All right. The final episode[1] of Joe Bob has aired, and so I guess it’s time to write up all the movies I’ve seen on the show that I haven’t yet written up.

But so, here we go, in what I think is most-to-least recent order, but may be somewhat out of sync. (Really, it’s just the order that I have notes sitting here.)

Messiah of Evil: So this is clearly made as a kind of art house-adjacent horror movie, but it’s got a real amateur vibe to it, and amateur art-house comes off as pretentious and portentous. Wikipedia notes that it’s praised for its “surrealist, dreamlike tone and elliptical plot.” I agree that those are qualities it possesses; how much praise it deserves for them, well. (Honestly, it’s not a bad movie, but it so badly wants to be better than it is.)

House on Haunted Hill: This is a 1959 classic with Vincent Price. A bunch of semi-strangers are called together by an eccentric rich man, to spend a night in this house for the chance to get a pile of money. The house is charming, with such features as an acid pool in the basement, but everyone stays for one reason or another, and shockingly the night does not pass uneventfully. The movie doesn’t really make sense in a lot of ways — like, you can easily follow the plot, but when you stop to ask why something would be the way it is, the only answer is “because they thought it would be cool in the movie if it were that way.” But it’s got a spooky vibe, and is solid in a very classical way.

The Innkeepers: So this is a Ti West joint, but unlike his Pearl trilogy, it’s not a period piece. Or, well, it was released in 2011, so at this point it’s kind of inadvertently one, but it was set in the contemporary world of 2010. You’ve got a hotel with an absentee owner and very few customers that’s going to be closing down soon, and we’re really following two employees who are staying there for its last weekend. They’re kinda ghost-hunters, and the hotel is allegedly haunted, and the plot of the movie is seeing how true that “allegedly” is.

It’s slow, and not much happens, but I was enjoying the characters and atmosphere for most of the movie’s running length — but right at the end, one of the main characters starts making decisions that are deeply stupid and wildly out of character, for absolutely no reason other than that the plot demands them. If you’re going to have a movie with little action because it’s just focusing hard on characterization, then I demand that when the events do pick up, you don’t immediately abandon every drop of characterization you’ve established in service of the plot. This was so incredibly annoying that it essentially ruined the movie for me.

Iced: So a bunch of high school kids on a skiing trip do some dumb quasi-pranks that get a guy killed while skiing. Years later, they meet up as adults at a timeshare, and a) catch up on each other’s lives and who they are as adults (I feel like the makers of this movie really wished their title could be a Big Chill pun), and b) get killed by a mysterious murderer, who (spoiler alert) is tied to the opening tragedy, because obviously. There’s a lot of absurdities in this movie, and it gets weirdly intense at moments, but it’s not bad.

Curtains: This is more of a psychological horror, about actors. As it starts, we’re with an actress in an asylum, where she’s had herself committed with fake insanity to research a part where she’ll be playing a madwoman. But then the director comes to get her out and is like “oh btw, the part’s not really yours, I’m doing a casting call,” which is legitimate grounds for murder. But then also it turns out his “casting call” is inviting six women to his mansion to rehearse and audition over multiple days (weeks?) until he makes his pick. And he is absolutely going to try to sleep with them.

It’s not much of a spoiler to say that the pool dwindles over time as they get variously murdered off. This is mostly very conventional, until the ending, which is this whole elaborate chase scene seemingly imported from another movie, in a geography that makes no sense. It’s like the killer is chasing their final victim in a private version of the House on the Rock — just this gigantic warehouse full of weird stuff and mazes and tunnels, that I guess we’re supposed to believe was just in his backyard? Maybe not a good movie, but it is interesting.

Blood and Black Lace: So they had an episode of Joe-Bob where they showed a Dario Argento movie (which we’d already seen) along with this Mario Bava movie, and had a debate over which was the first giallo. My vote is for Argento, because this felt like a proto-giallo, with a kinda Gothic vibe. It’s mostly set in these old mansions full of carved wood and marble, and had a very dramatic style to it. It’s an enjoyable movie, but giallo? I see the argument for it, but ultimately, I come down on no.

Mute Witness: So this is not a Russian movie, but it’s set in Russia, where characters are making a movie in an old, abandoned studio. And so early on, everyone’s gone home except the woman who does the (physical) special effects; and she witnesses another crew come into the studio and make what seems at first like a porn movie… until the actress is killed, and it turns out it’s a snuff film.

The people making the film realize that she’s seen them, and the rest of the movie is a cat-and-mouse game where they’re trying to capture her and her friends, while they’re trying to get the criminals brought to justice. (Oh, also, she’s mute, hence the title.)

This feels more like a thriller than horror, but it’s a really good thriller. There are lots of twists and turns, the suspenseful sequences are genuinely suspenseful, and the abandoned studio (which is also an abandoned studio in real life) makes for a great setting.

This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse: This is maybe the weirdest movie out of this whole lot, which is saying something, given what I’ve already described. It’s a black and white Brazilian movie about a kind of philosopher murderer named “Coffin Joe.” He’s looking for a woman to be the “perfect mother” of his child, a concept he will monologue about at length.

So, lacking dating apps, he instead kidnaps a half-dozen women, and submits them all to various tortures. Five of them don’t make it through the tortures, and he kills them all for exhibiting fear or disgust at e.g. having a bunch of spiders crawling around on themselves. One makes it through, but then for reasons I forget, it doesn’t work out between them. But meanwhile another woman comes into the picture who is, implausibly, totally into him and who meets his criteria for being a perfect mother.

And at this point, it all gets somewhat metaphorical with visions of hell and skeletons coming up from the ground, and long story short, he does not end up with a happy family. Amusingly, the Brazilian censors made him put in a bit at the end where Coffin Joe repents of his sins and welcomes Jesus as his lord and savior, which, uh, does not really fit with the rest of the movie, and which the director super hates for basically good reasons.

Earth vs. the Spider: This is a movie from 1958, and the premise is: there’s a giant spider. That’s pretty much it! Some teens fight it in a cave and kill it. They then take its corpse to their school dance(?!?), where the rock ‘n’ roll music wakes it up, and then they need to fight it again as it rampages through town. It’s basically forgettable, but interesting as a time capsule of the ’50s.

Dog Soldiers: So this is the story of a bunch of army guys who deploy in the Scottish Highlands to investigate werewolves. The movie is kinda dark, with lots of betrayal and brooding; it takes itself very seriously. But also everyone in the movie is very stupid, the plot events are nonsensical, and it’s just generally hard to care about any of it. I think it’s trying to make A Social Point, but there are horror movies that make better points while also being more entertaining. This is from the aughts, and I sorta think the aughts just weren’t a good decade for horror — that edgelord vibe of the era leads horror movies to places that I don’t enjoy.

Bad Moon: This is also a werewolf movie, and I can’t say it’s better exactly, but I dislike it less. The conceit here is that a family that lives out in a rural house has a) a dog, and b) a visiting brother who is secretly a werewolf. When people start being viciously killed, local cops blame the dog, but the dog tries to solve the crime and point them at the werewolf brother. (That’s not quite accurate, but it gets across the vibe — like half of this movie is from the perspective of the dog.) It’s tonally a mess, veering between straight-up horror and Hallmark movie sentimentality in ways that don’t mesh at all, and the plot is basically nonsense. But at least it’s not grimdark.

Piranha: One of many Jaws rip-offs, the conceit here is that a bunch of mutant piranhas are kept in a pool at a military complex, and then accidentally released into a river. Hijinks ensue, culminating in a summer camp where so many people are swimming as the piranhas move through. Is it good? No. But is it fun? Enh, not really; it’s one of those inoffensive, but not-even-mediocre movies.

Crocodile: So this is also a Jaws rip-off, but it’s Thai, and a lot more interesting. Or at least it is for most of its length. It starts off with the crocodile engaging in some beach murders, in true Jaws-like fashion; but then at some point a much larger crocodile is destroying a whole village before being a normal size again — as far as I can tell, it’s not supposed to be a magical size-changing crocodile, it’s just kinda inconsistent film-making.

But so anyway, this early part is fun and interesting, and then we get to the part where they’re out on the water to hunt the crocodile — it’s very faithful to the Jaws template — and it just slows down to a crawl. Like, suddenly we go from this fast-paced creature feature into a languid arthouse movie where nothing happens for seemingly hours. (It can’t actually be that long, but it felt like it.) By the end of the movie, it had exhausted a lot of my earlier goodwill, but at least there was goodwill to exhaust?

  1. Sort of? Shudder’s cancelled the regular series, but apparently there are going to be four more specials this year. I wouldn’t be surprised if they do more specials in the future, either, but… well, maybe not. If not, I’ll be sad, because I’ve really loved watching this show, both as a fun Friday night activity and as the thing that (along with my wife, of course) got me into horror as a genre. ↩︎