All right, another Joe Bob horror movie roundup here.

Nosferatu the Vampyre is obviously the back half of the same night that showed the F.W. Murnau Nosferatu, but this one is Herzog’s quasi-remake.

It’s sort of interesting as a remake, because it is extremely remakey, with a nearly identical structure, and some shots nearly identical. But at the same time, it’s a lot more natural — the original was of course a silent movie, and if you’re going to put dialogue in, then scenes tend to progress differently. In some respects, this ends up actually feeling like a cross between Murnau and Stoker, as it gets a bit closer to the original source material.

Overall, it’s a stylish movie with some great sequences (the plague stuff, and the dreams particularly stand out), good use of Wagner for adding foreboding ominousness to the score, and a solid update of a classic.

Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker is something else altogether, and I still don’t really know what. It’s a movie with an over-the-top plot given appropriately over-the-top acting, where it just keeps getting more and more wild as it goes on. Like, an incestuous aunt who murders a repairman is barely even table stakes here. “Okay, but how would you make that less sedate?” is the question that the filmmakers asked about plot points like that.

My favorite thing from the movie is the cop who’s investigating the murder. Because he’s absolutely right that there is shit going on and the story doesn’t hold up, but then he locks in on this homophobic theory that the aunt is covering up a gay love triangle with her nephew and his gym teacher and the murdered guy, and he absolutely refuses to even entertain any other idea. The movie is full of him brimming with self-confidence and dead certainty, dismissively telling coworkers that they’re idiots for coming to him with facts that would point in a different direction, and I tell you, if I haven’t worked with this exact guy, it’s definitely a close relative.

Even weirder is The Baby, a movie about an adult baby (he wears diapers, sleeps in a crib, crawls around, etc.), the family that is raising him, the social worker that takes interest in him and the family, and how that all falls out. The adult baby thing is just super-weird, and not least because there’s a suckling scene. But again, this is one that works because the cast commits to the over-the-top aesthetic and take it seriously even while leaning into it.

The Monster Club is not weird and disturbing and over-the-top. It’s a kind of silly, fluffy anthology movie. Some of the stories try to be genuinely scary, but they’re undercut by the movie’s framing around this complex monster genealogy chart that includes “shadmocks” (I forget) and “humgoos” (human/ghoul hybrids). But the movie has a kind of genial vibe to it (there are novelty rock songs in between each segment, for instance), and it’s got legends like Donald Pleasence and Vincent Price. It totally works as a Joe Bob “just relax and have fun with it” installment.

Head of the Family, however, doesn’t even work as that. This is an indie movie from the ’90s, and it’s the type of indie (Joe Bob glosses it as “LA style”) that feels like it’s a cheesy made-for-basic-cable kind of movie, except that it’s full of nudity. But even with that, I stick with my “basic cable” aesthetic: It isn’t classy enough to be a made-for-late-night-Cinemax movie, and yes, I realize what I’m saying here. It’s pretty much just straight-up bad.

Hellbender, though, is a much better indie movie. It’s extremely indie — like three people did 95% of the work on the movie (including the acting) and oh ps they’re a mother/father/daughter family. But it’s shockingly good, given that. It looks great visually (with the exception of some obvious low-quality compression artifacting on wide landscape shots, which they apparently did with drone cameras), it’s very well acted, and the thematic elements of motherhood and coming of age work really well, and with more ambiguity than I’d’ve expected to see in the genre.