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Friday, July 11, 2025

You Can Feel Them in Your Blood

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

Horror and a bit of comedy, all hosted by Joe Bob Briggs.

CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT (1991)

After more than a decade of covering horror films, the folks behind Fangoria magazine got into the business of making their own horror films in the early 1990s, forming the Fangoria Films production and distribution company... and it didn’t go very well for them. They achieved their goal of financing one feature film a year, but the endeavor only lasted for three films and three years before it all fell apart. Shockingly, given the fact that I became a horror fan in the late ‘80s and was already reading issues of Fangoria here and there by the time of the ‘90s began, I had never seen any of the Fangoria Films output until recently – and still haven’t seen the one that stars Bruce Campbell and Angus Scrimm! The one I watched was the 1991 vampire flick Children of the Night, which drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs presented to viewers of his The Movie Channel show Joe Bob’s Drive-in Theater on November 12, 1994.

Directed by Tony Randel of Hellbound: Hellraiser II and Ticks fame from a script he wrote with Nicolas Falacci, William Hopkins, and Christopher Webster, Children of the Night is a movie that – as Joe Bob put it - doesn’t make a lick of sense. It has multiple plots going on at once and is “damn confusing,” but it also happens to be a goo fest, which was enough for it to earn 2 1/2 out of a possible 4 stars.

The story begins when teenage Allburg resident Lucy Barrett (Ami Dolenz) and her grandma (Shirley Spiegler Jacobs) get a visit from Lucy’s longtime pal Cindy Thompson (Maya McLaughlin), who moved away to the town of River Junction, fifty miles away from Allburg, with her mom Karen (Karen Black) a while back. Now Lucy is preparing to leave Allburg herself, getting ready to go to college... and any there’s a rite of passage that any youth planning to leave Allburg has to endure. The crypt beneath the local abandoned church is flooded, and every kid who leaves Allburg has to swim in the crypt before they go, the idea being that they’re “washing the dirt of this town off of them.” If they don’t, they’ll just end up back in Allburg someday. Swimming in the crypt is just as disgusting as it sounds, as the place is filthy and the water contains the rotten corpses of the people who were entombed down there. Also in the water is the vampire Czakyr (David Sawyer) – and this guy isn’t your typical vampire, as is apparent as soon as we see him sleeping underwater with his lungs outside of his body (but still connected through his mouth and down his throat; he simply barfed them up when he went to sleep). The presence of the young girls in the crypt manages to awaken Czakyr, who sucks his lungs back into his chest and attacks Cindy.

Time jump. River Junction teacher Mark Gardner (Peter DeLuise) is sent to Allburg by his old pal Father Frank Aldin (Evan Mackenzie), a priest who confesses that he had been sleeping with his brother’s widow. Now he keeps that widow, Karen, locked in a room alongside her daughter Cindy, because they are both oddball vampires. Cindy sleeps in a bathtub with her lungs hanging out and Karen sleeps inside a cocoon, but they both arise every sunset. Arriving in Allburg, Mark discovers that the place has become overrun with vampires, while Lucy has barricaded herself inside her grandma’s house because the bloodsuckers are very interested in drinking her virginal blood. While Father Aldin deals with the restless vampires in his house (Karen is horny, Cindy is sick of eating the leeches he feeds to them), Mark and Lucy have to either find a way to escape from Allburg or destroy the vampire threat that has taken over the place. While making their way around the town, they cross paths with an obnoxious cop (Josette DiCarlo), a creepy little peeping tom familiar (Lloyd J. Kalicki) who suffers an amusing fate, and town drunk Matty (Garrett Morris), who’s having fun with the situation and also has some information on the back story.

Children of the Night is a strange movie, mixing moments that reminiscent of the atmosphere Randel brought to his Hellraiser sequel with displays of a goofy sense of humor that didn’t work very well for me. I can’t say I got a lot of enjoyment out of watching the movie, it even started to lose me toward the end, but I was impressed by the slimy special effects. I was also a big fan of Ami Dolenz growing up, thanks to her roles in early ‘90s movies like Miracle Beach, White Wolves: A Cry in the Wild II, Ticks, Witchboard 2, and Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings, so it was fun to see another Dolenz movie from that time.


CONTAMINATION (1980) - Hosted by Joe Bob Briggs on The Last Drive-in

Seventeen years after his TNT show MonsterVision was cancelled, the Shudder streaming service brought drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs back onto the airwaves to host a dusk-to-dawn-to-dusk marathon, which was so popular that they had him come back for more: a Thanksgiving special, a Christmas special, and then a weekly show with a first season that consisted of nine double features. For week seven of the season’s nine-week run, he hosted a double feature of the Italian sci-fi horror film Contamination and “the first Iranian vampire Western," A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.

The episode begins with Joe Bob sitting outside at a drive-in theatre, saying that he has hope for America because the game shows Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy are produced at the same studio by the same company – meaning that the stupidest people (Wheel of Fortune contestants) and smartest people (Jeopardy contestants) in the country regularly pass each other in the halls of that studio. Following the opening title sequence, we catch up with Joe Bob at his trailer home set, and he asks viewer that they not take him to the former slum downtown that has now been revitalized as a Riverplace Courtyard on the Square Plaza the next time he comes to their town for some reason, because he has already been to several of these revitalized slum areas. He proceeds to dig into what he has experienced in such places; his usual opening comedic rant bit.

Then, it’s time for the first movie – and I have to admit, I had never seen Contamination before watching it on The Last Drive-in with Joe Bob Briggs. I don’t generally get much enjoyment out of these type of Italian rip-off movies, so I haven’t gone out of my way to watch a lot of them.

As Joe Bob describes it, Contamination is an Alien rip-off that pretends to be an American movie without a single American in the cast. Here’s how he describes the movie: “The sensitive story of an obnoxious Brooklyn cop who watches four people get their intestines exploded by green, pulsating eggs left on a ship in New York Harbor only to find himself partnered up with a no-nonsense female agent from the Pentagon and an alcoholic ex-astronaut who went crazy after returning from Mars, and the three of them have to investigate secret coffee plantations in South America where a one-eyed mush monster eats people alive while music by Goblin plays.” Which sums it up quite nicely.

The story begins when a ship called the Caribbean Lady comes chugging into the New York Harbor, carrying cargo from a Colombian coffee plantation, and won’t answer their radio. At first, it appears that the crew has abandoned ship – but then they start finding bloody, messy corpses and green slime all over the place. Down in the cargo hold, there are a bunch of green, pulsating eggs... and when an egg erupts, anyone who’s touched by the acidic slime that comes out of it immediately explodes. It’s a pretty cool visual. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of exploding people action in the rest of the movie, because it gets bogged down in the story of a New York cop (Marino Mase), a government agent (Louise Marleau), and a disgraced astronaut (Ian McCulloch) – who was deemed crazy for saying he saw pulsating green eggs in an ice cave during a Mars expedition – trying to get to the bottom of what’s going on. For most of the movie, we’re more likely to witness shootouts than any alien horror, although it does circle back to being a creature feature at the end. (After all, the opening credits promise us we’ll be seeing an “Alien Cyclops” at some point.) Along the way, there are plenty of sexist moments involving the three investigators, including a scene where the astronaut apparently regains his manhood by slapping the government agent (and she likes it), and, once the characters reach Colombia, some of the “wandering around in the jungle” that seems to be required for this sort of flick. 

During his hosting segments, Joe Bob lets us know that the Italians are the masters of taking a popular movie and producing a cheap rip-off of it, and Contamination director Luigi Cozzi was the king of this practice. It’s no secret; Italian filmmakers of the grindhouse / drive-in era have been very open about the fact that they would rip off other movies and try to make audiences think their cheap knock-off was a sequel. The Italian film industry was in a slump back in the day, and rip-offs were how they tried to get out of it. Contamination was mostly filmed at De Paolis Studio in Rome, but Cozzi spent a day and half in New York City, shooting exterior footage that he got a lot of use out of. Joe Bob discusses Cozzi’s career and those of some of the cast members, and reveals that Cozzi wanted to cast his Starcrash star Caroline Munro, or someone of similar looks and age, in the lead female role, but the producers made him cast Louise Marleau, making Cozzi say he was forced to cast someone “older and ugly.” (Never mind that she was only four years older than Munro.) Cozzi wrote the initial script with the title Alien Arrives on the Earth, briging the alien threat to Earth because he figured he didn’t would be able to raise enough money to do convincing outer space scenes like those seen in Alien. The idea evolved because the producers didn’t like sci-fi and wanted him to make something that was more like a James Bond thriller – and then the Lucio Fulci movie Zombie was a hit, so Cozzi lifted some ideas (and cast member Ian McCulloch) from there as well. His main inspirations were the Quatermass Xperiment sequel Enemy from Space, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Them, and he named the astronaut characters after his favorite sci-fi writers, L. Ron Hubbard and Edmond Hamilton. The producer has been trying to make a rip-off of the 1979 thriller The China Syndrome, and when that project fell through, he slapped that failed project’s title onto Cozzi’s movie. Contamination.

Joe Bob notes that Cozzi liked to have his characters dress in bland clothes and drive old cars to give his movies a timeless feel – but what really makes them last is the fact that they are nonsensical, and nonsensical never goes out of style. He points out that the mechanical Alien Cyclops effect didn’t work the way it was supposed to, questions the film’s logic, and names the flamethrower as the most cinematic weapon ever invented. He references some other Alien rip-offs and reveals how it came about that Contamination was given a North American release with the title Alien Contamination and 11 minutes cut out of it.

Joe Bob gives the movie 2 1/2 stars out of a possible 4, after deducting half a star for the fact that there’s a shower scene that was photographed from the neck up only. I might deduct another half star if I were to rate the movie. There are some cool moments in Contamination and some interesting ideas, but the movie fails to be captivating for most of its running time.

Once Contamination has come to an end, Darcy the Mail Girl joins Joe Bob to deliver a letter from a fan who lives in Australia and watches the show even though Shudder isn’t officially available in Australia. It’s also mentioned that Cozzi runs a bookstore, and Darcy actually bought Joe Bob a book from that store.


A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT (2014) - Hosted by Joe Bob Briggs on The Last Drive-in

Some nights you just feel like eating pizza, some nights you feel like watching Iranian black & white vampire ghost town oil field horror with extra pimps, whores, and heroin addicts, with all of the actors speaking Persian and acting like performance art zombies. And when you feel like that, writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, which was produced by Elijah Wood’s SpectreVision, is there for you. We join Joe Bob inside the trailer for this one, and he gets started by admitting that the movie we’re about to witness is a pretentious art film with a techno spaghetti Western soundtrack with gratuitous skateboarding while feeding on human flesh... but there’s something intriguing about it.

Before we get to the movie, Joe Bob discusses the fact that Amirpour never did a very good job of explaining her movie during interviews, but did reveal that she is a Bruce Lee super-fan. And that bit of trivia launches him into a rant about the banning of nunchucks, the coolest weapon ever invented, in some areas, particularly New York, which also has a ban on knives with blades longer than four inches, which caused a great knife show that used to be held in New York to move over to New Jersey.

Once Joe Bob has that out of his system, he can properly introduce the movie as “the old story of a petty thief living in the loneliest town in Iran, who kicks his heroin-addicted father out of the house after stealing some drug money and falling in love with a vampiress, while strung out on ecstasy in a Dracula costume, unaware that his beautiful bloodsucker girlfriend is on a one-woman mission to eliminate the gangsters, pimps, and drug addicts in the oil town that’s so poor, they don’t have graveyards, they just roll people into a ditch.” And it was filmed in California. Joe Bob gives it 3 stars.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a movie that I first saw during an all-month horror movie watching spree (some call this the month of October) back in 2015 – and it happened to be one of my favorites of the movies I saw for the first time that month. So while I generally prefer it when Joe Bob shows older movies, I was kind of glad to see this one make its way into his line-up. It’s not a movie I can watch very often, as I’m not often in the mood for the pretentious art film vibe these days, but it’s pretty good. And I love the moment when the lead characters connect during the song "Death" by White Lies, embarking on a relationship even though, as Joe Bob points out, she has reasons to kill him and he has reasons to mistrust her.

During his hosting segments, Joe Bob celebrates the beautiful black & white cinematography, discusses the filming location, which was the oil town of Taft, California; names the vampire character played by Sheila Vand, who rises around on a skateboard and wears a chador, as one of the coolest vampires ever; and reveals that the idea for the film first occurred to Amirpour when she got the chance to put on a chador. He says that, to properly enjoy the film, you have to suspend your normal expectations of what a movie is because it plays like a dream vision or a series of paintings. It takes place in imaginary world of desolate places and empty people. Or, as Amirpour would say, it takes place in her brain. He talks about the tie-in graphic novel, which tells us that the vampire is 187 years old, has been there / done that attitude, and basically serves as the morality police. We hear that Amirpour identified with the vampire, as she wants to live forever, and she says that she learned how to direct by watching the “Thriller” music video. (Going to UCLA film school probably didn’t hurt, either.) Amirpour is also a painter, loves Anne Rice books, and has given some unusual answers in interviews, like the one where she said her stories “are like fungi that grow backward.” Joe Bob considers her to be the female Tarantino because she steals from everybody: the movie has spaghetti Western music, the tone of David Lynch, the visuals of Francis Ford Coppola (particularly the movie Rumble Fish), and there’s French new wave stuff in there, bringing to mind Jean-Luc Godard, which bits of post-punk and no wave also in the mix. The movie reminds Joe Bob of an off-off-Broadway play that was advertised as being “a dark story about death, depression, and despair.” He gives information on cast members, questions if vampires can have regular sex, and when he doesn’t understand something that’s going on in the movie, he just brushes it off. Some things are beyond explanation.

After the movie, Darcy the Mail Girl drops by in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night cosplay to deliver a piece of artwork that was created by a viewer. Then, the episode wraps up with Joe Bob telling a couple of groan-inducing jokes, as always.


HE’S MY GIRL (1987)

The Movie Channel subscribers who turned in on the night (or was it the morning?) of December 3, 1988 were treated to the sight of drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs donning a blonde wig, a boa, and some lipstick in an effort to prove that a man dressing as a woman is not funny, despite its popularity in the comedy genre. Milton Berle did it, it wasn’t funny. Jerry Lewis did it, not funny. Flip Wilson and Graham Chapman did it, and okay, they were fairly funny. The reason why Joe Bob dressed up this way while presenting a movie – and while sharing the news that Adam West had been cast in Omega Cop (then known as John Travis: Solar Survivor), Redneck Zombies was complete, and The Karate Kid Part III and Ghostbusters II (then known as Last of the Ghostbusters) were starting to film – is that the movie he was showing, He’s My Girl, is a not-very-funny comedy about a man who dresses as a woman to get ahead in life.

Directed by Gabrielle Beaumont from a script that was crafted by the team of Taylor Ames, Peter Bergman, Charles Bohl, and Terence H. Winkless, He’s My Girl stars T.K. Carter of John Carpenter’s The Thing as Reggie, who serves as the manager to his musician best friend Bryan (real life singer/songwriter David Hallyday), aiming to get them out of their home state of Missouri and help Bryan become The Next Big Thing. When the TV music program Video LaLa holds a contest for an all-expenses-paid trip for two to Hollywood to hang out with rock star Simon Sledge (Warwick Sims) backstage at his comeback concert, Reggie enters Bryan in the contest several hundred times. But when Bryan wins the concert, they discover there’s a catch: Bryan’s plus-one has to be a woman. So Reggie slaps on a wig, makeup, and ladies’ clothes and they head off to Hollywood, pretending to be a heterosexual couple.

All sorts of shenanigans ensue. Reggie’s drag performance as “Regina” is convincing enough that Video LaLa host Mason Morgan (David Clennon) tries to seduce Regina and woo her away from Bryan; Bryan falls for artistic local girl Lisa (Jennifer Tilly); while wearing his regular clothes, Reggie starts pursuing a relationship with Video LaLa employee Tasha (Misha McK); and Mason steals one of Bryan’s original songs, convincing the drug-addled Simon Sledge that he came up with the song while in one of his blackout stupors. Etc.

He’s My Girl has all the makings of your typical ‘80s comedy, but even though T.K. Carter was putting a valiant effort into his performance as Reggie / Regina, most of the comedy in the movie just doesn’t work very well. It just awkwardly drops there like a lead balloon. One thing’s for sure: Joe Bob was right, the simple sight of Reggie dressed up like a woman is not funny. He gave the film a two star rating, maybe just a one and a half, out of four, and that seems about right to me. I love to watch comedies from the ‘80s and soaking up that atmosphere, but not even the ‘80s-ness of it all can make the idea of repeat viewings of He’s My Girl appealing.

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