Sorority Row

After Aliens in the Attic, I was very much looking forward the second of my one-my-own-in-Memphis Friday night double feature. My plan was head about half mile down the road to the Malco Summer Drive-in (so called because it's on Summer Road out by the Interstate). Drive-ins are always a treat in my book, even if the viewing experience is less than ideal (which it usually is). There is just something so goofy and compelling about the whole idea, and moreover I like to support the remaining drive-ins that exist

The Summer was a little bit different than other drive-ins I've been to, however, because unlike the shabby and barely-holding-on independents I'd been to recently, the Summer is run by the giant Malco chain. The differences were immediately apparent on arriving, in that the approach drive had thematic decor that was either original from the 1960s or nostalgic from a renovation. I liked very much that was it was only six bucks for adult admission.

There were four screens, and you could see all four of them from any parking spot. I parked near Screen 2 to see the 7:30 showing of Sorority Row. Unlike other drive-ins, there were actually three showings per night on each screen, in an A-B-A sequence, with the first movie beeing repeated at 11:00 o'clock. This meant you could arrive for the 9 pm showing and still see both movies.

The enormous car plaza was entirely paved, and thus felt like an undulating parking lot. I arrived right as the gate opened and positioned my car front and center. Most of the dozen or so cars that arrived later for this particular show parked within a few spots from me. As I expected there were a few that kept their cars running the entire time, for the air conditioning, but thankfully, unlike the case in Maine, I was forced to be right next to them with my windows open.

Perhaps because it was the south, and also because the lot was paved, there was definitely not the casual culture I found in New England where people basically set up an outdoor picnic around their truck or other vehicle, with everyone sitting out in lawn chairs. It felt much more conventional.

Greg and the kids were having corn dogs that night, and I fulfilled a vow by bying one at the concessions, which were in the projection building in the center of the enormous plaza. They were nicely cheap--only three dollars. Later I went and bought a cheeseburger there for the same low price.

The movie itself was not quite what I thought it would be. As you probably have seen from the trailers, it is about a group of sorority girls who accidently participate in the death of one of their sorority sisters. They ditch her body and hide the crime. A year later, someone goes on a killing rampage, seemingly with knowledge of their crime.

I expeted the narrative to follow a trajectory in which one-by-one, the particpants in the coverup are murdered, and we have to figure out who is doing it, and why. There must be a few good juicy red herrings.

What surprised me was that the movie did not all follow this trajectory. Instead most of the characters who get killed are minor characters who had nothing to do with the original crime, but just seem to show up in order to get whacked in a bloody fashion. To me, this aused the narrative to lose most of its coherence by the Third Act. I went from "oooh, I wonder who the real killer is, and ho is posing as the dead girl," to not giving a damn. In the end, the identity of the real killer turned out to be a huge let down that barely even made sense, and was very unsatisfying. It's as the movie makers were afraid of following any kind of precedent in narrative, and instead just sort of made it up as they went along.

It was a cool concept, all in all, that was destroyed by an inferior script. This could have been a decent slasher horror movie, but it wasn't. It had decent acting and directing, but when the story is sub-par (as this one was), it just can't be saved.

As for the drive-in, there were the usual trials, such as having a dirty windshield, and also having to endure a patron who refused to turn off his headlights (!) while watching the last part of the movie. WTF!?

Nevertheless I was glad I had gone. One of the best parts was after the movie, when I stayed through the intermission, even though I wasn't going to see the second show (it was District 9, which I'd already seen). During the break, they showed a classic and highly scratched up drive-in intermission countdown from the early 1970s, with copious shots of the then-recent moon landing. I sat on the picnic tables outside the concession house and watched it while I ate my cheeseburgers, the sound wafting from the many cars in the nearby lot. It was a warm late summer night in the Mid-South. The air was perfect and pleasant. That alone was worth the price of admission.