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Never disrobe before a gunfight

In probably the weirdest scene in a film whose base level of normality is pretty askew to begin with, Milton picks up a woman in a bar, takes her back to his hotel room, and starts having sex with her, despite not taking his clothes off. When she questions his sartorial choices, Milton replies that he never disrobes before a gunfight, at which point dozens of large, burly men with large, burly guns start bursting into the room, only to be mowed down by Milton's undead-eyed shooting. There are a couple of things that can be taken away from this scene - not least of all that it is apparently possible to roll, jump and acrobatically twirl around a room, whilst shooting two guns, and still have somewhat satisfying sex (maybe it's just me, but I would find all of that a tad distracting) - but the most important thing is the almost Zen philosophy of Milton's statement. Sure, his decision not to disrobe is vindicated by the fact that a gunfight does, in fact, break out, but how was he to know that one would? As far as he was aware, a gunfight might not have been a pressing concern, but merely something that could happen in the future. In that context, his seemingly throwaway line is a way of saying that we should always be prepared for the worst eventuality, be it a gunfight, losing your job, or biting into a hot dog and getting ketchup all down your T-shirt. Rarely has a film packed so much profundity into a single line preceding a gunfight-sex scene.

Always respect the classics

Despite being shot in 3D, thereby making it almost aggressively modern, Drive Angry is, at its heart, a classic tale, and even illustrates one of the elemental truisms of the great Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov. Chekhov once said of story structure that "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off." It's an idea that is pretty much essential to any piece of taut, efficient storytelling, and Drive Angry respects this concept almost to a fault. But rather than rely on something as conventional as a gun, the film has its own spin on the notion, one that could best be summed up as, "If you say in the first act that you want to drink beer from the skull of the man who murdered your daughter and kidnapped your grandaughter in the hopes of sacrificing her to open up a gate to hell, in the second or third act beer best be fucking drunk from a skull."

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