The inmates, many of whom sport punk fashion, are placated with a steady diet of junk food, new wave music, drugs, and exploitation films.

The film was directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith and stars Ned Manning and Natalie McCurry as the captive couple, and Peter Whitford as the manager of the drive-in.

In an attempt to control the crime-waves, a chain of drive-in theatres is seized by the state and turned into concentration camps for the undesirables and unemployed youth.

These, coupled with the awful conditions on the outside, engineer an atmosphere of complacency and hopelessness so that the inmates will accept their fate and not attempt to escape before they are euthanased.

Jimmy "Crabs" Rossini, a young fitness enthusiast, sneaks off in his brother's vintage Chevy to take his girlfriend, Carmen, to the local Star Drive-In.

She becomes friends with several of the female inmates, who are successful at indoctrinating her to the encampment's racist mentality that non-white Australians are to blame for society's problems; a situation exacerbated by the arrival of foreigners and illegal immigrants (who cannot be sent back to where they came from as global warming has rendered Europe and most of Asia uninhabitable) trucked into the camp.

All attempts by Crabs to talk sense into her fail because she has succumbed to the hopelessness that pervades the encampment, as have many of the other trapped kids that Jimmy tries to interact with.

Crabs makes one more effort at escape: while the majority of the encampment, including Carmen, attend a racist meeting, he hijacks a tow truck.

This leads to a car chase inside the encampment; the police fire automatic weapons at the tow truck, which frightens the prisoners who are hiding in the café.

Using the lowered ramp of a police tow truck that is parked near the main entrance, Crabs launches another vehicle over the fence and lands on the S-Road, successfully driving away to freedom.

[13] Luke Buckmaster of Senses of Cinema called it Trenchard-Smith's "magnum opus" and "a perfectly gloomy fusion of physical objects juxtaposed with the story’s otherworldly elements and creepy dystopian undercurrents.