As a kid the 70’s, my parents couldn’t always get a baby-sitter or afford one so when driving through the ticket booth, they had me hide down on the back seat floor to save a couple of bucks. I remember the big metal speaker boxes hung on the window and the gravel, and they didn’t stop the film if it rained. They showed mostly new PG or R-rated movies so my parents went at night and relied on me falling asleep in the back. They’d keep an eye on me but I would occasionally wake-up right in time for something nasty like the sinking severed leg scene in Jaws. I was only 5, it looked real but I knew it was fake so it didn’t bother me. Jaws 2 was the one that gave me nightmares. I think the first flick we saw there was Zardoz and I woke-up for the giant floating head crashing down at the end. That was cool. In ‘77, I saw the poster for The Incredible Melting Man near the snack bar and I wanted to see it so bad but they said no. It was a safe place for families in the 60’s and 70’s but it got seedy and rowdy by the mid-80’s. My friends and I heard about a trail through the woods behind the screen to get in for free and discovered that it was a gay hook-up spot. We actually saw two naked dudes prancing through the woods in the dark carrying a small foam mattress and giggling. These things you don’t forget. Not long before it closed, we heard about a gang-brawl there or something like that and people stopped going. That’s what always seems to eventually happen. You couldn’t have a big open-field drive-in like that today, especially in Patchogue. They occasionally do pop-up screen movie nights in the parking lot behind the church but they have to hire security.
It’s wonderful that this theater is still in operation but it should really be listed on here as the Oakdale Theater proper because the new playhouse has never shown a film except for a few while semi-closed during the pandemic. I grew up in Oakdale and as a kid in the 70’s, I saw a lot of Disney movies there with my parents, but most of my memories of that place are from my teens in the mid-80’s when I was old enough to walk there with my neighborhood friends. It was a pretty cool shopping center with a bowling alley, a KFC, a dime store where I’d get candy cigarettes and Mad/Cracked magazines and for a brief time, a small arcade down a basement stairwell on the side of the building. The single-screen theater was fairly large and cozy and they showed new releases well into the 80’s. There were more state-of-the-art theaters in the shopping malls but we still went there often, mainly for the cheap double-feature matinees. The marquee said 80 cents for the 80’s! They must have had their own library of film prints because they would routinely re-run classics like Airplane, 1941, Grease, Midnight Express, the Smokey And The Bandit and Cannonball Run movies, Time Bandits, Clash Of The Titans, Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger, American Werewolf In London, The Black Stallion, My Bodyguard, A Soldier’s Story, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, The Muppet Movie… and I sort of remember seeing Disney’s Fantasia viewed with the enhancement of various substances. Towards the end, my buddy and I were usually the only ones in the theater and one sunny afternoon, a film reel jammed-up and couldn’t be fixed. After a long and frustrating wait, the projectionist gave us the bad news and as we exited, he came out to apologize and talked to us for a bit. He told us that they were closing and that was our last visit there, but that old theater managed to hang on for a surprising amount of time despite the opening of the Patchogue 13. I remember passing by and seeing Time Bandits and Clash Of The Titans relentlessly posted on the marquee but at that point I’d seen them so many times, VHS rental stores were the new thing and everybody had a cable box by then, so who knew we would miss it?
As a kid the 70’s, my parents couldn’t always get a baby-sitter or afford one so when driving through the ticket booth, they had me hide down on the back seat floor to save a couple of bucks. I remember the big metal speaker boxes hung on the window and the gravel, and they didn’t stop the film if it rained. They showed mostly new PG or R-rated movies so my parents went at night and relied on me falling asleep in the back. They’d keep an eye on me but I would occasionally wake-up right in time for something nasty like the sinking severed leg scene in Jaws. I was only 5, it looked real but I knew it was fake so it didn’t bother me. Jaws 2 was the one that gave me nightmares. I think the first flick we saw there was Zardoz and I woke-up for the giant floating head crashing down at the end. That was cool. In ‘77, I saw the poster for The Incredible Melting Man near the snack bar and I wanted to see it so bad but they said no. It was a safe place for families in the 60’s and 70’s but it got seedy and rowdy by the mid-80’s. My friends and I heard about a trail through the woods behind the screen to get in for free and discovered that it was a gay hook-up spot. We actually saw two naked dudes prancing through the woods in the dark carrying a small foam mattress and giggling. These things you don’t forget. Not long before it closed, we heard about a gang-brawl there or something like that and people stopped going. That’s what always seems to eventually happen. You couldn’t have a big open-field drive-in like that today, especially in Patchogue. They occasionally do pop-up screen movie nights in the parking lot behind the church but they have to hire security.
It’s wonderful that this theater is still in operation but it should really be listed on here as the Oakdale Theater proper because the new playhouse has never shown a film except for a few while semi-closed during the pandemic. I grew up in Oakdale and as a kid in the 70’s, I saw a lot of Disney movies there with my parents, but most of my memories of that place are from my teens in the mid-80’s when I was old enough to walk there with my neighborhood friends. It was a pretty cool shopping center with a bowling alley, a KFC, a dime store where I’d get candy cigarettes and Mad/Cracked magazines and for a brief time, a small arcade down a basement stairwell on the side of the building. The single-screen theater was fairly large and cozy and they showed new releases well into the 80’s. There were more state-of-the-art theaters in the shopping malls but we still went there often, mainly for the cheap double-feature matinees. The marquee said 80 cents for the 80’s! They must have had their own library of film prints because they would routinely re-run classics like Airplane, 1941, Grease, Midnight Express, the Smokey And The Bandit and Cannonball Run movies, Time Bandits, Clash Of The Titans, Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger, American Werewolf In London, The Black Stallion, My Bodyguard, A Soldier’s Story, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, The Muppet Movie… and I sort of remember seeing Disney’s Fantasia viewed with the enhancement of various substances. Towards the end, my buddy and I were usually the only ones in the theater and one sunny afternoon, a film reel jammed-up and couldn’t be fixed. After a long and frustrating wait, the projectionist gave us the bad news and as we exited, he came out to apologize and talked to us for a bit. He told us that they were closing and that was our last visit there, but that old theater managed to hang on for a surprising amount of time despite the opening of the Patchogue 13. I remember passing by and seeing Time Bandits and Clash Of The Titans relentlessly posted on the marquee but at that point I’d seen them so many times, VHS rental stores were the new thing and everybody had a cable box by then, so who knew we would miss it?