Back To the Drive-In – Review
105 Minutes, Not Rated
Written and Directed by April Wright
**NOTE: this post may be updated with audio if we actually get the chance to talk about it. Until then, you can read Mark’s review below. Remember, though, you can listen to all our discussions of this and every other movie directly over on ACAST. Stay tuned.**
Synopsis:
BACK TO THE DRIVE-IN takes viewers behind the scenes to visit eleven unique family-owned drive-ins across the country – including L.A’s Mission Tiki, the Field of Dreams Drive-In, and the Wellfleet in Cape Cod – to experience their passion and determination to keep their theaters alive. It’s a story of human resilience.
Remember during that first summer of the Covid-19 pandemic, when nothing was open, but everyone still wanted to do things?
Yep, the drive-in theater made a comeback. As it should be.
The drive-in has been around nearly as long as movies themselves, but in the last decade or so, they’ve been dying out at an alarming rate. Between bigger and better theaters, a drop in younger people driving, or just plain “my parents went to the drive-in” angst, there are now relatively few drive-in theaters left.
With Back To the Drive-In, April Wright attempts to remind everyone what made–and still makes–the drive-in experience so popular. It was, more so than a “sit-down” theater, a social experience, designed to not only allow you to enjoy a film (or two…the double-feature is a staple of the drive-in) but to enjoy the company of those around you.
I grew up on the drive-in experience as a kid, and I have to see that watching Back To The Drive-In was a punch right in the old nostalgia button. The playground apparatus for kids to use before the film starts; jockeying for the perfect parking spot for your car; the careful preparation of furniture and snacks for the often 6+ hours at the venue.
Magical.
April Wright provides some hope about the future of the drive-in, highlighting those who’ve opened completely new venues over the last 5 years, along with those who have taken the alternate route and acquired existing properties and spruced them up, bringing them back to some semblance of their former glory.
It sounds silly, I know, to sit in your car and listen to a movie built for Dolby 5.1/7.1 surround sound on car speakers (high or low-end) or a portable radio, but the experience is something that literally can’t be described, only lived.
I hope, if you’ve never had the chance to go to a drive-in, that if there’s one near you, you can find time to catch a great double feature of new/recent films or, better still, a pair of drive-in horror classics.
You don’t know what you’re missing, and those of us that do, know what will be missing if the last of these cinematic monoliths ceases to exist.
Back To the Drive-In is now available to stream and features appearances by those brave souls keeping the drive-in dream alive.
And remember, if the BEST thing you can say about a movie is that it’s “visually stunning,” then they’ve done something wrong.
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