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DEAD-END DRIVE-IN
Rating: 
Australia. 1986.
Director – Brian Trenchard-Smith, Screenplay – Peter Smalley, Producer – Andrew Williams, Photography – Paul Murphy, Music – Frank Strangio, Special Effects – Chris Murray, Production Design – Larry Eastwood. Production Company – Springvale Productions/New South Wales Film Corporation.
Cast:
Ned Manning (Jimmy ‘Crabs’ Rossini), Natalie McCurry (Carmen Nicholson), Peter Whitford (Thompson), Ollie Hall (Frank Rossini), Dave Gibson (Dave), Wilbur Wilde (Hazza)
Plot: In Sydney of the 1990s, society is starting to crumble at the edges. Jimmy ‘Crabs’ Rossini ‘borrows’ his brother’s car to take his girlfriend to a drive-in. But while they are making out the wheels are stolen from the car. Forced to spend the night, they wake in the morning to find what on the outside seems a drive-in is really one of a series of prisons created by the government to curb and contain youth unrest.
Australian director Brian Trenchard-Smith’s career has been a mostly undistinguished one. His earliest genre effort was the dire Turkey Shoot/Escape 2000 (1983). Directorial work on various undistinguished tv series such as the 1988 Mission: Impossible, Time Trax, Silk Stalkings and Flipper followed. In the mid-1990s Trenchard-Smith emigrated to the US where the pitifully bad Night of the Demons 2 (1994) gave him a new course as director of campily bad horror films, with Leprechaun 3 (1995), Leprechaun 4: Leprechaun in Space (1996) and the Christian End of the World film Megiddo (2001) following. Nevertheless there are a couple of bright spots in Brian Trenchard-Smith’s otherwise eminently forgettable career – one of these is the intelligent children’s film Frog Dreaming/The Quest (1986), and the other is Dead-End Drive-In.
Dead-End Drive-In was clearly intended to jump in on the success of the biggest international success Australia had had in some years with Mad Max 2 (1981). And as such it is slick, fast, violent and maintains the cheerful punk cynicism that became the trademark of the better of the Mad Max copycats. It has several irritations, such as the geekish yobbery that most of the Australian actors let pass for performances and an awful synthesizer/pop score.
But beneath the action exterior of Dead-End Drive-In hides a rather witty degree of satire. The idea of the drive-in theatre as a prison is a sharp and potent social metaphor. And the images the film creates of the society within the prison where cars become habitations, the junkfood stand a diner and the Ladies Room a makeshift hairdressing salon are quite remarkable. The great amusement is watching the way in which this society becomes a mirror of the outside world – how the makeshift hairdressing salon becomes a perfect mirror of a real one where the womenfolk gather to gossip, and how with the arrival of a group of Asians racial tensions immediately begin to flare and the inmates start to become defensive about their domain being invaded. Lead thug Dave Gibson has a remarkable little speech about how he prefers it in there because he receives a free supply of drugs and how in the outside world all he faces is unemployment and misery, a moment that really makes one turn around and question the point of hero Ned Manning’s struggle for freedom.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1992
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