DRIVE-IN TRAILER PARK: BEWARE THE UNFLESHED!

Time is tight, so this week’s Drive-in Trailer Park is gonna be a quick one, sticking with the seasonal theme of science fiction and horror, of course.

Today’s double feature of classic drive-in newspaper ads comes from the Raleigh, North Carolina area-- the Tower Drive-in Theater and “Raleigh’s newest,” the Center Drive-in Theater. According to The Newspaper Movie Ad Archive (from which these images were obtained), the engagements described date to March and April 1968.

(Image courtesy of The Newspaper Movie Ad Archive. Click on image to enlarge.)

The first, showcasing a can’t-miss bill of “4 HORROR HITS!” is a great example of the slapdash collage approach to putting together drive-in ads on the movie pages of papers in the early ‘70s. Better than just the simple listing of film titles in simple typeface, which was most certainly the cheaper, more efficient option for drive-in owners trying to keep costs down, the slapdash collage at least employs the actual advertising logos of the films, often hastily snipped out of pressbooks provided by the studios and pasted upon a generic design, the nature of which depended on the movies themselves of course. (Horror films were easy, because the iconographic imagery was pretty abundant in newspaper layout formats—a good skull was never hard to find.)

In this case, the movie titles jet out of the eye sockets of the skull on harsh beams of light presumably originating from the devilish brain still contained within. The bill is a good one, too, well worth the time and effort to promote it in such a flashy way—two bottom-tier Hammer films-- The Reptile, The Mummy’s Shroud-- and Warner’s low-rent (but fairly entertaining) William Castle-esque knockoff Chamber of Horrors. (“The movie with the Fear Flasher and the Horror Horn!”)

But whoever put the ad together got a little excited—perhaps it was the end of the day and he/she had to beat bad traffic—and ended up forgetting to post the fourth feature! Oh, well, surprise and shock being the exploitable elements that they were in the day as far as drive-in combos went, perhaps it was more fun going to see this bill not knowing what feature number four was going to be—all the better to keep you awake until the wee hours when it would finally find its way to the big drive-in screen.

(Image courtesy of The Newspaper Movie Ad Archive. Click on image to enlarge.)

The second ad, for a double feature of almost completely forgotten horror films, is notable for a couple of reasons. I know that during this period, when I was watching the movie pages very closely, Fridays were typical release days, though it wasn’t unusual to see a new program beginning on Wednesday, to give enough time to build up interest for the weekend. And my local drive-in usually ran a Tuesday through Sunday schedule, six days with a change of program on the following Tuesday. But I don’t recall too many programs actually starting on a Sunday, the last day of the weekend, especially movies of this nature. (Maybe that’s just how they did it in Raleigh. Anybody know?)

The other thing that’s kind of amusing about this particular ad and its layout is its side-by-side design, and the fact that the art for Cave of the Living Dead seems either a lame knockoff of the already lame art for Tomb of Torture, or maybe even a total rip-off of it drawn up by a bored artist sitting around the newspaper office. And then there’s that ad copy: “Prey to the creatures from the grave…” Does this mean that, should these creatures’ potential victims hope to save themselves, they should hightail it to the nearest chapel and “prey” for deliverance, even as they were being sized up by the monsters as potential “pray”? And I’ve never, in my many dark, dank days of scrutinizing ads like these, ever heard of zombies described as “the unfleshed”! Boy, in comparison to this, the movie pages just aren’t any fun anymore, are they?

Okay, on to this week’s trailers. First out of the box is a movie that most of us have only seen on TV or DVD, but which I was lucky enough to see in a theater, at a canned-food matinee, as I recall, back in the early ‘70s. The WWF should bow before this film and acknowledge it as their primary source of inspiration…



And finally, to carry us into our weekend, what red-blooded young man in 1966 (and you really get an up-close look at the red blood in this movie) wouldn’t want Raquel Welch checking him out from the inside?



That’s it from the Drive-in Trailer Park for this week! Thanks once again to everyone who made the Robert Aldrich Blog-a-Thon so much fun to read and coordinate! Next week, in anticipation of Halloween, another visit with Saw III star Shawnee Smith and my look at some underrated, underseen and flat-out ignored horror films. All the best to you and yours for a great, relaxing weekend!