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)
To a lot of fans, this is the film that killed the franchise. It says a lot that the next installment is yet another retcon. Halloween VI: The Curse of Michael Myers attempts to explain Michael’s unrelenting evil, which lead to mixed opinions from longtime fans. There are two cuts of the film, theatrical vs producer’s. For a lot of people, the latter is the only one worth mentioning. Aiming to be as accurate as possible, I will be talking about the producer’s cut. Let’s begin!
Plot
We start Halloween VI with a six-year time jump from part five. Jamie is now barefoot and recently pregnant, running away from Michael as he wants her baby. While she manages to hide the little one away, Michael finally gets his hunger satiated by killing her. The moment is one of the most brutal ways in the franchise up until that point. Rest in peace, Jamie, you held your ground for as long as you could, the sequels were just too relentless.
The movie then cuts to a whole different scene going on. We have a new family living in the Myers house and their youngest child is hearing voices telling him to kill his loved ones. Tommy Lloyd is watching the family, played by none other than Paul Rudd in his first-ever theatrical role. Tommy still carries trauma from the events all those years ago when Laurie Strode was babysitting him. So when he finds Jamie’s baby, his part in the story becomes even more essential.
Dr Loomis also stars in what was Donald Pleasance’s final role before his passing. He and Tommy try to stop Michael once and for all before the cycle can repeat itself. As it turns out, Michael is a victim of a druid cult which makes him want to kill his family members every Halloween. Thorn, the cult in question, thinks they can control Michael and make him do their bidding. This results in catastrophe and Michael goes berzerk and kills all the cult members. Once again, it’s one of the most gruesome montages for the franchise up until that point.
Tommy and Kara are left to face Michael on their own which they manage to do with some corrosive liquid and good luck. However, nothing stays dead in this franchise as it’s soon revealed Michael somehow escaped and this time Dr Loomis might not be so lucky…
Overall thoughts
I would say for me personally Halloween VI definitely ranks somewhere near the bottom. The whole point of Michael is that there is no rhyme or reason to his killings and this film tries to go against that. I am glad the mistake was rectified by the upcoming installment. There were still some good things about it, such as Paul Rudd’s acting that reveals some raw talent as far as I’m concerned, as well as some direction choices and musical score. However, I also think it absolutely deserves all the criticism that it gets.
(2.5 / 5)
We’ve reached the final episode of American Horror Stories, season three. After the ups and downs of the season, I didn’t know what to expect. I felt that we were due a big finish, Killer Queens. But I feared we were in for a big letdown.
As it turns out, The Thing Under The Bed was neither.
The story
We begin our story with a little girl named Mary, who is scared of something under her bed. She sneaks out of her room, only to be caught by her father and sent back to sleep. And of course, there is something horrible waiting for her under her bed.
This scene cuts away to a woman named Jillian. She has strange dreams, including one about Mary. But her husband, Mark, doesn’t want to hear about it. He’s only interested in a little lovemaking because he wants a baby. Jillian doesn’t, which makes total sense because she’s already married to one. But her irritation with her childish husband goes away when he goes away. And by goes away, I mean he’s sloppily devoured by something vicious under their bed.
What worked
In short, this episode just worked. The acting was professional and believable. The cinematography and lighting work were wonderful, adding spooky effects and startling moments without impairing visibility.
Best of all, the story was solid. There were no plotholes to be found. Our main character, Jillian, was relatable and sympathetic.
This was maybe my favorite part of the story. I thought Jillian was a remarkably sympathetic character. She was dealt a hand she never asked for, having her husband slaughtered in their bedroom. I don’t think she missed him, so much as she was afraid of the legal ramifications of being caught with literal blood on her hands.
Then, when it would have been safest for her to just lay low and save up for a good defense attorney, she instead goes into unlikely hero mode. She does her best to save people, putting herself in legal and physical danger. It’s hard not to root for her.
It’s also a little hard not to root for the antagonist, too. I don’t want to ruin the twist for you, so I’m going to tread lightly here. But it’s great when you have an antagonist who might be off their rocker, but also maybe has a point.
What didn’t work
I can only really think of one complaint with this episode. And that is how frequently one character says the word Chickadee. And if you’ve seen the episode, you know what I am talking about.
I get it, he has a pet name for his daughter. It’s adorable. It’s meant to convey that the two of them have a healthy loving relationship and I get it. We all get it. Blind monks get it. But the fact remains that no parent on Earth calls their kid by their pet name every single time they speak an individual sentence to them. It was just too damn much.
All in all, this was a good episode. It was a classic story, turned on its head, told by professionals from start to finish. And I hope that if there is another season, we see more stories like this one. But after the efforts put into this season at large, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the last we see of American Horror Stories.
(4 / 5)
If you’ve watched enough short-form horror anthology shows, you’ll notice that some stories are mainstays. Each show seems to put on the same sort of episodes, with the occasional surprising storyline that we’ve never (or at least rarely) seen before.
Leprechaun was an example of a repeated story—the story of a greedy thief whose punishment far outweighs the crime.
The story
We begin our story in 1841, with a drunk man leaving the bar one late night. He’s distracted by something glowing at the end of the well. When he reaches down for the glowing thing, he falls in. Moments later, he screams.
We then cut to the modern day. The well is still there, and now it’s surrounded by a dying town. In this town lives a young man named Colin. He’s married, his wife is pregnant, and he’s out of work. Like many of his friends.
Desperate for cash, Colin and his friends decide to rob a bank. They put together an Equate version of Ocean’s Eleven, and break in one night. But, of course, they find that the gold is nothing more than bait. And the creature waiting for them is something they never expected.
What worked
The first thing I want to point out is how real this episode felt. At least to anyone currently living in the same small town they grew up in. These characters felt like guys I went to school with. Guys I would see at the bar.
I appreciated the real anger and frustration these characters are feeling. Especially Colin. He’s bitter, and maybe he has a right to be. He did exactly what he was supposed to do to succeed. He went to school and invested in his career, and yet now he’s out of work and struggling to support his family. I probably don’t need to tell you how that feels. Because of this, we can all kind of understand why he was tempted to rob a bank.
I also want to talk about the fact that this was, as I said, an often-explored story. That can be a bad thing, but it can also be a good thing. This story is told over and over because it’s a good story. A relatable story. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
What didn’t work
That being said, this version didn’t try to do much to break out of the mold.
Because we have seen this story so many times, most of us could tell the story themselves. I would have expected something new, or some twist. But, in the end, the story didn’t bring anything new to the discussion.
Maybe because of this, the ending left a lot to be desired. Trapped in the basement of the bank, everyone just sort of stares at everyone else, until the thieves give up. And that’s it. The ending wasn’t scary, shocking, or funny. It was just sad, on multiple levels.
Overall, this was an okay story. It was entertaining, if not surprising. I would compare this episode to homemade macaroni and cheese. Everyone’s got their own version, they’re all pretty good, and none of them are exciting.
There’s just one episode left in this season of American Horror Stories. Let’s hope they’ve saved the best for last.
(3.5 / 5)
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