I suppose this movie ‘Drive-Thru’ is a bit nostalgic for me as one of the first jobs I had as a kid was working at Jack in the Box back home in St. Louis. By the time I started working there however that scary ass clown head that we had to talk into to get an order through, when I just a tyke, had been retired. My fond memories of working at Jack consisted of my ‘premium’ pay of 3.65 and hour, as opposed to 3.35, watching an endless series of laser disks on the ‘Jack in the Box Way’ which was basically just hours upon hours of trashing McDonalds, and people yelling racial epithets at me as they were driving away from the drive-thru window after I handed them their food. Possibly the worst week of my life – The Ultimate Cheeseburger excepted. Watching yet another Lionsgate horror dump was less painful than that dark time in my life, but only because it lasted all of 80 minutes as opposed to a whole week and nobody in the movie called me any nasty names.

‘Drive Thru’ starts out well enough as an Escalade full of hip-hoppin’, weed smoking, drunk driving Caucasians roll up on Hella Burger to get a couple of Hella Double Chili burgers. The talking clown head however is quite hostile and insulting and has gotten our two suburban thugs in quite a tizzy causing them to bust up in the restaurant, gats turned sideways fenna to cap some minimum wage earning burger hocking suckaz. Sadly the only thing our boys meet is their untimely bloody demise at the hands of the demonic wisecracking mascot of Hella Burger, Horny the Clown.

While those wacky kids are getting hacked up, across town virginal final girl MacKenzie Carpenter (Leighton Meeister) is having a blowout high school graduation party. About MacKenzie’s much ballyhooed virginity, apparently the only reason she won’t do her boyfriend Fisher (Nicholas D’Agosto) is because she’s seventeen, at least for a couple more days, and doesn’t want Fisher to break the law for violating a minor. That’s most admirable. Of course she and Fish are already smoking weed, doing some heavy underage drinking and basically sponsoring a teen sex orgy for everybody else in

neighborhood. Not that I want to encourage teens to have any more sexual activity than they’re already doing, but you might as well get to screwing girl. That crime is the least severe of the ones you’ve committed already. Regardless, MacKenzie and Fisher find a Ouija board, which is never good in these movies, when all the sudden it starts spelling stuff with nobody touching it. The kids handle the possessed board pretty well. Look, another possessed Ouija board. What is happening is that this possessed clown has taken a liking to MacKenzie giving her a warning of who his next victim will be.

Soon the bodies just start piling up. The cops think that Hella Burger owner Jack Benjamin is behind the murders, avenging the death of his son some years ago, but it is much more sinister than that as MacKenzie uncovers the secret of Horny, one that has been buried for over twenty years.

Well its official, actress Melora Hardin, who plays MacKenzie’s mom in this movie is just plain hot. Her hotness was first observed in the sports spoof ‘The Comebacks’ and is confirmed here as she is hottest chick in this flick, despite the fact that she’s damn near twice the age of most of the ladies in this picture. Miss Hardin’s hotness did make my experience watching ‘Drive-Thru’ a bit more pleasant, but not enough. I’m assuming that this was meant to be a horror / comedy since it did have a lot of splitting heads and one-liners, but taken as a whole, it wasn’t all that funny and it certainly wasn’t all that horrifying. Writers / Directors Brandon Cowles and Shane Kuhn simply don’t bring anything to the table that we haven’t experienced in countless other movies before this, ad nauseum. Hell, I don’t know if there IS anything to new to bring to the table in this genre. As far as the comedy goes, homeboy Larry Joe Campbell is pretty funny as the bumbling cop and some of those Horny the Clown commercials did manage to be amusing, but Horny himself was neither funny nor all that scary, no matter how demonic they made his clown head. I should also mention that ‘Super Size Me’ maven Morgan Spurlock makes a cameo as a manager at a Hella Burger. Good to know he’s not whoring himself out or anything. Wish I had something to whore myself out on. Here’s to hoping.

As is usually the case, what we have here with ‘Drive-Thru’ is a standard paint-by-numbers horror flick that falls short on being even the least bit frightening, falls short on humor but is high on head splitting, virginal final girls, and red tinted Karyo syrup. At least you know what you’re getting before you go in.