Drive Angry is trash, and we loved every second 

Richard Crouse: Mark, Drive Angry has all the qualities of a great drive-in movie. There’s muscle cars, gratuitous language and nudity, a vengeful Southern cult leader and the single wildest gunfight/sex scene ever committed to celluloid. Roger Corman would have been proud. Were you? Did you like it?  

Mark Breslin: Richard, this movie was complete and utter trash and I loved every minute of it. Usually I cringe at any supernatural subplots, but with William Fichtner as the underworld's "accountant," how could they go wrong? Did you love him as much as I did?

RC: Oh yes. Fichtner is wicked — see what I did there? — and I loved the way he and Cage use this deadpan delivery to say the craziest dialogue of any movie so far this year. Cage hasn’t had a line as great as “I never disrobe before a gunfight” since David Lynch was writing his lines.   

MB: The dialogue was funny although the serious scenes with David Morse stopped the movie cold. But I thought Amber Heard brought a lot to a role that could have been a throwaway.

RC: The whole thing could have been a throwaway, but it isn’t. Instead it’s a throwback to the kind of movies that played at the bottom of the bill at the drive-in. It’s so over-the-top, so in-your-face it seems like a recent graduate from the Russ Meyer School of Fine Arts, class of 2011. Even the 3-D is extreme. This isn’t Avatar with its elegant stereoscopic effects. Here, as body parts and bullets were flying off the screen I couldn’t help but think that the 3-D was as extreme as the movie. What did you think of the 3-D?

MB: I felt I had to scape those body parts off my sweater when the movie finished. Verrrrry realistic! And Cage was his wonderful squirrelly self again, redeeming his somnambulistic role in Season of the Witch. His performance here is in his pedal-to-the-metal, no-holds barred Bad Lieutenant/Vampire's Kiss tradition — the Nic Cage I love.

RC: Absolutely. He’s a helluva lotta fun here. This is the Cage that I wish we saw more of — the wild-man-actor who seemingly has no boundaries. He’s still not 100 per cent back in my good books — the memory of Season of the Witch is too fresh to be forgotten—but a few more like this and a few less like Bangkok Dangerous and he may yet earn his way back to my A-list.