So this week is a great example of what I like best about Joe Bob, because he’s doing a theme night — the show aired on Cinco de Mayo, so we get a little history lesson about the day along with two Mexican horror films — but the two movies he’s showing couldn’t be more different.

The first, Don’t Panic, is an ’80s supernatural slasher — there’s a Ouija board, someone’s body gets taken over by a demon, and then a bunch of other people get brutally murdered. The plot involves the protagonist (for reasons that I think are never fully explained) getting visions of upcoming murders, so he keeps trying to warn/protect people, and failboating at it; he ultimately, of course, has to have a showdown with the demon.

It’s mostly forgettable, with a lot of nonsense supernatural logic, idiot character plotting, and middling performances all around. But — like a lot of the trashier Joe Bob shows — it kinda works, because it is a period piece by now, plus it’s so weird in so many ways, not the least of which is that the main character spends a lot of the movie in dinosaur pajamas that would be more appropriate for a five-year-old than the 17-year-old he is. But it’s arguably the ending (which, for no particular reason, I won’t spoil) that’s the most surprising part. Just completely going off the rails relative to what kind of story this is.

But so the second movie, Tigers Are Not Afraid, is a movie of recent vintage (2017) and artsier ambition: It’s telling a magical realist story about a gang of kids who are cartel war orphans, making their way together on the streets after their parents have been kidnapped or murdered. One of them steals a phone from a cartel guy, which it turns out has some material that would incriminate an up-and-coming politician (played by Tenoch Huerta, who would go on to play Namor in the MCU), and so now the cartel is after them.

As a horror movie, it’s one part realistic gang violence and one part supernatural creepies — one of the kids has three pieces of chalk that her teacher gave her, each of which gives her a wish; but the wishes have a kind of monkey’s paw nature to them, and there seems to be a dark power chasing after her.

It’s well-made. The locations are striking, the kids are incredible actors, it’s moving in places, and the melding of the mundane and supernatural is done well. And so I want to say that I loved it, but… I didn’t, quite: There’s something about it that’s a little too lowkey somehow.

Some of this is maybe the overused piano-tinkle-and-strings music, some of this is that the story beats are obvious and you can see them coming from far away, but a lot of it is that it weirdly doesn’t feel that scary. Kids being pursued by hardened killers and supernatural forces should be absolutely harrowing and terrifying, but the movie mostly wants to just live in a kind of gentle slice-of-life mode. Which works really well for what it is — the director gets great, natural performances out of these kids, and a lot of this would work really well in a movie that’s just about these kids kinda living their lives together on the street — but means that it doesn’t have the kind of gut punch intense energy that you’d think it would have from the subject matter.

But while that keeps it from being great, it doesn’t keep it from being good: There’s a lot to like here, and it’s worth watching. And it’s to the Joe Bob team’s credit that we’re getting both of these movies together — a trashy ’80s teen occult slasher, and a Trump-era social issue magical realist dark fairytale.