May 7, 2018 6 min read

Last month, I attended the April Ghouls Monster-Rama event at Riverside Drive-In in Vandergrift, Armstrong County. This event is a celebration of the heyday of drive-in movie theaters with two nights of quadruple features of classic horror movies.

The event has become a staple for cinephiles thanks to the films being mostly shown from vintage 35mm prints – a rarity since most screens today have switched to digital projection. Even the concession stand promos and movie trailers are projected from film. Horror movie fans travel from as far away as Canada and even camp out both nights to catch all eight movies. Even legendary special effects artist and Pittsburgh native Tom Savini (“Dawn of the Dead,” “Friday the 13th”) occasionally comes out for the event.

This year, attendees were given a pamphlet with reprints of the original movie ads with their tickets. I really enjoyed getting to see how the films were marketed in newspapers. Then, I remembered that the Observer-Reporter has a microfilm archive with decades of advertisements like these.

With Washington and Greene counties each having just one remaining drive-in movie theater left, I thought it would be interesting to take a look back at what would’ve been playing on this date in the past.

So, please join me for my new column, Drive-In Time Machine, where you can take a nostalgic trip back to the grand-old days of outdoor cinema – or if you’re a millennial film fan like me, imagine what it would’ve been like.

Turning the clock back just 20 years to 1998 shows “Titanic” was dominating area drive-in screens. Both Skyview in Carmichaels and the Brownsville theater boasted James Cameron’s epic on their first screens. The film’s long runtime didn’t allow for a second feature, but double features were offered at both locations’ secondary screens.

Brownsville had their own time traveling going on in 1998, with the then-20th anniversary re-release of 1978’s classic musical “Grease” being pared with a contemporary release: “The Wedding Singer.”

But you couldn’t catch “Grease” in its original run at the drive-in on the first weekend of May in 1978, as it wouldn’t hit theaters until mid-June. However, Washington’s Route 19 Drive-In still had a lineup worth checking out with Mel Brooks’ “High Anxiety” followed by “Damnation Alley” this past weekend 40 years ago.

“High Anxiety” is Brooks’ loving parody of one of his cinematic idols, Alfred Hitchcock. Despite not reaching the same legendary status as Brooks classics like “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein,” “Anxiety” is hilarious homage that Hitchcock himself approved. It is a great example of Brooks’ lampoons being incredibly respectful to their source. If you like his films and haven’t seen this one, it’s definitely worth a watch.

While “Damnation Alley” may not be a title you’re familiar with, it holds an interesting footnote in film history. During production, Twentieth Century Fox executives expected this post-apocalyptic thriller to be a hit big enough to carry another sci-fi movie they had on their slate they were expecting to be a financial failure.

But the exact opposite happened. Their expected bomb was “Star Wars” – which we all known became one of the most lucrative movie franchises of all time – and returns on “Damnation Alley” were so poor, it left theaters and was relegated to the b-movie status Washington Countians might have fell asleep during back in 1978.

Going back five more years to 1973 brings up a quintessential example of a drive-in double feature at Route 19: “Five Fingers of Death” and “Four Flies on Gray Velvet.”

A dubbed, re-titling of the Shaw Brothers “King Boxer,” “Five Fingers of Death” is most notable for helping to popularize kung-fu films in America after enticing audiences with the promises of a “martial arts masterpiece” with “sights and sounds like never before.”

But the real winner of this cinematic pairing is “Four Flies,” a murder mystery from Italian maestro Dario Argento. A few years earlier, Argento had made international waves with another murder mystery, “The Bird With the Crystal Plumage,” and was being touted as “the Italian Hitchcock.”

“Four Flies” is another one of Argento’s classic crime thrillers known as “giallo” – the Italian word for “yellow.” In the 1930s, pulp crime novels hit shelves in Italy with distinctive yellow backgrounds on the covers and the color became synonymous with all crime fiction in Italy. While Argento wasn’t the first director to bring crime thrillers to the screen in Italy, his work in the genre resulted in international acclaim and cemented his status as possibly the most well-known Italian giallo director.

Terror at the drive-in continues when we go all the way back to 1958. Sixty years ago, a double bill of horror and sci-fi from exploitation extraordinaire American International Pictures hit the screen at Sunset Drive-In in Washington featuring “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” and “Invasion of the Saucer-Men” for the low price of 50 cents for adults.

Future “Little House on the Prairie” star Michael Landon portrayed the titular “Teenage Werewolf.” The movie was such a big success that AIP wound up churning out a number of films with similar titles like “I Was A Teenage Frankenstein” and “How to Make a Monster” to capitalize on the success.

In case any parents wanted to avoid exposing their impressionable toddlers to the horrors of Michael Landon with crepe hair glued on his face, the Sunset also offered a “BIG Cartoon Carnival” earlier in the night.

Of course, anyone concerned about the schlock that was playing at Sunset could’ve always parked at Route 19 for the Washington County premiere of “The Long, Hot Summer” starring Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Orson Welles and Angela Lansbury. The film played twice that night instead of a double feature, but it also included a preshow of six cartoons.

That about wraps it up for this week’s Drive-In Time Machine. Until next week, make sure to put your speaker back on its post before leaving!