The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs – Dangerous Waters
After a month-long mid-season hiatus, The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs splashed back onto television sets and computer screens across the USA (sorry Canada, next time!) last Friday with a double-feature of aquatic horror on AMC+ and Shudder. The Last Drive-In is known for its eclectic movie selections as well as the informative, and sometimes on-topic, rants Joe Bob is prone to deliver during breaks in the films. His co-host, the intelligent and beautiful Darcy the Mailgirl, does her best to keep him under control but he is one hard to wrangle cowboy.
Aquatic Horror Night
It always starts with a tweet. This time: “a double feature of impossible scenarios from 2 continents.” Without knowing what to expect, viewers tuned in to see what Aquatic Horror Night on The Last Drive In would deliver. Sharknado (2013) and Amsterdamned (1988) were the winners that swam into our lives Friday night.
Look out! A Sharknado!
While Sharknado might not be everyone’s cup of tea, Joe Bob’s excitement to be presenting writer Thunder Levin and director Anthony C. Ferrante’s work on The Last Drive-In for its 10-year anniversary will win more than a few people over to his side by the time they finish watching.
The Drive-In Totals include but are not limited to: one bikini-bar riot, a burning nursing-home swimming pool, an exploding shark, a school-bus rope rescue, and propane tank fu. “Joe Bob gives it four stars, check it out! I’d give it five stars if I could.” Which is some of the highest praise I’ve seen Joe Bob give a movie on The Last Drive-In.
In between scenes of shark related carnage, Joe Bob interviews Ferrante. “We need to know where it ranked, that hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. We need to know that precise number.” Ferrante says category 5 based on the presence of flying sharks. I agree when Joe Bob thinks it should be higher.
Other questions include which letter of the Hollywood sign crushes the sort-of heroic school bus driver. Joe Bob also demands to know who wrote the line “Looks like it’s that time of the month.” His willingness and ability to adapt his interview style depending on The Last Drive-In’s guest is truly admirable.
All Hail The Drive-In’s Mailgirl
Darcy fully embraces the unserious nature of Sharknado, and hides what I am certain are bloodshot eyes behind the sunglasses included in her customary character cosplay. At one point, Joe Bob asks her what she would do if a real life sharknado happened. I choke on my drink laughing when she giggles and replies, “Online, so I could share, like, videos and shit.” Wouldn’t we all?
She also chimes in to explain the logic of the movie with a simple, “It’s Sharknado.” While her word count per episode is significantly lower than Joe Bob’s, Darcy’s contributions on The Last Drive-In are always valuable.
The fan mail reading reveals another of Joe Bob’s strengths: his ability to tell people they are wrong in a way which never makes them feel stupid. Darcy’s ability to pick out letters which elicit amusing responses from Joe Bob is unmatched, especially when Joe Bob disagrees with the author.
Made-for-TV Love
It’s easy to see the love Joe Bob has for Sharknado as he goes into the different aspects of the production history. He gives Ferrante’s biography, and he wraps it into a motivational speech about the power of putting yourself out there. He dives deep into Syfy’s sometimes complicated partnership with production company Asylum. As he lists movie titles, I realize there are too many shark movies lurking out there.
Nothing highlights his love of the movie like his beautiful rendition of the theme song “Sharknado” at the movie’s end. Joined by John Brennan, The Last Drive-In’s music producer, on his guitar, he breaks into song. The segment feels like a campfire sing-a-long. These moments are an example of what makes The Last Drive-In so special. No matter where you are watching, you cannot help but feel like you are right there on set.
Joe Bob lets loose a signature bad joke to end the presentation of Sharknado. Darcy says she’s too “Sharknado’d out” to get it. I’m right there with her.
My rating for Sharknado:
(3.5 / 5)
We’re all Amsterdamned
Before flying into Amsterdamned on The Last Drive-In, viewers must listen to the pre-flight boarding rant. Joe Bob declares, “The Goddamned foreigners are trampling the tulips in Bollenstreek.” Thankfully, Darcy interjects with a loud “Wow,” to show her displeasure with his choice of words. Her pushback is appreciated, and Joe Bob corrects “foreigners” with “tourists.”
He proceeds with everything from airline price fixing to pirates. His dedication to broadening the cultural worldview of his audience is admirable, even if his less than politically-correct language frequently makes Darcy shake her head. The contrast between Joe Bob’s old-school style and Darcy’s more modern sensibilities helps The Last Drive-In strike the necessary balance between offensive and progressive.
Amsterdamned is written and directed by the Dutch film director Dick Maas, and is about a scuba-wearing serial killer who sneaks through the city’s canals to murder random unsuspecting victims. Joe Bob describes the movie succinctly as Dirty Harry (1971) meets Jaws (1975).
The Drive-In Totals include but are not limited to: a gunshot through the shattered diving goggles, throat slitting, a boat paddle to the cranium, juvenile psychic-sleuthing, and spear gun fu. Although he believes Amsterdamned “sounds like a title they thought up with when they were drunk,” he still gives it three stars.
Drive-In-Flight Announcements
Joe Bob starts by calling Darcy out. “So, you’re the weed expert.” Despite Amsterdam’s reputation for weed tourism, Darcy is much more chipper and bright eyed for the start of this movie. As the serial killer evades and torments the detective hunting him, Joe Bob breaks in with critical information. This includes how to tie a one-handed bowline knot, the virtues of the Golden Earring hit song “Radar Love”, and the perpetual misrepresentation of musketeers.
His segments also offer a plethora of information about Maas and Amsterdamned. The smash Dutch hit features well known actors in the region with a quarter of the Dutch population seeing it upon release. Darcy unfortunately runs to the store for more snacks during the movie. Without her breaking in to keep him on track, these segments of The Last Drive-In can feel more like info dumps than usual.
One of the more fascinating tangents Joe Bob shoots into includes the drug lord Klaas Bruinsma and his use of the city’s canals to stage a prison escape. When Joe Bob continually references a “frog man,” my literal-thinking brain conjures up something much different than a man wearing scuba gear.
All of the stunt men in Amsterdamned (including stunt horses) were imports from England. Joe Bob Briggs praises the 8-minute boat chase scene near the end of the film, saying it alone is almost reason enough to watch. He specifically calls out Nick Gillard as the stuntman responsible for the scene. It is nice to hear as Joe Bob gives recognition to the often-forgotten stunt crew.
The Red-Eye
Darcy returns, wearing sunglasses again, at the end of Amsterdamned. She quickly falls back into familiar banter as the two debate whether the end of the movie made any sense. Joe Bob vehemently believes the ending is terrible because the killer is never previously mentioned or seen. She believes the ending is great because of the song that plays over the credits.
Before he refutes her, Brennan returns to the set for an incredible rendition of the song, aptly called “Amsterdamned”. Neon lights shine and someone turns on a bubble machine. It’s hard to not want to join the costumed production crew as they dance. As the song ends, Joe Bob sits unmoved and perplexed in his longhorn-adorned chair. He continues the argument, and Darcy stands firm in her beliefs.
My rating for Amsterdamned:
(3 / 5)
Landing at The Drive-In
The episode ends with the final fan mail. Before he reads the letter, Joe Bob Briggs is off on another tangent about the use of live animals as college mascots and the intricacies of crossbreeding bovines. As the author of the letter, Zach Crockett writes, “Your commentary and monologues make the show great fun.”
Without knowing what will be shown, viewers continue to tune in to The Last Drive-In. They have faith in Joe Bob Briggs and his seemingly endless pool of film knowledge, and you should too. My rating for the episode:
(4 / 5)
Kait says check it out.
We’ve now reached the end of Fallout, season one. As I mentioned during the last review, I was heartily concerned that this show, like so many others, was going to drop the ball at the finale and ruin an entire season.
Thankfully, that wasn’t the case. This episode was everything it needed to be and more.
Let’s discuss.
The story
We begin our story with Maximus returning to the Brotherhood of Steel compound. He has a head, which he is claiming is the real head of Wilzig.
I don’t know why he thought that was going to work.
Of course, it doesn’t. The elder cleric is about to kill Maximus until Dane says that they hurt their foot.
Because of this, the Brotherhood is sent out to get the head. Or rather, what’s inside of it. They head to the city run by Moldaver. This happens to be the same place Lucy and The Ghoul are headed.
There, Lucy does manage to find her father. What she ends up finding is so much more than she wanted to find.
What worked
The first thing I have to discuss is how seamlessly the storylines of the series combined.
Each of our four main characters has been on their own journey. Lucy is trying to save her father. Maximus wants to become a knight. The Ghoul wants to find his family. Norm wants to know what’s going on in Vault 31.
I sure wasn’t expecting all of these stories to come together in the way that they did. And to preserve the ending, I don’t dare say more. I will only say that yes, all four stories tie in perfectly with one another. By the end, two characters end up having the very same goal.
As I hinted before, I did not see the twist ending coming.
Yes, we might have guessed some things from the last episode. We of course guessed that Lucy’s dad was involved in some nefarious and probably sci-fi way. But the way this story twists at the end is nothing short of serpent-like. Which is why I cannot go into too much detail here. If you haven’t seen it yet, you need to experience it blind.
Finally, I can give the Fallout season finale the most important praise I can ever give a finale. It did its number one job, getting us excited for season two. We have answers, but now we have new and more exciting questions. And even better, we have a desire to see vengeance done.
What didn’t work
Now that the season is done, though, I can bring up something that bothered me through all eight episodes.
I don’t buy Lucy and Maximus’s relationship.
Maybe because it’s rushed. Maybe because the two actors don’t have a lot of chemistry. Maybe it’s because I’m not sure even now either character could tell you a single thing about the other. There is just no spark between the two. So their love story feels tacked on. I honestly feel like their love story could have been removed from the show entirely and it would have no negative impact.
I also didn’t buy Dane’s confession. This is a minor spoiler, but it comes up early in the episode. Dane confesses that they hurt their foot so that they wouldn’t have to go into the wastelands.
And at first, I kept expecting Maximus to thank them later. I honestly thought that they were just lying to save Maximus’s life. But no, as it turns out, they were not.
But it just doesn’t make sense. The motivations don’t jive. I honestly think it would have been better for the story if they had lied to save Maximus’s life.
At least then there’d be one other Brother of Steel who had some nobility.
In the end, this first season of Fallout was everything I could ask for. So far as I can tell, it was everything fans of the Fallout franchise could ask for. There wasn’t a bad episode in the bunch. Honestly, the only real complaint I had was that the season was so short.
I’ll be counting down the days to season two, and I hope you’ll be joining me then. Because war, war never changes.
(5 / 5)
If you like my work, you can check out my latest science fiction/horror novel, Nova, launching on May 17th. Pre-orders are available now on Amazon.
Episode seven of Amazon’s Fallout is the penultimate episode. This is often when a series goes off the rails and starts to mess things up. After being burned so often recently, I was apprehensive when this episode began.
Thankfully, this was a fear that did not come to pass. And so far, Fallout’s finale is doing just fine.
The story
A lot happened in this episode, so we’re just going to skim over some of the more important storylines. We’ll start with Lucy and Maximus, in Vault 4. Lucy has discovered what she believes is a secret collection of monsters. But of course, it turns out that it’s simply people that the vault dwellers discovered and are trying to help heal. But her meddling around was enough for them to kick her out of the vault. With two weeks’ worth of food and water, of course.
But Maximus assumes they’re going to do something much worse. And so he steals their power coil to fight through the perfectly innocent people and save Lucy.
Meanwhile, we dive further into The Ghoul’s past, when he was still Western star Cooper.
After attending a Communist meeting, he’s approached by Lee Moldaver. She suggests that Vault Tech is hiding something, something terrible. And she tells Cooper that his wife Barbara knows more about this than she’s letting on. Moldaver gets Cooper to bug Barbara’s Pip Boy, and listen in on an important meeting.
Poor Cooper hears far more than he wants to.
War, war never changes.
What worked
I would like to first point out that this was one of the funniest episodes so far. I mean, it got incredibly tragic and sad by the end. But it also had some great laugh-out-loud moments. This should be a surprise to no one, with such an array of comedians guest starring. Chris Parnell was in the last episode as well but is now joined by the incredibly funny Fred Armisen as DJ Carl. This is of course not his first foray into the funny and spooky world, as he also played Uncle Fester in Wednesday.
Most of what makes this episode funny is the character’s understated and deadpan responses to wild situations. When Maximus returns the energy coil and is greeted by a simple thank you. When Thaddeus gets an arrow through his neck, and slowly realizes that hey, he might be a ghoul. These were hilarious because they could have been truly dark moments. But because this world is so dark, and the characters have already been through so much, they’re simply done. They take all of this in stride because of course that’s what’s happening. It’s par for the course for them.
On the other hand, we’ve finally seen the full extent of The Ghoul/Cooper’s past. And it’s so much worse than we could have imagined. I assumed that he’d lost his beloved wife and daughter in the atomic blasts two hundred years ago, somehow not dying with them and instead turning into a literal and figurative monster. The truth is so much worse. I’ll do my best not to spoil the ending. But I will say this. There is nothing more painful than mourning someone and hating them at the same time. And it’s easy to see how Cooper turned into The Ghoul. That sort of pain could drive anyone mad.
This balance between comedy and tragedy is one of the reasons why this episode worked so well. It’s one of the reasons why the series is working so well. It manages to combine the core tenets of theater in a way that never compromises the strengths of either. The eventual downfall of Thaddeus is a great example of this because it’s both tragic and funny. We’ve seen what happens to ghouls, and it’s a horrible end. But as he’s hardly been a sympathetic character, we can all get a good laugh at his predicament as well.
The sheer amount of good old-fashioned gore doesn’t hurt either, of course.
What didn’t work
All that being said, there was one thing that bothered me about this episode. And it was the reveal of Vault 4’s big secret.
Honestly, I was expecting the Vault 4 storyline to go way darker. I wanted it to go way darker. While I’ve never played these games myself, I know enough about the story to say that these vaults are not the bastions of safety and morality that they have so far been portrayed as. And while that has certainly been alluded to, we haven’t seen it.
We haven’t seen the depravity in these vaults. And it’s there. But maybe we just haven’t gotten to it yet.
In the end, The Radio did exactly what it needed to do. It set us up to have most of our questions answered in the season finale. And I can’t wait to see how it all ends.
(4 / 5)
If you like my work, you can check out my latest science fiction/horror novel, Nova, launching on May 17th. Pre-orders are available now on Amazon.
Amazon Prime’s Fallout has continued to be a suspenseful delight. And with the last episode’s dramatic cliffhanger, I was certainly looking forward to this one.
Thankfully, it did not disappoint.
The story
We start our story with Lucy and Maximus waking up in a decontamination room in Vault 4. They’re welcomed guests, once they’re done with decontamination.
Vault 4 at first seems very much like Vault 33 to Lucy. She’s surprised, however, to find that a lot of people who live there are actually from the surface. And the people who live in this vault are, well, a bit mutated. Their overseer, named Benjamin and played by the hilarious Chris Parnell, has just one eye in the middle of his face. Some people have extra limbs or missing ones. And yet it’s clear that everyone’s living together in peace and companionship.
At least, that’s what it’s supposed to look like. There is, after all, the matter of the weird cult the surface dwellers seem to have formed. And, the small matter of the vault level no one is supposed to go to. It should come as no surprise that, of course, that’s exactly where Lucy finds herself before the episode is over.
Of course, this episode wouldn’t be complete without checking in with the Ghoul. And his part of the story is, honestly, more compelling.
We see him apprehended by people referring to themselves as The Government. And while he appears to be a prisoner, it’s clear soon enough that he’s the one in charge.
Far more compelling are his flashbacks to his past. While his wife, Barb, is starting to be more secretive, he learns more than he wants to about Vault Tec. He also learns that the Communist party in Hollywood might know more about what Barb does for a living than he does. And it’s clear soon that she never wanted him to know.
For good reason.
What worked
I first want to draw attention to the excellent way we are learning about the Ghoul. As we learn more and more about his past, we can see how he’s become the monster he is today. It’s clear that once upon a time he had everything he could want. A lovely home, a family he lived for, and a successful career. And he lost all of that, even his dog. And with those losses, he lost his humanity in more ways than one.
But I also think we’re seeing signs that his humanity at least isn’t as lost as he thought it was.
On a lighter note, I loved Maximus’s response to the vault. While he’s apprehensive at first, he is swept away by the welcome basket. He’s lived his whole life hungry, barely surviving, and suddenly he has food. Good food. Caviar and oysters. He has a warm robe and TV and a safe place to exist. It must have been like stepping into a fairy tale for him. And while it wasn’t exactly helpful for Lucy, it’s completely relatable that he decided to sink into a chair and have a snack in front of the TV for a while.
What didn’t work
While this episode was mostly good, I do have one complaint. When Lucy is first meeting with Overseer Benjamin, we see him accidentally drinking a cup of coffee that has gotten moldy.
Now, this makes perfect sense in our world to convey someone too busy and forgetful to clean up old mugs. But it’s hard to fathom someone living in a Vault in which every resource is carefully monitored, letting something like coffee go bad. It’s a small detail, and it was funny. Also more relatable than I’d like to admit. But in this instance, in this world, it was jarring.
So far this season has been intense. There’s a lot of intrigue and mystery. There’s a lot of high emotions. And there’s a lot on the line for everyone. Maybe, for one character, more than we’ve ever realized before.
Good thing we still have two episodes to discover what’s happening.
(4 / 5)
If you like my work, you can check out my latest science fiction/horror novel, Nova, launching on May 17th. Pre-orders are available now on Amazon.
Billy
June 29, 2023 at 5:46 pm
Plethora…..