Grindhouse: Drive In, Bleed Out: Slay Ride #1 Review: A Delight

Grindhouse movies were a major part of 1970s cinema. They did not have big budgets, the best acting, or the best stories, but besides these downfalls people ate these movies up like they were candy. The grindhouse movement has seen a resurgence in recent years with plenty of fanfare. One of the most recent examples is “Grindhouse: Drive In, Bleed Out: Slay Ride #1” by Alex De Campi and it’s as glorious as you’d expect.

In a remote town 200 miles northwest of Edmonton, a terrible murder has occurred. Here, Shayla returns home after her stepbrother tells her that her stepfather was murdered. After she investigates she finds out that this murder is much weirder than it appears to be.

The story is your typical shlock grindhouse fare with poor writing, characters that are way too outrageous to be realistic, swearing, gore and nudity. It does have a slow start and is not as in your face crazy as you’d expect from the genre, but you can tell the heart is in the right place.

Of course, we get the shock factor early in this comic. It does not have the same impact as seeing it in a movie. That could be due to the fact that “Dark Horse” may not have wanted the scene to be too graphic in order to make it available in stores.

The art by R.M. Guera is well done. The character designs do look nice, as do the backgrounds. It gives the comic a sense of something evil is lurking somewhere and it will scare the reader to bits. The problem is it really does not work for what’s supposed to be a grindhouse story. Something a little grittier and uglier like the art used in “Tales from the Crypt” would have worked much better here. That style would have completed the whole low budget feel of the story.

“Grindhouse: Drive In, Bleed Out: Slay Ride #1” is a nice addition to the grindhouse revival the world has seen. It’s as low brow as can be and has some well drawn art despite not fully fitting with the story. This should be a delight to fans and non fans alike, especially if they decide to put in that narrator from all those grindhouse trailers.