It’s a double feature of Crown International Pictures drive-in fun, but to keep it simple we’ll review them one at a time.

THE POM POM GIRLS: Johnnie and Jesse are on the football team and considered to be the rowdy ones of the bunch. They like to drive recklessly, drink too much and bang cheerleaders whenever possible. Johnnie is played by Robert Carradine, so there’s the whole NERD luggage that goes with him, but this project was produced before that film was ever made. You can tell because he looks like he’s about fifteen. Jesse is played by some washed up TV actor named Michael Mullins, who tries to play the whole teen angst thing about living in a small town, being sick of football, being a jock and whatnot. He’s not very believable in the role and the producers probably hired him because he was pretty.

So, as all good teen comedies go this one has two rival high school football teams who are constantly pranking one another. Even when they finally get to compete in a football game, it doesn’t progress beyond one play before everyone is on the field kicking the shit out of each other!

The movie seems to drag way beyond the 90 minute running time. The characters just go to the same places and do the same things over and over again. We get two pretty chaste humping scenes and one good girls locker room scene, but that’s it in the T&A department. The hi-jinks are lame. For example, our team decides to steal the local fire department’s fire engine and go hose down the rival team during practice. It really seems like there would be some kind of jail time for something like this, juveniles or not. And it amazed me that the people making this flick put all of their so-called stars on the fire truck and let them crawl all over it while they drove it down the road. I checked pretty carefully and saw no stunt doubles. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I would feel too safe when Robert Carradine is behind the wheel of a big old fire truck. Seems a little dangerous to me.

Now, where was I? Oh yeah, the flick just keeps going until it reaches the 90 minute mark and then it’s abruptly over. There was some suicide chicken race, which isn’t really scary since neither of the cars went past thirty miles an hour and nobody died. Now let’s move on to the second feature, shall we? A little ditty called…

THE VAN: Now, I had hopes for this. I thought it might be a horror movie about a killer van. You know, like THE CAR was about a killer automobile. It seemed logical to me, but I wasn’t so lucky. Seems we got this kid who just graduated high school named Bobby. Bobby’s a good kid who works at a car wash (which is run by a really young Danny DeVito, whose acting style really hasn’t changed over the decades) and buys one of those fancy conversion vans. What’s that? You’ve never heard of the conversion van craze of the 70's? Oh yeah, anybody who was anybody had one of these vans with a bed in the back and a cool mural or design painted on the sides. Bobby’s is called Straight Arrow, primarily because it has this huge arrow painted on the side of it as well as the words, “Straight Arrow.” And this thing is tricked out. It has a refrigerator, a water bed, closets, TV, hell, it even has a toaster! So, Bobby is in search of what all good young men are after who own a van…PUSSY!

If THE POM POM GIRLS was chaste, this baby is anything but that. There are so many naked girls in this flick that it becomes a little redundant after a while. And there’s this one creepy fat chick who should not have been allowed to get naked. Enough said about that. As is the case with all teen comedies, we get hi-jinks aplenty and naked girls aplenty and…well, not much else. Now, for the weird part. The lead character in THE VAN is played by actor Stuart Goetz. Okay, altogether now, “WHO?” Well, let’s go back to the wild and woolly days of old television. You know that stuff they show on Nick At Nite? Remember The Brady Bunch? Now remember the episode where Marcia gets clocked by the football and her nose swells up? Okay, in that episode there was the hot guy she wanted to go out with named Doug played by Nicholas Hammond, who played in the short-lived and super crappy live action Spider Man TV series. And then there was the red-headed, good kid named Charlie. Stuart Goetz is Charlie. So, here we have this kid, who I have memories of being the nice guy that lives down the street, riding around in his trim mobile looking for action, getting drunk, high and naked way too frequently for my tastes. Nothing like some crappy drive-in flick to shatter your memories of youth, is there?

Anyway, here is the double feature by the kings of schlock Crown International Pictures and it does remind me of going to the drive-in. The disc has some crude but neat animation of pulling into a drive in, and there are concession stand clips, trailers for other titles in the Crown International Library that look as bad as these two films, and a Mighty Mouse cartoon. The drive-in experience at home, what will they think of next?