We finally finished up the last of our Joe Bob movies today, so here’s a quick round-up of the rest of the season.

Habit: So this is a ’90s indie movie set in New York, and it’s extremely what you think of when you think of ‘90s indie: Small, dingy apartments, Gen-X dropout-cool characters (who you feel like might all be using heroin), kind of a muddled pessimistic attitude, and sex as a metaphor (here, we get a succubus vampire). It’s a flawed movie with lots of problems, but it nails the aesthetic so perfectly that I am able to forgive it a lot through nostalgia-tinged eyes.

Uncle Sam: This is supposed to be a political parody, pretty clearly. And I’m pretty sure that it’s supposed to be making fun of American militarism and toxic masculinity, but… boy, it just does not have its tone under control at all, and seems to swing between sentiment and satire too quickly and inconsistently. It’s clearly a small budget movie with low production values, and one of the things that it makes clear to me is that while a 1970s movie with low production values can feel daringly homespun, a 1990s movie (which this is) with low production values just feels like a direct-to-video/late-night-cable piece of schlock. I think this is a me thing, where I saw a bunch of junk on TNT and USA and whatever when I was a kid, and that someone younger (or older) wouldn’t feel that distinction so strongly, but idk. Anyway: meh.

Nightbreed: This is a movie that’s almost more fascinating for the story around it than the movie itself. Apparently, Clive Barker wanted to make this kind of epic horror fantasy, and the studio didn’t get it and took it away from him and edited it into a generic, sorta incoherent, slasher, which was released to general meh in 1990. And that’s where everyone assumed it would have to end, except that apparently the studio still had all the footage, and yadda yadda fan activism and in 2014, Barker oversaw the release of a Director’s Cut that had 40 minutes of different content from the original studio cut, essentially a totally different movie.

And so that’s what we saw, and I think that it still doesn’t quite totally work — the movie just didn’t have the budget or running time to fully realize Barker’s epic vision; it’s the kind of thing that would really cry out for a modern prestige miniseries — but is still pretty good. It’s interesting, it has David Cronenberg acting(!) as a compelling villain, and the mythology stuff mostly works despite the wonky pacing and lack of a compelling protagonist. If it’s not a success, it’s at least an interesting quasi-failure.

The Stepfather: So Joe Bob just kept going off during the breaks about how well-acted this is, with John Locke from Lost in the lead role as a guy who kills his family, then marries into a new one. And okay, sure, I can go along with that. He did a great job. But the movie felt flat to me, with very little tension throughout its running time. Because we know what happened upfront, we’re never wondering if he’s the killer; and because we know that he kills methodically and with a plan, we’re never worried that anyone’s in mortal danger up until a certain point in the movie. Which means that we spend a lot of the movie just watching stuff happen with no sense of creeping dread or incipient terror or anything. This goes into the “just okay” bucket for me.

The Freakmaker: This one also ends up in the “just okay” bucket, but in a completely different way. Rather than being a well-made, but boring, movie, it’s a terribly made, but interesting, one. Basically, you’ve got Donald Pleasence sleepwalking through a role as a mad scientist who is trying to make human/plant hybrids, and doing it on kidnapped victims. But it’s attached to a movie about the circus, and particularly the “freaks.” Joe Bob talks about how it was apparently appallingly exploitative to audiences at the time that these people were played by the actual circusfolk who had these deformities and medical conditions. But I think to a modern audience, it goes the other way: Putting those actual people in the roles and treating them with dignity and humanity is what keeps it from being exploitative. So the circus stuff I think works, but beyond that, the movie is just a complete mess despite having lots of talent in lots of different places.

And that’s the season done with!