UA Commack Drive-In
44 Veterans Memorial Highway,
Commack,
NY
11725
44 Veterans Memorial Highway,
Commack,
NY
11725
1 person
favorited this theater
Showing 51 - 75 of 79 comments
Dig this! Too cool for words: Fellini & Hells Angels at…the Commack Drive In…
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Another disjointed triple play,(circa 1975?) courtesy of the Commack Drive In Theater!
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Pre-“Go Ape” ,July 1973 ad from Commack. I saw this bill at the Whitman when I was in 5th grade, but my dedication to the Commack D.I. designates it to this page:
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Oh my gosh! This double bill was at the Commack Drive In AND the Commack RKO Twin…at the same time!! Do any of my Cinema Treaures experts know if this happened more than once in the lifetime of BOTH theaters??
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Going by the ads I have collected—the triple bills stopped in 1976. Another classic incongruous Commack triple bill circa 1975:
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A GREAT double bill from Commack circa 1971! Two classic “bad” movies that most of us only know from WPIX’s channel 11 Chiller Theater on TV.
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OK, forget “Cobra”, “Grease” and “Cold Turkey”: here is the true guts of the Commack (and other) drive in theaters! :
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Finders Keepers/Losers Weepers: stuff I had found on the grounds of the Commack Drive In after the vacancy of the 1985 season. For about a year or two after closing, documents and paperwork were strewn all over, as well as plastic pick-up reels from the projection booth and paper supplies from the snack bar. Here are two more interesting historical bits:
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COMMACK DRIVE IN AD for GREASE; depending on your age, this is either awesome or not…
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ABOVE: TWO MORE GREAT COMMACK ADS from the 1970’s. I suspect they owned a stock “Night of the Living Dead” print, and slapped it on, in order to pad out a triple bill—even when the other two movies were non-horror! (I’m certainly not complaining; I would have LOVED to have seen “N.O.T.L.D.” at the Commack Drive In !) By the late 1970’s the triple bills were trimmed down to mere doubles. Correction from above “Dawn of the Dead” ad: the double bill was “Dawn…” and “The Kentucky Fried Movie”.
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I think I may have seen the “Out of Towners” there as well, but with another movie on the bill as I have no memory of “Cold Turkey” at all. I believe I have the ad for the “Chainsaw” & “Mad Mad Movie Makers” somewhere. What the hell was “Mad Mad Movie Makers”?! It doesn’t even sound like a real movie. We may have been warned about the “Chainsaw” print as well, can’t remember (I may have been hiding in the TRUNK at the time). I just found all my old movie ticket stubs in a scrapbook. Here are some Commack ones, and a triple bill; (see if you can spot which movie does NOT include Dustin Hoffman), and an ambiguous Commack horror double bill from the late 1960’s that makes it so hard to believe that movies like “Cobra” actually wound up there. By 1983.
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Hey BLOOP…do you remember when the re-release of Texas Chainsaw played the Commack DI in the early 80’s… they had workers warning patrons on line in their cars that film print was bad and that once they paid…they would NOT get their money back? We entered anyway. My dad had taken me to see TEXAS CHAINSAW when it was first released at the Commack Drive in in 1974…it played with a comedy called MAD MAD MOVIE MAKERS.
The first time I went to the Commack DI was a double bill in 1971—COLD TURKEY w/ THE OUT OF TOWNERS
The last movie I saw there was COBRA in 1986
Great photos BLOOP! Actually I did some research in the late 90’s and the COMMACK DRIVE IN opened no earlier than 1952 and no later than 1953. I’m still in search of photos of the ORIGINAL Commack Drive In marquee before it was changed in 1980 to the one in the BLOOP photo’s. I think BLOOP and I are the only two people alive this obsessed with the Commack Drive In!
How did I forget!? the summer of 1976, I saw the Karen Black classic “Burnt Offerings” here! Don’t laugh…I’m SURE a remake is on it’s way!
The first movie I saw at the Commack Drive In on a high school date: “The Swarm”!
The most mentioned movies on this site: 1)Star Wars. 2) Jaws. 3) E.T. 4) The Sound of Music. 5)Howard The Duck. _______ When there’s no more room in HELL; the dead with walk to Commack:
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a pivotal cinema moment (for some folks—depending on your age)at the Commack Drive In : View link
DATELINE: very early 1980’s. The dying days of “grind house” at Commack Drive In:
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I’m pretty good with dates—except for my guess with the opening of the Commack D.I. ____ PHOTOS from my collection: a speaker, yanked from the pole at Commack D.I. in 1981, and a piece of the plastic marquee sign that I saved (part of the “E” in “Drive”!). View link
1983
What years did you manage the RKO, L.I.M.? Sounds like “CinemaRadio” era—1982 through 1985? I remember we were at the Nesconsett/Smithtown drive in on the night they were tossing the speakers in a big pile (!) when “CinemaRadio” was just put into action(1982/83?). They told us we could have all we wanted (!), so we threw about a dozen in our trunk. The Nesconsett/Smithtown Drive In often had better double bills than Commack, especially in the late 1970’s, and it was an All-Weather. We watched “Police Academy” in the snow once! At one point the drive in selection of movies was so awful that we realized that we were going to the drive in, just to go to the drive in. LOL. not to actually see a movie. I think me and my friends talked through “Friday the 13th, Part 3” (not in 3-D at the Drive in!, like three times.
When i managed the rko we would sit on the roof of the theater with a radio and watch the drive in movie for free…..
In the mid 1970’s (junior high) , a good friend of mine lived in the Fairfield Village apartments that faced the Commack Drive In (screen!). So, being that there were no VCR’S available to us back then, we would time the movie, and watch the “good parts” on the next night. I specifically remember (from my ad posted above) timing the “Airport 1975” cockpit crash scene, to watch over and over. When “Frenzy” (was co-featured with Hitchcock’s last film “Family Plot”) we timed the scene where the woman’s shirt opens up. Also it was great seeing “R” rated movies that we could never get into..“Death Race 2000”, “Flesh Gordon”, “Groove Tube”, “Kentucky Fried Movie” and for some reason, the movie “Mother ,Jugs and Speed” stands out as another. Later on by high school (and with a car), I saw the original “Phantasm” there (summer 1979)..and I think the co-feature was…“Kentucky Fried Movie”! Commack was known for lop-sided double features (see my ads!).