Drive Thru Review

Drive Thru is a straight to dvd horror comedy, which features more laughs than horror. The overall tone is dark, but the gore is immense, and the comedy is so-so, but it’s worth at least one viewing.

The story surrounds a villain named Archie, who for the rest of this interview is known as Horny the clown. When he was young the local kids would play tricks on him, and one day he invited everyone to his birthday party, but instead of having everything go right, the kids burn the burger joint down and Archie is presumed dead inside.

That’s the spoiler kids…Horny goes from kid to kid killing all the children of the kids that caused the fire.

Here’s a trailer for the film Drive Thru:



The movie is straight to dvd, so the quality isn’t exactly very high at all. It’s above television quality, and I presume it was filmed in HD. The main character “Mackenzie” is hot, or at least she was when I saw it, and maybe I’m just fond of “punk/emo” chicks in horror movies, or maybe I’m just weird, but I thought she looked good. Whatever the case is, the movie progresses through lots of slayings fast, and it doesn’t really get going until the third act when everything starts to unravel.

The comedic value and tone to this film is almost immediate. The start of this film has some wannabe gangsters ordering food from Hella Burger only to meet their demise with Horny the clown. This clown isn’t all that scary, he’s a punk rock version of what you would imagine a killer clown would be like. He moves fast and kills with a cleaver, and is often found spewing horrible one liners. I’d give you an example, but I’d rather not.

There is an attempt at a love scene, but I’m assuming the girl involved was either too young or the director couldn’t get her to commit, because the camera pans away, the screen fades out and we never see any of the action. For a rated R film, this makes no sense, especially since they tease that through the whole first and second act of the film.

The killings range from straight up slash and hack deaths to deep fryer kills, and even a few explosions. Overall, the body count is massive for such a corny film. The final turn of events and explanation onto what is going on is stupid. I hated the way the film treated me like a complete idiot, but at the same time tried to act serious. Morgan Spurlock even shows up as the Hella Burger manager at one point! The producers were NOT serious when making this horror comedy, and it’s hard to take it seriously when the makers weren’t serious at all.

Why Drive Thru is Scary: The scary parts of this film have nothing to do with the plot and are directly linked with the harsh themes found in this film. The revenge is over the top, and I’m not sure if revenge killing has ever happened in real life, but it makes you think about the whole notion of “you reap what you sew” and in this case that’s what happened. The mean kids grew up and had children of their own, only to have them snuffed out by someone from their past. Sometimes we move on, and we don’t realize that we hurt someone in our past, and just like those crazy killers out there with “hit lists”, revenge is never a good thing. I guess the scary notion is that anyone would harbor such hate for so long that they would seek out this sort of devastation as a result. Drive Thru is comedy before horror, but to a lot of people the gore levels in this film will be enough to induce vomiting or nightmares, because after all, it’s still a horror film.

Comedy or not, the film must have made some money because a sequel is planned to hit dvd stores and it will most likely follow along the ending of this film, which you can guess at this point. The saving grace of this film relies heavily on the cuteness of the lead actress (Leighton Meester of Gossip Girl Fame), and the Morgan Spurlock cameo. Otherwise, I would only recommend viewing this film if you’re a diehard horror fan like myself, and just must see everything. If you’re more of a discerning movie fan, you’re going to hate the lack of support from the actors, writers, and director on this film. They basically phone it all in. However, if you are a fan of horror and terror in a Fast Food setting, let me recommend an awesome book collection of horror stories all based around Fast Food: Fried! Fast Food, Slow Deaths, which is a great book that I got to read a few months back and recommend it highly today.

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