry David might say, it's pretty, pretty, pretty good, though I have a hard time picturing Larry David watching this.