Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Drive-in movies

I haven't often been to drive-in cinemas.  There was a place called the Grand View Drive-In near my hometown, where I saw Saturday Night Fever at sixteen. (The other people insisted on smuggling me in to save on my admission, which didn't please me.) 

Saturday Night Fever was OK, but it was on a double bill, followed by Sorcerer.  In the first scene of that movie we see a man on a hotel balcony who looks down at a fiesta, pours a drink, then sees a guy in a blue suit and shades come in, pull out a gun and shoot him dead!  In the next scene we see a bus in Jerusalem, which ends up exploding!  After that we went home. (In the part I missed, I later found out, Roy Scheider murders a priest for bingo money, and he and the other desperadoes end up driving two trucks full of volatile nitroglycerin through a treacherous jungle to put out an oil well fire.)

Five years later I went there again and saw a double bill of Night Shift and Creepshow. Night Shift was a comedy with Michael Keaton and Henry Winkler working in a morgue and opening up a bordello there. Creepshow was a horror-comedy based on the notorious E.C. horror comics of the 1950s. (Lots of stuff with people being drowned by the tide or killed by gorillas, and skeletons rising from the grave.) 

I really don't care for the horror genre--don't like being manipulated--by I am fascinated by '50s horror comics. This was an age when many people were being relentlessly positive, with books like The Power of Positive Thinking.  Meanwhile, these comics were an outlet for all the suppressed negativity of the post-World War II era.

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