So let’s talk about some Joe Bob movies. I’ve got two weeks (so four movies) to catch up on here.

First week was Lucio Fulci movies. I kinda love Italian horror directors, because even when they’re filming total nonsense (which is most of the time), they do it with such style.

And so Zombi 2 is a wacked-out zombie movie. (Like, just to start with, the “2” in the title is meant to imply that it’s a sequel to George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, which was titled Zombi in Italy; but… it’s not.) It takes place in the tropics and brings voodoo into the mix, but honestly what I’ll most remember from the movie is the absolutely over-the-top scene, where a (of course) topless woman is scuba diving; menaced by a shark, she hides in a rock formation, but turns out there was an underwater zombie there, yadda yadda, the shark and the zombie fight, with the zombie basically riding the shark and then the shark biting off the zombie’s arm.

As I’m watching it, I’m like… man, I have no idea how they did these special effects. It doesn’t look like it’s doing any hokey optical gimmicks (rear projection or whatever), the zombie and the shark are clearly in the same scene. Nor is it a fake shark or a mannequin zombie: That’s a real person, and a real shark. But like… the zombie doesn’t have scuba gear on, and they’re underwater for a long time, and also clearly you wouldn’t just have an actor wrestle with a shark, right?

Haha, of course you would. Drug that shark up, and let’s go, motherfuckers. This article has info about the making of the scene, along with a (NSFW, as aforementioned) clip of the scene. As they so often say, “you couldn’t do that today,” which in this case is almost certainly for the best for shark and man alike, but maybe not for cinema.

It occurs to me that I forgot to mention all the eyeball horror — the impalements, the gougings — but good news, we have a chance to talk about more of them with Fulci’s next movie, The Beyond.

So the thing about Joe Bob is that it airs in real-time starting Friday at 9 PM, and he shows two movies. We’ve basically never successfully stayed up through both movies, but we almost always foolishly attempt it. In this case, we got like 90 minutes into the second one before my wife gave up and succumbed to tiredness.

When we went to finish it later, she’s like “you know, I think I was dozing off during this one, can we restart from the beginning?” And we did, but here’s the punchline: She hadn’t actually dozed off that much; she thought that she must have been because the movie hadn’t made any sense, and was just a bunch of disconnected scenes with no narrative logic. But turns out that no matter how wide awake you are, that’s the experience you’re going to get here. Whether you’re wondering what the plumber is hoping to find in the basement once he opens up a wall to reveal extensive caverns with standing water in them (“ah, there’s the leak”); why there are face-eating tarantulas in a library in New Orleans; or why a morgue stores a 50-gallon jug of face-melting acid with no lid on the very top of a rickety shelf, you will simply never get an answer.

Both of these movies are, in some classical sense, not very good. And yet, zero regrets about watching them, and I’d be up for more Fulci any time, so it’s clear that they’re doing something right.

The same thing is mostly true for the second week’s movies, except leaning heavier toward the “not very good” side and a bit less toward the “zero regrets” side. First up was Witchboard, a movie about an evil spirit haunting a Ouija board. The characters are terrible, the plot is silly, nothing makes much sense, and hey, this sounds a lot like a Fulci movie, right? But no, not quite, because it just doesn’t have the style.

And also beyond the style… the thing is, the Fulci plots don’t make sense because nobody cares at all about them making sense, and they don’t even try. This tries real hard, with lots of elaborate exposition about how Ouija haunting works (“progressive entrapment” is the hilariously legal-sounding phrase they came up with for how the spirits can possess someone), but it’s still nonsense. It’s one thing to recognize that nobody cared about plot coherence in a movie and to go with the vibe; it’s another thing when they clearly did care, and just couldn’t execute for competence-related reasons.

That said, because it was made in 1986, it has a kind of period piece vibe to it, and it worked okay. (I am sort of coming to believe that many movies just need to age to reach their full potential, like fine wines.)

The Devil’s Rain worked a little better — the director was clearly trying to do things that were visually interesting, Ernest Borgnine did a great scenery-chewing piece of acting, Shatner was a wild choice for a protagonist — but the screenplay is so very very bad in ways that actually make the better production values almost a hindrance: It seems a shame that so much talent was expended on something so fatally flawed in conception. Like Witchboard, this one has piles of exposition that all adds up into nothing coherent. Still, an enjoyable-enough watch if you’re in the mood for some southwestern-flavored Satanic cults.