So I realized that I normally write up Joe Bob movies at the end of a “season,” but since they’ve moved to doing movies every other week year-round, I’m not going to hit an obvious breakpoint, and I should probably put together a post here before I forget everything completely, despite my notes. I’m going to try to keep this brief, because there are a bunch of movies to get through.

Freeway is an absolutely wild movie. It has real stars in it (Reese Witherspoon is the protagonist), but it’s so off-the-rails it’s hard to believe it. Witherspoon plays an unrepentant trashy criminal type who encounters a predatory serial killer; the movie is completely unpredictable, and surprises throughout. This could/should be a legitimate cult classic.

Vamp is an extremely mediocre vampire stripper movie for the most part, but Grace Jones is amazing as the queen vampire, and there are surprisingly cool visuals around her appearance — apparently some Andy Warhol-adjacent people were involved at this point. But it’s not enough to save the movie, it’s just this weirdly stylish and cool bit in the middle of an otherwise thoroughly meh horror movie.

Next are two Roger Corman movies. This episode came out before Corman’s death, and featured him on stage talking to Joe Bob (along with some other elderly Corman-adjacent figures, including Bruce Dern). It’s been fascinating seeing his career re-appraised after his death, because obviously when he was alive, his reputation was as a schlockmeister, but as soon as he died, he morphed into this incredibly influential producer who left his mark on cinema. And I think these two movies show both strands of that.

A Bucket of Blood is the good Corman. It’s a short eighty-minute movie about a guy who hangs around with beat poets and wants to be an artist, and eventually finds success in making “sculptures” by killing people and covering them in clay. It’s tense and stylish and feels like a good Twilight Zone episode.

Deathstalker is total schlock. It’s a barbarian swords-and-sorcery exploitation movie, which is notably porny even by the standards of the genre — it ends up feeling like a movie you might see at 2 AM on Cinemax in the ’80s. (It’s also way rapier than you’d see if movies like this were made today, which they’re not.)

Next up is Rottentail, which was an Easter-themed movie. It’s basically garbage, about a man who gets bitten by a mutated rabbit and turns into a half-man/half-rabbit and goes on a killing spree. The acting is all over the top, and the plot is absurd. The one thing it’s got going for it is a kind of endearing amateurishness; even though it’s a new movie (2019), it doesn’t feel too slick and cable TV-ish.

The Autopsy of Jane Doe is much more interesting. It’s a genuinely scary psychological/supernatural horror movie. It’s claustrophobically set in a single location (a morgue in an old building), and its protagonist is dead (there are lots of shots of her corpse, which never moves or visibly emotes, but somehow expresses emotion all the same). I think the movie doesn’t fully work, as its theme gets away from it a bit, but it’s still interesting even if not completely successful.

Death Spa is just silly, set in a high-tech health club in 1988. The story is incoherent, the characterization makes no sense at all, but there are surprisingly bloody kills and lots of them (and it’s probably not a spoiler to say that Chekhov’s blender, introduced early, does in fact pay off). It’s hard to say the movie is good in any sense, but it’s the fun kind of trash.

When I saw Graduation Day, I took notes saying “very mid and forgettable, irrelevant story, no real characters to speak of.” I remember literally nothing about it, so I guess it’s extremely forgettable. (Looking it up, it involves members of a high school track team being murdered. I remember it now, but tbh have nothing more to add.)

Donnie Darko isn’t really horror, and I don’t know what it says about me that I’m like “oh, this is too new to be on Joe Bob” even though it’s 23 years old. (Well, I know what it says: that I’m very old.) Anyway, I’ve seen this before, but the Tarantino-esque dialogue really stands out as being of its time, and it’s hard not to think that the plot is at the perfect level of coherence: It’s just mysterious enough that people can make up their own theories, but straightforward enough that those theories can be sensibly applied to the movie’s many totally-straightforward bits. Perfect for a movie pitched to dorm room intellectuals. (Also, I had forgotten that the “I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion” bit was from this movie.)

Suitable Flesh was a bland movie that wastes Heather Graham in body-hopping horror. But I have to be honest that I might be under-rating this movie: It’s a new (2023) Shudder exclusive, so the director was a guest on Joe Bob and I hated him so much, just wanted to punch him throughout his appearance, and probably can’t be objective about his work.

And most recently, Carnival of Souls is a 1962 black-and-white surrealist horror. The protagonist is fascinating, because she’s blank and unreadable for much of the movie, a misanthrope who mostly doesn’t want to be around anyone at any point… but who keeps getting told what she should want by a series of unpleasant men, which makes the movie feel extremely feminist in its way. The ending, which focuses on a trippy scene with ghouls in an abandoned amusement park, leans hard into the more Lynchian side of the movie, en route to some surprises. Definitely one of the more interesting films here.