The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs: Perfectly Mad Animation Night
The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs marches toward the season finale with its indiscriminate movie selections alongside the informative, and sometimes on-topic, rants Joe Bob delivers 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. It can be watched on AMC+ and Shudder.
CW // Perfect Blue includes graphic animated depictions of SV and SA
Animation Night
Mad God (2021) and Perfect Blue (1997) have three things in common: 1) they are animated 2) they are horror 3) you’re going to need a shower after watching them. Well four things, if you count being shown together on The Last Drive-In during the first-ever Animation Night.
It’s a Mad, Mad World
Instead of opening the episode with a questionably on topic rant, Joe Bob breaks with convention and gets right to business. He introduces the Phil Tippett created stop motion, mostly speechless film Mad God almost immediately and warns the audience it is nearly indescribable.
To prove its elusive nature, Joe Bob reads out multitudes of reviews full of nouns and not verbs. When one review mentions dieselpunk, he appears confused by the concept of ___-punk. Despite Darcy’s best efforts at explanation, he sums it up as “Fuck you dieselpunk.” I personally enjoy several dieselpunk movies, most notably Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984).
Concessions Break
When asked what sort of “popcorn” would be best to enjoy with Mad God, Darcy recommends psilocybin. Joe Bob has his own whiskey recommendation. He even recommends a specific high CBD, low THC strain of marijuana to enhance the experience. We really need these pieces of advice in advance, Joe Bob.
The most unhinged Drive-In Totals I have ever seen for Mad God include but certainly are not limited to: 1 giant cervix, legless mummy-head crawling creature, skinny hypnotized undead machine-people, monster-baby totalitarianism, plump nekkid stag-reel porn, and Nosferatu fu.
When Joe Bob finishes rattling off the totals, Darcy asks everyone on set to clap for the feat. The movie earns Joe Bob’s highest rating of four stars and Darcy’s stamp of “Weirdest Drive-In totals ever.”
Tippett or Not Tippett.
As the movie slogs its way through hell, Joe Bob interviews the Oscar-winning creator of Mad God. Tippett is best known for his work on blockbuster films like Jurassic Park (1992). As well as the cult classic Starship Troopers (1997). Joe Bob makes it clear the main point of the interview is to get Tippett to accurately describe the plot of Mad God, but I don’t think he can count it a success by that metric.
In terms of being a sort-of basement masterclass in life philosophy and film, the interview is a wild success. Tippett does not hesitate to push on any and all assumptions Joe Bob has about the creative process of creating Mad God or his interpreted meanings. Joe Bob is met with “No,” as an answer to more questions than I can count.
God is a Woman?
In one instance, Joe Bob repeatedly assigns the male gender to both God and The Assassin in his descriptions. Tippett quickly points out the assumed maleness is just that – assumed. “It’s a force, it’s a thing.” They are never given a gender. I find this level of discourse on The Drive-In to be absolutely delicious, and I watch in real-time as Joe Bob corrects his language away from he/him pronouns.
When talking about making the film, Tippett emphasizes repeatedly he did not know what story was being told until years after he started making it. When Joe Bob describes the movie as grim, Tippett endearingly responds, “I thought it was funny.” Having a dark sense of humor is, in my opinion, needed to get through the shit-shoveling world of today.
Estimated Time to Process: 30 years
Tippett says the film is about process as much as it is anything and resists most interpretations Joe Bob foists his way. “If I do know, I’m not saying,” remains the most cryptic answer given, hinting at an inner interpretation Tippett is unwilling to give.
One thing Tippett is clear about is the value of hard work and dedication. When Joe Bob asks him what advice he’d give a newcomer to the effects / animation field, his response is simple – practice. Sometimes the only prescription is more work.
Tippett mentions his failures as much as his successes and his struggles with mental illness & substance use. He talks about himself as if he does not know he is one of the greatest living visual effects artists. He is probably the definition of the word humble.
Even Joe Bob acknowledges this by revealing the college students who worked weekends on the film were the best students from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Tippett mentions them in the interview as if they were just random students who decided to help.
You may all go to Hell, and I will go to Texas
The interview again highlights Joe Bob’s best strength: his adaptability. With Darcy absent during the interview, Joe Bob was placed in her usual position of attempting to keep the conversation on track. Thankfully, he mostly lets Tippett wander with his thoughts. I certainly do not understand Mad God any better, but I definitely have a shifted perspective on life.
The fan mail segment delivers an emotional e-mail from Josh Hitchens. Hitchens describes how Monstervision gave him something to look forward to, and thereby a reason to live, as a young queer person in a hostile environment. We’re all glad you’re still here circling the sun with us Josh.
Joe Bob seems reluctant to accept this position as a source of comfort. Darcy succinctly describes the feeling as: “It’s like we felt like outsiders and we became insiders when we watched your show.” I re-discovered Joe Bob during the early chaos of the pandemic, and The Drive-In became my happy place. Now that I’m a part of the #MutantFam, I’m never leaving.
My rating for Mad God:
(4.5 / 5)
Lost in the Sauce
Joe Bob describes Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue as a “Japanese giallo.” The film tells the story of ex-idol Mima as she attempts an acting career and loses her grip on reality as her life becomes indistinguishable from her work & the lies of an online stalker. While more easily described than Mad God, Perfect Blue is itself a puzzle box with many layers of possible interpretation.
The Drive-In Totals include but are not limited to: 19 breasts, 1 downtown Tokyo apparition traffic-jam chase, gratuitous superhero movie, and aquarium fu. This movie also lands a four-star rating from Joe Bob.
I suddenly feel an urge to go back and see how every movie shown on The Drive-In is rated to see if my suspicion that Joe Bob is showing more movies he loves this season than in previous seasons is correct.
Sounds Like Mima
Darcy certainly loves Perfect Blue, and reveals her overall love for the anime genre. She gives a shout-out to Fullmetal Alchemist for being one of her favorites, and somehow manages to make the story sound almost delightful. If you’ve ever seen Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, you know how horrific the story gets.
While Mima learns if she can trust herself to differentiate fantasy from reality, Joe Bob tells the audience Satoshi himself cannot be trusted. He describes Satoshi as a “sometimes misleading teacher.” This immediately reminds me of Tippett’s earlier interview and his seeming nonanswers to some questions.
What’s in a Name?
Perfect Blue is loosely based on the novel Perfect Blue: Kanzen Hentai. The name of the novel has a double translation of either Complete Metamorphosis or Total Pervert. Satoshi famously said there is no meaning behind Perfect Blue as a title, although Joe Bob does not believe that to be the truth. He calls Satoshi an unreliable narrator, which is not something you hear often in regards to a creator discussing their own work.
(Listen, there’s no better way to say this. I just need to say it and get it out of my system: I don’t think Joe Bob knows about hentai. He seems to not know a lot about anime in general, but the way he says Perfect Blue: Kanzen Hentai without even a glimmer of a smirk reveals his utter ignorance of anime’s kinky cousin. Some would say ignorance is bliss. I say we all deserve an education.)
While Satoshi cannot be trusted as a narrator, he can be trusted as a filmmaker. Joe Bob highlights in particular the use of match cutting and intercutting as a way to obfuscate the truth of what is happening to Mima. Though in true giallo fashion, he lays out enough clues that a viewer might be able to figure it out before the end.
Huge in Japan
Joe Bob brings out The Drive-In’s art director and the Tokyo Cowboy, Yuki Nakamura to act as the resident Japan expert during the film. We learn: Japanese people love idols. There are not too many idols. Some idols make good money. Joe Bob is pronouncing none of the Japanese names correctly.
My rating for Perfect Blue:
(4 / 5)
Idol Worship
As the movie ends, we return for the final fan mail segment and Darcy finally reveals her perfect Mima cosplay. The fan mail comes in the form of a letter and an incredible maquette of the (mostly implied) monster from Hogzilla (2014) from Tim Martin. Martin’s letter follows a similar theme to Hitchen’s e-mail and describes The Drive-In as “virtually hanging out together on the front porch… welcome and invited.”
Fuck Cancer
Satoshi and Tippett seem to share the commonality of allowing the audience to keep whatever meaning they find in Perfect Blue and Mad God. Tippet thinks hell is the clock in the doctor’s office while you’re waiting for the cancer diagnosis. Satoshi wrote a beautiful letter to his friends asking them to guide his wife onwards after his own terminal diagnosis.
We do not seek. We find. I’m so glad, like countless others, that I found the #MutantFam.
My rating for the episode:
(4.5 / 5)
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.
