Playing with Fire

Gang! Here's a movie you should watch as soon as humanly possible, Brian Trenchard-Smith's Dead End Drive-In (1986)!

Dead End Drive-In? More like Dead End . . . I thought I had a joke for that, but I don't. Whoops!

The films of Brian Trenchard-Smith (BMX Bandits, Stunt Rock) were first brought to my attention by a great documentary called Not Quite Hollywood. Said film details the history of Australian cinema with a strong emphasis on genre pictures. Among the many strange and amazing-looking movies mentioned in Not Quite Hollywood was Trenchard-Smith's Dead End Drive-In, which Quentin Tarantino hailed as his favorite Aussie flick.

Actually, wait, my first experience with Trenchard-Smith's work was Leprechaun 3, which I once watched back-to-back with both Leprechaun and Leprechaun 2. I'm a d-d-daredevil.

My point is, Dead End Drive-In is a super-duper treat. It starts off as the (well-crafted) Australian equivalent of  Escape from New York -- replace Manhattan with a post-apocalyptic drive-in movie theater pulling double duty as a prison camp for new wave hooligans -- and then morphs into a transparently allegorical parable on racial scapegoatting, police corruption, manipulative girlfriends who look sorta like Sheena Easton, social welfare, getting in fights with 7' tall freaks with danger-mullets and skin-tight silver Rod Stewart pants, oh! and fascism.

Fascism?!

Maybe. Dead End Drive-In does go deep, and it goes hard (!). The metaphor involved is probably kind of, uh, on a remedial level in the sense that even I picked up on it, and let's face it: I spent at least half of the film's 92 minutes daydreaming about Christmas leftovers and that girl from Billy Idol's "Cradle of Love" video. That's an exaggeration, but only a slight one. Oh, and (SPOILER ALERT) I don't know why our hero crashes through a neon sign that looks like a slightly-angled star of David at the film's climax. Maybe it was already there. Maybe it was Trenchard-Smith's way of saying, "Fuck you" to the Illuminati.

S'kiddin'.

But, hey, check this song out:

Cool, right?

Lisa Edwards' "Playing with Fire" rocks during the end credits, as (SPOILER ALERT) the film's hero makes his daring escape from the drudgery of ghetto existence, and speeds toward the horizon . . . and a better life. Look, I'm not saying I tied a wool sock around my head and started furiously Phil Manzanera-air-guitaring on a softball bat I had handy -- but that's exactly what happened.

I dare you not to listen to it at least four times in a row. I-FUCKIN'-DOUBLE-DOG-DARE-YOU.

According to Wikipedia, which is never wrong, Lisa Edwards was a back-up singer for Kylie Minogue in the early '90s and had an Australian Top 5 hit in 1992 with "Cry" -- a cover of a Godley and Creme song.

Godley and Creme were members of the weird-but-affable British pop-rock band 10cc, and then went on to direct music videos during the early years of MTV. And that's an amazing coincidence considering I literally JUST finished reading I Want My MTV by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum, which prominently features Godley and Creme.

Please forgive my sad adult ADD outburst/stream of consciousness retard-tangent. What's that? That's the thrust of my entire blog? Oh, snap. You're right.

I'm exhausted by my own stupidity, but that shouldn't stop YOU from marching over to your TV and adding Dead End Drive-In to your Netflix queue. Or you could do it on your computer, which you're presumably using right now. See what I mean about the stupidity? I'm insufferable even to myself!

Hasta luego and stuff.

(Worth noting: That guy on the poster has almost nothing to do with anything that actually happens in Dead End Drive-In . . . just a heads up.)