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.
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