I might have a fourth chance to see it! And it would be at - are you ready for this? - a drive-in theater! There's one of the few ones left in a small town not far from here. And it would be, again, a double-feature if they run it (not sure what the other film would be). And the cost, you may ask? Are you also ready for this? Two bucks a car, no matter how many are in it! You don't even have to hide everyone in the trunk! I haven't been to an outdoor theater for well over thirty years, if not more. The last film I was at one (while on vacation in South Carolina) was the spooky George C. Scott horror film, The Changeling.
I grew up with drive-ins. The first film I saw at one was Hey, There, It's Yogi Bear. The next one was Mary Poppins. As teens (where we did do the hiding-in-the-trunk thing) and young adults, we went all the time. We mostly saw horror movies, from Prophecy to the original Dawn of the Dead (which was filmed in a shopping mall I often patronized after I moved to Pittsburgh, PA, and - ironically - even though it was filmed in Toronto, the remake was set in a mall in Milwaukee, WI, Milwaukee being only an hour away from where I live - small world, ain't it?). Drive-ins required a rather resiliant form of movie goers. First of all, there were the speakers one attached to the driver's side window and it gave only a scratchy sound (it was better to open the windows and listen to the better clarity of all the speakers going), and you never got one that didn't have bird poop on it. Then you dealt with the mosquitoes. The options in battling those blood-suckers (and maybe I'll get to see our favorite blood-sucker one more time) was limited. You could close the windows, but then they fogged up, so you had to turn on the car and run the de-fogger, not a good idea on a hot, humid summer night. You could go into the concession cabin and purchase an anti-mosquitoe "puck," which was a cylindrical thing your set on your dash board and lit with the car's cigarette lighter (boy, I'm really showing my age now), but it's effect was limited, if it worked at all. And, of course, we did the one usual "practical joke" always done when going to a drive-in. We convinced a newbie to go to the concession cabin and pick up tons of popcorn, pizza, candy and soda, and whilst the "virgin" was there, we'd move the car and duck down as we watched, hysterical with laughter, as the newbie hunted up and down the various lanes looking for us. Oh, c'mon. It was funny and the newbie was initiated and did the same thing to the next newbie. It's not like we dumped a bucket of pig's blood on someone's head at prom.
So maybe I'll go again, for a fourth time, but only if I can get a bunch to go with me. Two bucks for a full car is the ultimate bargain, even if it means mosquitoes and bird-pooped speakers and all that. Any of you want to come? I promise you, when we send you to the concession cabin, we won't move the car. We won't. I promise. Really. I do.
Gerard