The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs: Zombie Night 2: Reunion Boogaloo
The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs wraps up season five with another double feature of delicious horror. Fans say goodbye for now to 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, has done her best to keep him under control this season, but he is one hard to wrangle cowboy. The Drive-In can be watched on AMC+ and Shudder. Stay tuned for future news about specials and seasons.
This week on The Last Drive-In, Joe Bob brings the season full circle by ending on another zombie night. You may remember the season premier features Lucio Fulci’s Zombie (1979) and The Beyond (1981). The finale brings the dead back with the Spanish-Italian film The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1974) and George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead (1985). The episode also treats viewers to an incredibly charming cast reunion of Day of the Dead.
You Are What You Wear
Thankfully, Shudder seems to have resolved the major server issues plaguing the site/app last week. Joe Bob opens the episode asking why children are told to keep their elbows off of the table while they eat. An interesting question given zombies are perhaps the least polite diners.
Joe Bob seems hopeful viewers have specifically requested Manchester and Darcy has to break it to him that it just isn’t true. He alone is responsible for the crusade to bring this movie to our screens. As he describes the plot, he says the zombies were “created by flat cappers.” Darcy makes the mistake of asking for clarification and Joe Bob is off describing European hat culture.
Manchester is written and directed by Jorge Grau and tells the story of George (Ray Lovelock) and Edna (Chrisina Galbo) as they plead with local law enforcement (Arthur Kennedy) to believe them about the zombie threat created by a new piece of farming equipment promising to eliminate crop pests.
The Drive-In Totals include but are not limited to: 13 Dead Bodies, 16 Undead Bodies, 5 Dead Undead Bodies, zombie toast, bloody psychotic infant, gratuitous streaker, and lantern fu. This movie earns four stars and high praise from Joe Bob. He says Grau figured out how to “outdo Romero with Romero-type zombies.”
I Hate Spanish Zombies
No movie presentation is complete without a history lesson. Joe Bob explains the economic and political climate of Spain under the rule of General Francisco Franco. Franco controlled most everything about life in Spain, including which films could be produced and released.
His hardline stance against horror was loosened with The Awful Dr. Orlof (1962). However, any Spanish horror films had to be filmed outside of Spain and feature foreign actors in unsavory roles.
These limitations result in Kennedy as the only American in the cast playing the over-the-top authoritarian police inspector. The inspector is actually never given a name, and Joe Bob says this is because Grau is using Kennedy’s character as a stand-in for Franco. Joe Bob disagrees with those who say Kennedy over-delivers his lines. “He’s just delivering exactly what this movie demanded.”
Manchester probably wins the award this season for the movie with the most alternate titles. Titles include but are not limited to: Weekend of the Dead, Don’t Disturb the Sleep of the Dead, Zombi 3 (no relation to the Fulci films), and Let Sleeping Corpses Lie.
New Rules
Joe Bob says Manchester is almost ““the true sequel to Night of the Living Dead (1968).” Giannetto De Rossi is responsible for the zombie design in the film. Both he and Grau studied Night intensely before making Manchester.
They receive high praise from Joe Bob when he says, “You could say that Jorge was the European George Romero and Giannetto was the European Tom Savini.”
When he goes into the more technical aspects of filming, Joe Bob apologizes for giving too much detail. These deep dives into various aspects of filmmaking keep us coming back for more so please don’t apologize, Joe Bob.
This movie does not really have a character you could describe as the hero. As with many zombie movies, Grau imbues this film with socio-political commentary. Joe Bob points out city folks will find “There’s no escape from the hypocrites and the liars,” out in the country. According to the ending of Manchester, there may never be an escape at all.
My rating for The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue:
(4 / 5)
Mail Call
There is only one mail reading in this episode and boy is it a doozy. Content warnings for SA, DV, SI for this portion of the episode.
I honestly do not feel comfortable recapping it or commenting on it. I’ll just leave Joe Bob’s words here, ““Some of these letters sound like they should be sent to a psychiatrist, you know, or a priest.”
Get Down to Business
Joe Bob gets right to it with and immediately starts talking about George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead. He begins with the start of the trilogy and says Night of the Living Dead is “the foundation film of modern horror and Dawn of the Dead is “the kind of spectacular pinnacle of that genre.”
Unfortunately by the time of Day of the Dead’s release in 1985, Joe Bob says Romero was already “made obsolete by movies he inspired.”
The movie we end up watching is a much different version from Romero’s original vision, with the working script being nearly one third of the length of the original script. Continuing, Joe Bob points out the criticisms levied against the film and Romero at release and says he still doesn’t understand the ending.
For those unaware, Day of the Dead tells the story of a group of scientists working in an underground facility guarded by soldiers attempting to solve the zombie pandemic ravaging the world. Power struggles cause chasms in the group and their plan to save the world falls apart.
Come on Down!
Before the guests start to come out as part of the cast reunion interview, Darcy appears in a beautifully shot homage to Lori Cardille’s opening scene as Sarah. Darcy awakens on set and tries to warn Joe Bob about a bad feeling she’s having. He brushes her off and tells her to “have a mushroom.”
Cardille enters the set and her presence is hard to describe. Her voice is low and soothing and she brings a measure of unexpected calm. Joe Bob starts by asking her about her father William “Chilly Billy” Cardille before moving to the film.
Her father stars as the reporter in Night of the Living Dead, though this connection is not entirely responsible for her role as Sarah. She reveals she had been approached by Romero with the original script for Day of the Dead after seeing her in a stage production of Reckless.
When Joe Bob asks about the “backyard” set up in the mines by John (Terry Alexander) and Bill (Jarlath Conroy), Cardille draws a comparison to the trailer set of The Drive-In. This obviously makes Darcy happy as she lets loose an adorable “Yay!”
Down and Out
One of the most pressing questions throughout the interview is about the gay subtext between the characters of John and Bill. When Cardille is asked, she says she doesn’t think the two of them are covert lovers.
Alexander is the next of the cast to enter the set for the interview. Joe Bob praises his delivery of the speech about the meaning of life in the face of a zombie apocalypse. He then asks Alexander if he thinks there is gay subtext between John and Bill.
When answering, Alexander is animated and lively. He puts his whole body into his answers and he smiles as he recounts a story in response to the question. According to him, Romero once joked he was going to make a movie called Gay of the Dead.
Cardille keeps reassuring everyone “that would be ok” if the two characters actually were gay and her earnestness is so endearing.
The final guest is Conroy and he certainly knows how to make an entrance. He confidently strolls across the set, grabs Alexander’s face in his hands, and plants a kiss right on his lips. The set erupts into cheers and laughter as Alexander sits with a slightly shocked look on his face.
Despite this, Conroy says he never thought about there being gay subtext in John and Bill’s relationship. Joe Bob says audiences have almost been trained in the last 30 years to look for gay subtext and this is a frustrating trend.
It is so very important to have loving and intimate examples of straight male friendship. It is something that is sorely lacking in current media and reality.
Down Bad?
The interview is not entirely focused on the big gay question. It also touches on the various working conditions of filming. There is also an entire Holiday Inn portion which brings me back to Cassandra Peterson revealing she was a go-go dancer at a Holiday Inn once upon a time.
The camaraderie is obvious as the cast sits together and the interview is the most entertaining of the season.
My rating for Day of the Dead:
(4.5 / 5)
Spill Your Guts
Lest you forget, this is the season five finale. Joe Bob has said multiple times that we never know how much time The Drive-In has left. While season six has been confirmed by the hosts, there has yet to be an official announcement from Shudder or AMC. The current state of streaming is a disaster and it remains to be seen how this will affect things in the future.
In that vein, the final segment of the episode features Joe Bob alone on set. Calling out for Darcy, he receives no response. Left alone, he begins to wax poetic about the ending of Day of the Dead. He sums it up as, “The struggle, that’s what we do.”
As he continues, zombies shamble out and surround him. He falls to the ground and begins singing a John Brennen original “See You on the Other Side.” The song sounds melancholy but as Joe Bob reminds us, “This is not the end. Oh, not goodbye.”
Much like the zombies in the films featured in the episode – the drive-in will never die. Joe Bob has a smile on his face as the zombie feast on his guts, after all.
My rating for the season five finale:
(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.
