Drive-In Cult Classics - 8 Movie Set
Starring: Anthony James, Gini Eastwood, Katherine Justice, Anne Saxon, Nancy IsonDirector: Joseph Ruben
Studio: Mill Creek Entertainment
MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Running Time: 692 minutes
DVD Release: February 5th 2008
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DVD Review
Pick-Up:
An off-beat story about two young women whose lives are forever changed when they hitchhike a ride in a mobile home.
The Sister-In-Law:
A punchy story about the sexual entanglements of four people and how their moral conflicts lead to heartache and destruction.
The Stepmother:
A high-living architect who - as a result of his violent temper - finds himself enmeshed in two accidental deaths. When he discovers his 2nd wife having an affair with his teenage son...there's almost a third murder!
The Teacher:
She corrupted the youthful morality of an entire school! An explosively tense story about a beautiful, provocative 28-year-old high school teacher whose seduction of one particular student proves fatal.
Trip with the Teacher:
A chilling experience in terror as a group of female students and their pretty teacher are ambushed, while on a field trip, by two sadistic bikers, forcing the women to learn a lesson in survival.
Best Friends:
Two young couples taste the free and easy life on a cross country motor-home tour until love backfires and tragedy follows.
Cindy and Donna:
Two sisters, growing up in a middle-class home with parents too preoccupied with booze and sex, find that being grown up doesn't mean acting like their folks, as experiments with drugs and sex teach them.
Malibu High:
High school senior Kim is having her share of problems. Her grades are poor, her boyfriend dumped her for a rich girl and her financial situation is disastrous. So she makes an after hours deal with one of her teachers to improve her grade point average. Soon, she is working her way through the faculty room and taking on paying customers.
User Reviews
Great sleazy memories!! - Rating: 5/5
Ahh, the good old nights at the drive-in, not watching this stuff but hearing it through the speaker hanging in the car window! Remember? If I had a DVD projector, I'd set up a big sheet in my garage, hop in the car, and travel back in time. What a great way to waste a few hours on a Saturday night! Buy these, get a case of beer and some chips, a sweetie, and enjoy.
unknown but not trash - Rating: 5/5
one or two of the eight films can be seen as evidence of the prudish attitudes of the USA in the sixties and early seventies - supposed lovers have unbridled sex without uncovering their genitals, for example. But several of the films are surprisingly good.
Worth the money and worth watching.
Trashily terrific - Rating: 4/5
If you listened to many film critics, they'd say that the 1970s was the last great era of movie making, a time before studios became obsessed with the blockbuster and special effects over substance. It was the era of The Godfather, Network, Taxi Driver and a lot of other great movies. As Drive-In Cult Classics demonstrates, however, there was plenty of garbage in that era too.
This set of eight movies from Crown International Pictures features some movies that are cheesy fun but by no stretch are any of these films good or even average. Using the Amazon rating scale, these range from one to two stars, though some have a so-bad-they're-good quality. Not all of them, though.
Each of the two discs contains four movies, two to a side. On Disc One, Side One is The Pick-Up and The Teacher. The Pick-Up is a complete mess, exacerbated by the fact that the no-talent director tries to be artistic. The story - what little there is of it - involves two young women who hitch a ride with a guy with a motorhome. They get stuck in the Everglades and while awaiting rescue, sleep with each other and have various hallucinations and flashbacks. It's borderline porn, which might be fine if it wasn't so poorly made (though admittedly, some of the nature scenery is nice). The Teacher's tag line states that "she corrupted the youthful morality of an entire school". In reality, the title character only gets involved with one former student, played by former Dennis the Menace Jay North. As with all these movies, there's plenty of gratuitous nudity, but this one also has the semblance of a coherent story.
The flip side has Best Friends and Trip with the Teacher. Best Friends also has a big name star (well not big, but at least someone you've heard of): Richard Hatch, Apollo on the original Battlestar Galactica. It's another road trip story in which Hatch, his best friend and their two girlfriends take a motor home across the country. The close quarters and the best friend's psychological problems create issues. Trip with the Teacher has a teacher escorting some high school students (all beautiful girls, naturally) on a weekend trip. Along the way, they run afoul of a couple bikers. It's one of those movies in which all the characters act stupidly and seem unable to conceive ways to get out of trouble (despite outnumbering the two bikers three-to-one).
Disc Two, Side One has The Sister In Law and The Stepmother. The Sister In Law seems to be the only movie not made on a shoestring budget, but it is still only two shoestrings. John Savage from The Deer Hunter play the prodigal son who has come back into the fold, just in time to be seduced by his brother's wife. The brother is involved with drug dealers, and soon enough, so is Savage, but at least not all is lost: he gets to sleep with his brother's mistress too. The Stepmother has Larry Linville (Frank Burns on M*A*S*H) but only in a supporting role. Alejandro Rey plays the lead character, a husband whose fits of jealousy lead him to murder.
Things get really trashy on the final side. Malibu High is the story of a high school senior who, dumped by her boyfriend and failing all her classes, decides to start sleeping with her teachers to boost her grades. She also becomes a prostitute for the cash, and later a hit woman. Cindy and Donna is bottom-of-the-barrel, about two sisters. The bad one sleeps with any guy (including her step-father!) and the good one wants to be bad. With plots that go nowhere and an ending so abrupt and out of left field that you get the feeling the director must have realized he was about to run out of film, this is laughably bad.
There are some common factors in these movies. As stated before, they all have plenty of nudity and are clearly the product of the free-love seventies. Many of the films look like R-rated versions of Afterschool Specials, in which sex and drugs lead inevitably to tragedy. Whenever parents are shown, they are completely ineffective, either out-of-touch or completely disinterested in their kids. Women seem to merely exist to have sex with (though once they have a kid, they become useless); the only lead women to have legitimate jobs are the two teachers.
With no extras (not even a scene selection menu), the desirability of this set is purely based on the quality of the movies. So how does a set like this merit four stars? Because, despite their awfulness (or maybe because of their awfulness), some of these moves are actually fun to watch. Others (particularly The Pick-Up and Cindy and Donna) are exercises in tedium. And this set delivers exactly what it promises: trash.
Some Duds, But Some Great B-Movie Moments (spoiler alert) - Rating: 3/5
These films for the most part are neither cult movies nor are they classic. However, the drive-in moniker is dead on, and if you enjoy 70's b-films that are slow-medium paced, with a lot of swimming pools, sunsets, joint smoking, feathered hair, tight white pants, vans, motor homes, motorcycles, bummer endings, gratuitous T & A (in most of them), and occasionally hilarious moments of really bad dialogue and acting, then this is a good set, especially for the price. My only gripes are 1) the sound is often a bit muffled, gets better if you have it through a stereo and can thin it out with more treble/less bass; 2) no subtitles. these films are perfect to set it and forget it, kill the sound and put on a record, but it'd be nice to still be able to follow the story with subtitles. 3) the provided summaries are sometimes misleading. But these are minor complaints considering the overall pleasure-to-dollar ratio available here. Drive-in movies were a genre all their own, and shrugged off the burden of plot like it was just some unnecessary hassle.
MALIBU HIGH
Worth the price of admission alone. This is the one that really shines out of this bunch. Much stronger language than all of the others, classic dialogue ("Maybe if you weren't so concerned about dirt, and dust, and greasy buildup, then Daddy wouldn't have left, and wouldn't have had to kill himself because he couldn't get it up anymore!"), plenty of salaciousness, and great low budget jaw-dropppers like a high school dance that takes place in a Mexican restaurant, not to mention wicked 70s wall-rugs and phrases like "Check you later!" Malibu High RULES. If only they could all be this good.
CINDY & DONNA
The second best film in this set, and a classic theme song. Donna is the slutty older sister that ultimately lures the uptight Cindy into a trampy lifestyle. Tame by today's standards but otherwise not for the prudish. One of many with an astonishingly abrupt ending.
THE TEACHER
Pretty entertaining by virtue of its lameness. The by-line on the package is totally misleading, however - she does not 'corrupt the morality of an entire school,' not by a long shot. This one features a lovely, Cheryl Ladd-ish teacher figure - it's summer vacation so other than one shot outside the school during the opening credits, there is no school-related activity whatsoever. This has very TV-style acting, shooting, everything, then the obligatory T & A every 20 mins or so. It's like watching The Brady Bunch with partial nudity plus some light crime. The goofy villain, Ralph, is a hilarious scene-stealing goon. What's unfathomable is why the Teacher would be interested in a dork like Sean who greatly prefers working on his van to having sex. Seriously, count the number of times he references working on his van, it's insane. This one also has a classic theme song that plays through 75% of the movie.
BEST FRIENDS
Weird flick. Goofus and Gallant take a motor home on a multi-state trip as one last fling to celebrate Goofus getting out of the Army and Gallant getting married. But Goofus just can't face the end of the footloose good times with his buddy, so he sets about to destroy the impending marriage. Ann Noland really shines in this movie as Jo Ella - she's got a great spontaneity and charm. But questions linger: where the hell did Goofus put his motorcycle when he was riding in the motor home? And why didn't Gallant just waste him? Pretty classic drunken strip scene in an Indian bar.
THE SISTER IN LAW
This is actually a fairly serious movie about two bearded brothers from a well-to-do family. The elder brother, Edward, was a briefly successful writer who has since fallen into wearing white turtlenecks and performing deliveries for organized crime types who have a flair for dramatically handing envelopes to one another. His marriage to a gorgeous though small-nippled woman is dissolving when the younger brother, Robert, our protagonist, returns to the swank family house from his idealistic exploration of America. Swimming in the pool, wearing tennis clothes, and banging Edward's older soon-to-be ex-wife suddenly loses interest when Edward shows up with his mistress, another lovely woman just about Robert's age. Eventually Edward has a movie opportunity in L.A. right about the time he's scheduled to do a particularly risky package pickup in Canada, and he gets Robert to do it for him by letting him bring the mistress along. Plays out like a pretty good auteur type of film of the period if you're down with the laid-back 70s pacing.
THE STEPMOTHER
This one looks & feels like an extended episode of Barnaby Jones or Police Woman. The only thing remotely 'cult classic'-ish about it is 1) there's a scene where the elite group of friends are dancing during the daytime at the beach house to flute music...and one of the dudes is revealed to actually be playing a flute, and 2) a scene where the cops bring in 'Sanchez' or 'Lopez' or whoever and the guy lays out a very 70s racist caricature of the hot-blooded Latino. Otherwise you'll swear you're watching TV at 12:30 at night in 1972.
TRIP WITH THE TEACHER
No relation to The Teacher. This one is pretty dark. Two creepy bikers trap 4 or 5 teenage girls and their teacher in an abandoned shack and proceed to torment and rape them while they cry. If you like relentlessly hopeless situations like in Cape Fear, then have at it, but this is not for me.
PICK UP
Why this one is presented first I can't imagine - it is easily the most boring one in the bunch. Two lovely young women catch a ride with a 70s dude who is driving a motor home through Florida. Ultimately it becomes soft porn in a swamp, with some psychedelic scenes of ambiguous mysticism, interspersed with hostile phone calls from the fat sweaty man expecting the motor home to be delivered to its destination in a timely fashion. Oh, and some flashbacks about being molested in a church. Don't expect a happy ending, or a payoff for all the shots of sunsets, roadside landscapes, blah blah blah.
Great value - Rating: 5/5
Only watched a few and bought it for B movie actresses Angel Tompkins and Connie Kreski so I was not disappointed in seeing either of those lovely ladies grace the screen.
