Movies, with a bit of makeshift magic - Guerilla Drive-In screens free films wherever there's a patch of land and a wall.

Guerilla Drive-In prefers the latter.

At Guerilla Drive-In screenings, you don't shell out $12 for tickets or stretch out in stadium seats. Instead, you join a hundred or more cinema fans draped in blankets and hunkered down amid the weeds, watching films projected onto random walls.

Guerilla Drive-in has been a semi-underground summer diversion here since 2002.

If you're a believer, you grab a beach chair and a sweatshirt every other Friday night for free screenings of DVDs outdoors, enveloped by the chilly Santa Cruz fog.

"I love the vibe," said Alan Voegtlen, a high school Spanish teacher straddling his bicycle and toting a thermos of lemon-ginger yerba mate at a recent screening of "The Matrix."

"I love the smell of the grasses. I love people getting together as a community. It all has kind of a rainbow flavor to it."

Being Santa Cruz, it also has a political flavor that's half zany and half in-your-face.

"It's about getting people together to do something very deliberately outside the realm of commerce," said artist Rico Thunder, a creator of "industrial whimsy" who is a driving behind Guerilla Drive-In. "It's about reclaiming public space."

Mostly, Guerilla Drive-In shows movies on a patch of private land between a winery and some railroad tracks. The spot's owner, Bonny Doon Winery, even lets Guerilla Drive-In tap into its electricity.

"I'm a pretty laissez-faire person," said Bonny Doon's founder, Randall Grahm. "I probably should think more about liability issues, but I don't."

On this Friday night, though, the chosen locale for "The Matrix" was beneath the Soquel Avenue bridge spanning the San Lorenzo River -- a spot where police shut down a showing of "The Third Man" a couple of years ago because parkland was being used after hours. Both financially and philosophically, Guerilla Drive-In is opposed to acquiring the permits it would need for the use of public property after dark.

Above, traffic crossed the bridge into the city's downtown.

Below, young couples huddled together, drinking wine and viewing the 1999 sci-fi thriller. A software engineer sat beside his two young daughters half-asleep in their stroller. A few homeless men smoked cigarettes. Rico Thunder, known in his more mundane moments as Wes Modes, surveyed the scene from beneath his fedora, licking his chops over the prospect of another visit from the local constabulary.