Two weeks of Joe Bob, and four movies.

The Babadook wasn’t what I was expecting. Literally all I know about it is that it’s a gay pride icon, but… literally there is nothing gay in the movie at all. Like, looking it up afterward, apparently this is just some random iconography that the community came up with, but wow, I totally assumed the movie was doing some queer horror, and also how is there not a bunch of queer horror?!? Leaving that all to the side, it’s apparently an Australian horror movie about how being a parent sucks sometimes, and how maybe the real monster was inside you all along. Not bad, but also not super-great.

The Muthers isn’t horror at all, but I guess it qualifies as a “drive-in” movie even if it doesn’t seem like it should be on Shudder. It’s a blaxploitation/sexploitation movie starring women who are… in Vietnam? Is that right? That can’t be right. (It’s not, it’s set in the Philippines, where it was also filmed, part of a wave of cheap action movies filmed there in the ’70s.) Watching this at the beginning, I was like “holy shit, I suddenly understand what influenced Quentin Tarantino movies” and then it turns out that Tarantino really likes this specific movie a lot, so… yeah. Recommended if you want a pulpy movie about bad-ass pirate women who fuck up a bunch of crime lords in the jungle, but not particularly strongly unless this is really what you want.

The Mutilator is fucking wild, because the original title of the movie — still shown on the title card in the movie — is Fall Break, and it’s about a bunch of college students who take a vacation on fall break (THIS IS NOT A REAL THING) to go vacation on the ocean shore, and then get murdered one-by-one for no real reason. It’s pure slasher trash, but manages to hit a basically perfect level of low-budget sincerity to be exactly what you want if you’re looking for slasher trash. Also, it has a montage sequence set to the original song “Fall Break” that will do its best to convince you that fall break is a real thing (it is not).

Possession is a Polish art-house film from 1981, and it is even more fucking wild. It’s really a movie about a marriage dissolving, and is like 90% just this terrible melodramatic relationship exploding in the way that’s familiar if you’ve watched a whole bunch of European art-house films — Journey to Italy, Contempt, L’Atalante — but then also it’s got a monstrously terrible creature in it that turns it into horror. Sam Neill is the male lead, and I don’t think that before or since, he’s played any role in this “dialed up to 11” register. If this movie had been made any later, they would have been contractually required to put Nic Cage in that role. Arthouse horror is usually my wheelhouse, and there are definitely things here to recommend, but it’s all just such stylized, nonsensical emotionally charged shouting that I feel like it would have been better off just going a little more straight pulpy.