MUTANT FAMILY VALUES: JOE BOB BRIGGS AND KEEPING ‘THE LAST DRIVE-IN’ ALIVE

My love for horror was forged in my childhood. In many of the horror reviews I’ve written over the years, whether for home video reissues of cult classics or retrospectives to honor a specific anniversary, a good portion of them had a habit of going back in time to loop in a specific childhood memory or anecdote about the title and why it meant as much to me then as it does now. Adoring the horror genre was always written in the stars for me, but my father was a major influence in getting me to look at those stars in the first place. It wasn’t that he consciously took me aside as a child to impart any kind of cinematic history whenever a specific horror flick was playing on television; it’s more that he enjoyed the genre across the spectrum, from the terrific to the terrible, and also because, even at the scant nine or ten or eleven years of age I was during that era, he wasn’t one of those parents hovering over the remote and ready to switch off anything inappropriate should their child walk into the room. He allowed it to happen because, by that time, I was already gobbling up R.L. Stine and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and playing with Creepy Crawlers and Monsterface in the other room. He knew it was somewhere in my blood. That’s not to say the horror genre encompassed most of his chosen entertainment, but there was something about monsters, zombies, ghosts, and masked killers that struck a chord in me, and I always took notice when those particular faces were on the screen. Either sitting next to him on the couch, or peeking around the corner just behind his seat, I caught an eyeful. It was my first experience with an education that felt worth a damn because it wasn’t being forced down my throat. It was already out there, in the world, far from any school book, and I could choose it if I wanted to. 

And I did. 

I could keep you here for days and share memories of all the different flicks I caught during those years. There was the night I made acquaintance with Halloween 4: The Return Of Michael Myers, which I think was my first exposure to the Halloween series. (Either this sequel or John Carpenter’s original always fight for that honor in my hazy memory.) I could talk at length about JAWS, Phantasm II, The Blob (1986), Darkman, Pet Sematary, along with fringe psycho-thrillers like The Boys from Brazil and Marathon Man. But one title that got repeat play in my house was 1985’s Return of the Living Dead. My father never turned down a zombie flick, no matter how bad it got (he’s still powering through The Walking Dead, so you know he’s willing to watch some bullshit), but Return of the Living Dead in particular was a favorite, due to the outrageous and vaudevillian humor that he responded to, being someone who grew up in the heyday of Laurel & Hardy. (The zombie picking up the police radio and telling command post to “send more cops” still elicits the same amount of laughter.) He is someone who'd watched so many films, horror and otherwise, that their titles alone weren’t enough to trigger association, and additional identification was needed. Return of the Living Dead often got misfiled in his brain alongside Night of the Living Dead (“the one with the basement”) and Dawn of the Dead (“the one in the mall”), and a nickname of sorts was eventually coined. Even years later, I’ll throw a mention to him of watching Return of the Living Dead, and he’s always quick to respond, “the one with the music?” It was a shorthand we developed over time, and one that still goes on to this day.

Soon after, once this foundation had been established, I set out on my own journey of discovery to see what else was out there in the world waiting for me. Sunday mornings, with the arrival of the newspaper, saw me leafing through that week’s television listings to see what horror flicks would be playing, on what channels, and at what time. The meatiest slots to check were late-night weekend lineups on the USA Network (Up All Night with Rhonda Shear was fertile ground for b-horror fun), the Sci-Fi channel, and TNT, who had a penchant for running the occasional Friday the 13th marathon for no reason whatsoever. I absorbed more movie knowledge from this mundane task than you might expect. I couldn’t have named you the first ten presidents of the United States, nor picked a prime number out of a math book lineup, but I easily could have told you that John Carpenter’s Christine was released in 1983, starred Keith Gordon, and had been awarded three stars by whoever it was that decided those things. I was a sponge, eager to absorb everything about this weird, gooey, icky genre that, for whatever reason, was calling to me.

 

I wish I knew how I first stumbled upon TNT’s Monstervision with Joe Bob Briggs. It may have been my father’s influence (he definitely knew who Joe Bob was, as he was quick to point out his cameo in Martin Scorsese’s Casino and ask, “Isn’t that the guy who watches all the goofy movies on TV?”), it may have been a happy accident, or it may have been a byproduct of Joe Bob’s hosting a particular flick that had been on my radar for a while, and which led me to his trailer, his silver bolo, and his amusing but charming southern drawl. Where things left off with my father’s influence, they continued with Joe Bob Briggs. For years after that discovery, every Saturday night was set aside for catching Joe Bob and hanging out with him during whatever double feature he had in store. Not every title that got the Monstervision treatment was a winner, but it was impossible to walk away from watching Joe Bob’s segments without learning something about the genre, or the production history of the movie, or the filmmakers and actors involved, all of which enhanced your appreciation of this title for which you may not have otherwise cared. Keep in mind that this was the mid-to-late ‘90s, and consumer internet hadn’t yet swept across the land. For every house that had a gigantic boxy computer and a dial-up subscription to Prodigy or AOL, ten houses in between did not, so the idea of “meeting” like-minded Monstervision fans in chat rooms and message boards had yet to become a mainstream, everyday reality. (And yet I still remember the URL for the old Monstervision website – “TNT dot Turner dot com forward slash Monstervision” – since it played during every commercial break.) Even the show’s set suggested Joe Bob was this strange, elusive figure living in isolation in the middle of the desert, far from the constraints of normality and good taste, and I’ll be damned if you didn’t wish you could park a trailer right next to him and hang out for the rest of eternity. The set was less of a gimmick – that of the typical redneck who lives in a trailer and watches television outside – but more of an indication of what Joe Bob Briggs and Monstervision were all about: appealing to the mutants and freaks on the outskirts of polite society. 

Monstervision was an anomaly on television. It didn’t feel like part of anyone’s plan, and certainly not the intended product of such a conservative network, thanks to Joe Bob’s at-times politically incorrect humor and the offscreen laughter of his crew, which violated the rule in the production handbook: never break the fourth wall. But there was a method to his madness: the whole point of Joe Bob’s schtick was to make his viewers feel as if they were sitting on the other side of that set as he talked to us, friend to friend, about the merits of Wes Craven’s Swamp Thing or Larry Cohen’s The Stuff. During this time, on another channel, you had Siskel & Ebert At the Movies where the persnickety critics were giving the thumbs down to stuff like Friday the 13th and My Bloody Valentine, but on TNT, you had Joe Bob rejoicing in the antithesis of that philosophy and exploring the kinds of films that were often left abandoned by the snoots who believed they were above it all. From his outlook, all films contained something to celebrate, and all films were worth seeing at least once. This was a wild and risky approach to a weekly television show, along with the fact that it didn’t air at the same time every Saturday night, sometimes getting pushed back almost an hour thanks to some basketball nonsense. It wasn’t a show that waited for you at the same time every week – you almost had to luck out and catch it, like an animal in the wild – but even when the show ended during its typical time, it was usually around one or two in the morning. In my mind, who in the blue fuck was watching this goofy show that didn’t appear to have a script or follow the rules and which highlighted cinematic bilge like Children of the Corn 2 and Project Metalbeast? Who was staying up this late to catch some weirdo movies hosted by some weirdo guy cracking wise in between commercial breaks? It all seemed so odd and accidental, like someone had hacked their way into TNT’s broadcast signal Max Headroom-style to feed some horror flicks to a hungry audience only to disappear before the sun rose and TNT’s board of directors had climbed out of their mansion beds.

 

I don’t remember every episode of Monstervision I ever saw, but I do remember the ones that featured a particular flick that would go on to sustain my love of the genre: 1990’s Night of the Living Dead, 1988’s Phantasm II (watched in full this time), Wes Craven’s Deadly Friend, the legendary three-hour cut of Needful Things that’s never been released on video, even 1982’s Halloween III: Season Of The Witch – a movie I hated, hated, hated as a kid, but which I now love as an old-ass man. What was it about this show that stuck with me all these years? Why is it that, twenty-five years later, I can remember certain things Joe Bob said about the movies being shown that night, like Halloween III being the black sheep in the franchise for not having Michael Myers “with the white stuff on his face,” or Phantasm II being “the sequel that took Don Coscarelli nine years to make”? Joe Bob Briggs not only solidified and legitimized my love for horror, he inflated that love by adding new titles to my library or enhancing my knowledge of the ones I already knew, every week, without fail (unless goddamn basketball was on). Joe Bob Briggs was just fuckin’ cool, and he liked horror, so if I liked horror, then hell, I was cool, too, and what a nice feeling for a kid who didn’t have a lot of friends and who was fifty football fields away from being cool.

When Shudder announced in 2018 that they would be returning Joe Bob Briggs to the small screen for one last Monstervision-inspired Dusk-to-Dawn movie marathon, as well as giving him the sendoff he deserved but didn’t receive after being unceremoniously let go by TNT, it was kismet. It didn’t just feel like something I wanted to happen, but something the entire horror community needed to happen. The genre had been riding the nostalgia bandwagon for years at that point, getting lots of mileage from resurrecting old franchises and creating new ‘80s-inspired entertainment like the massively popular Stranger Things, which started out with good intentions and soon gave way to shameless fan-wanking with characters dressing as the Ghostbusters and singing the fucking theme song to The Neverending Story. You can pump all the ‘80s synthwave and John Carpenter fonts you want into your movie’s trailer, but it’s no easy feat to recapture the mood, the feel, the spirit, and the essence of a specific time period of the genre. 

But if anyone was going to do it, it was Joe Bob Briggs.

 

By now, we all know the rest is history. Shudder, Joe Bob, and his new sidekick Darcy the Mail Girl, who features much more prominently and significantly than the mail girls of Monstervision old (she’s the show’s preeminent superfan, social media guru, and street team all in one), broke the internet the night of the Dust-To-Dawn Marathon. Joe Bob’s return/“retirement” was so successful that Shudder brought him and Darcy back again and again and again. Monstervision had been reborn, this time known as The Last Drive-In. The fans demanded it, and not just because we wanted it, but we needed it. Briggs’ return to the format was a return to a simpler time – when event television was still experienced at the same time for every viewer, when there still existed the concept of live programming, when it was okay to be politically incorrect every so often, and when it was encouraged to celebrate weird, gooey, and icky cinema. But it was also a return to a time when life outside our front doors didn’t seem so alien and dangerous and downright sad. We needed entertainment, yes, but we needed a familiar and comforting presence to bring us that entertainment, too. And with his first on-screen appearance, it was beyond satisfying to see that Joe Bob and co. hadn’t missed a beat. Joe Bob’s trailer, both inside and out, had been faithfully recreated, littered with beer bottles and cans bearing Texas stars. The southern duds were back, along with the boots, the bolo, and that amusing but charming southern drawl; Joe Bob was still opening shows with unrelated rants and closing them with a double dose of jokes so bad you couldn’t believe you were laughing at them. To paraphrase Freddy Krueger, Joe Bob was back and better than ever.

Yet, there was and is something else about The Last Drive-In that feels new, different, but not altogether foreign. An awareness – exuded not just by Joe Bob, but by Darcy, the crew, and all of Shudder – that this was special and not to be taken for granted. That even though, in the grand scheme of things, this is a niche show for people with tastes in niche movies, it’s still important, and even therapeutic. Yes, of course the ultimate goal is to have fun, and watch flicks both terrific and terrible, and engage each other on social media through our shared love of the genre, but there’s something else we all need to do, and it’s this: to enjoy this now, for as long as we can, while we still can. Guys, it’s been fucking tough these past five years. The planet is dying. A highly divisive and some would say dangerous president is in the White House. Racial disharmony is at the highest it’s been since the 1960s. As I write this, we are approaching the fifth straight month of lockdown thanks to the raging COVID-19, which has taken the lives of so many people that I can’t give you the current number because I just don’t have the heart to look anymore. The party could end at any time, and for many of us it already has. I’m not saying that Joe Bob carries the burden of trying to counteract all this madness within the confines of his ultimately powerless show, because only a bleeding-hearted martyr thinks like that, but I do think Joe Bob genuinely wishes he had that kind of power. Though The Last Drive-In is nearly a carbon copy of Monstervision, yet massively improved by the presence of uncut HD movies and segment breaks much longer than the lousy forty-five seconds TNT allowed way back when, there’s a poignancy to his return, bolstered by an unexpected melancholy that appears during every final episode of the season. Whether it’s Joe Bob opining about the whole point of his various shows over the years – the 1980s' Joe Bob’s Drive-In Theater, or the 1990s' Monstervision, or the 2010s' The Last Drive-In – which was to bring us mutants together to relish in our favorite genre, or it’s the production turning the set into a high school dance to give Darcy the prom she never had, or Joe Bob singing a soft, somewhat broken, and pensive iteration of The Last Drive-In’s normally rockabilly theme song, it’s the acknowledgment that every season could be the last season. Every show could be the last show. Every recitation of the drive-in oath could be the last promise we ever make. We are lucky we still have him as our host, and, if I can be bold, he is lucky we still look to him for that sense of need. We are lucky we still have each other – me, the person writing this, and you, the person hopefully reading it – even if we’ll never know each other in real life, even if Joe Bob will never be more than a face on a television screen. We are here right now, sharing space, acknowledging each other’s existence, because Joe Bob brought us together.

 

Along with his now famous, pre-movie Drive-In Totals, which let us know how many breasts and gallons of blood awaited us in that night’s double-bill, Joe Bob has coined many phrases over the years. There’s “aardvarking,” “Joe Bob says check it out,” “if you know what I mean, and I think you do,” and lastly, “the drive-in will never die.” That last one isn’t just a statement, or a wish, or a prayer to the gods of b-moviedom. It’s an acknowledgment – a promise made by him, and a command bequeathed to us all. The drive-in isn’t just a flat cut of vomit-splattered land with rows of crappy speakers and a large stained silver screen. It’s a movement. It’s a collection of genres. It’s a mindset and a community. That’s what Joe Bob’s drive-in oath was all about. He’s been doing his part since the 1980s to keep the drive-in alive, through his newspaper columns, his standup specials, his books, his DVD commentaries, his convention appearances, and his three – count ‘em, three – television shows over the years. The drive-in will never die, and such a trivial collection of words has never been more romantic.

But what is it about horror that’s so romantic? Why does this genre that so often runs gleefully away from sentimentality and good taste act as such a lightning rod for longing, wistfulness, and happy sighs? Why do I get goosebumps when I’m looking at side-by-side photos of John Carpenter and Jamie Lee Curtis on set of 1978’s Halloween and 2018’s sequel of the same name? Why did I get hit with the feels during Phantasm Ravager (even though I kinda hated it) when seeing what the scourge of time had done to Mike Pearson and his best friend, Reggie? Is there something about this weird, gooey, icky genre that drives this notion of romance, or am I the one assigning the romance because the horror genre is the only thing that’s remained consistent throughout my life? Why does it fill me with such joy to see the likes of Kelli Maroney and Ashley Laurence and Tom Savini sitting alongside Joe Bob as their movies play, relishing in the fact that their work is still being celebrated all these years later? How am I supposed to feel that, when I was a kid, Barbara Crampton was among my first onscreen exposures to girls and sex and what that all meant, but that we’ve aged to the degree where I’m now a so-called man while she’s become an almost motherly figure in the horror community? Well, I can tell you how that feels: comforting, and right, and the tiniest bit sad. Is it because I spent a childhood watching their movies and seeing them in DVD supplements and reading their interviews in Fangoria? Is it because they were always there, enthusiastically taking part in this strange genre that none of the other kids at school were into? Is it because I got so used to seeing them that they felt like this odd, alternate family who never came to Christmas dinner, but who were no less important? 

And finally, am I really the only one who feels that way? 

 

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this life, it’s that time is precious, but it’s also sadistic. It can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with; it doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear; and it absolutely will not stop, ever, until we are dead. The horror community has already suffered tremendous blows over the last decade from the losses of Wes Craven, George Romero, Tobe Hooper, Stuart Gordon, Larry Cohen, Joel Schumacher, and I have to stop because the tears are coming already. It’s impossible to replace a director who has made your favorite movies, who entertained you for twenty or thirty or forty years, who created a ninety-minute slice of escapism that allowed you to feel less lonely, that pulled you back from the precipice of depression and despair – and I’m talking to you, specifically, right now, because you know exactly what I’m talking about – but I am eternally thankful that we have the likes of Mike Flanagan, James Wan, Leigh Whannell, Guillermo Del Toro, Jason Blum, and many others working tirelessly in the horror genre to keep it alive and introduce it to new audiences. They’ll keep the candle burning in the terror tower to guide our entire, ever-expanding mutant family home. And for as long as Joe Bob Briggs has it in him, I hope he’ll continue introducing films made by the new generation to the new generation. 

We are people, which means we’ll die. It sucks, and it’s scary and sad, but that’s what we do. That’s our role. All we can do is fill this world with every positive thing we can while we’re still here – if we’re writers, then with our stories; if we’re directors, then with our films; and if we’re fans, then with our passions, our sense of community, and our want and need and responsibility to care for and about each other. These things will never die because they are eternal, and they’ll live forever on movie screens and in the eyes, ears, and hearts of every new generation that finds them. This is why horror. This is the point. Through this, we’ll all live forever, because this what the drive-in is all about.

And the drive-in will never die.

[Reprinted from Daily Grindhouse.]

GHOST TOWN (1988)

Remember that one time you went on vacation with your family to Tombstone, Arizona, or Dodge City, Kansas, and just after finishing your "Buffalo Bill Burger Blast" you went outside and caught the noontime showdown in the street between those two guys in the really bad beards shooting each other with blank pistols whose gunfire seemed to be coming out of the crackling speakers behind you instead of the deadly instruments grasped in their hands?

That's Ghost Town, in a nutshell, with costume store make-up. It is glorified dinner theater with a horror bent and a budget slightly higher than the one possessed by those people who put a little too much effort into their front lawn Halloween displays. And of course, there's obviously nothing wrong with this, because Ghost Town, despite its obviously low budget, its lack of anyone with name recognition (beyond Bruce Glover), and its somewhat restrained use of visual effects (how many times "ghosts" disappear/reappear on screen after a while becomes hilarious), remains an infinitely watchable film, perfect for those late nights when you don't want to surrender to sleep just yet, but you don't want to watch anything heavy. It's Ghost Town, all the way.

What's refreshing about Ghost Town (and unlike many other Charles Band productions) is that everyone on screen knows they're making something silly, yet everyone is sincerely giving it their all. Not every performance is Day-Lewis caliber, but obviously that doesn't matter, because even though the film revolves around a hapless deputy wandering into a ghost town in the middle of the desert and stumbling upon a collection of ghosts, skeletons, and people trapped in time, every member of the cast does admirable work, including the Michael Bay lookalike lead character of Langley, played by Franc Luz.

With a typically quirky story by, at one time, go-to Full Moon Pictures auteur David Schmoeller (interviews with him here and here), Ghost Town is charmingly innocent and not the least bit pretentious. Band became a producer infamous for not only low budget horror, but low budget trash horror, which has only gotten worse over the years, so to see his name affiliated with a project built on good intentions of just trying to tell an old fashioned story is not only surprising but welcoming. Except for the icky ghost make-up exhibited by some of the on-screen ghouls, and a few moments of bullet carnage, Ghost Town isn't terribly violent, either. (It also exhibits the most restrained and tasteful allusion to ghost rape probably ever.) Its tone goes for serious but light at the same time, and except for a moment of side-boob, Ghost Town feels like something to put on for the kids on Halloween night.

Ghost Town's "rules" get a little fuzzy as the film progresses: sometimes the characters Langley encounters are ghosts, sometimes living skeletons, and sometimes living folks (?) "trapped in time," and after a while it's hard to figure out what exactly is going on, and who is in danger of what (apparently those trapped in time can still die - again, or for the first time), but Ghost Town's intentions are pure enough that after a while none of this really matters. There's no denying that the film is patently stupid, but that's okay, because the amount of love that went into this production evens out its inherent stupidity, resulting in a good time.

Ghost Town is deliciously, lovingly, charmingly, and acceptably stupid. It's the perfect example of a title that would have fallen into obscurity in the years following its release just because of how odd, quirky, and somewhat kid-like it is...and let's not forget those visual tricks on the same level of a ghostly Unsolved Mysteries episode.

THE CONJURING 2 (2016)

Every time James Wan threatens to retire from the horror genre, it breaks my heart a little -- not to mention strikes more fear in me than all the ghosts and demons he's conjured (shut up) from his imagination. The horror genre never truly dies, despite what weirdos like to claim about the '90s, as there are always up-and-coming filmmakers and interesting indie horror films that will stand the test of time. However, so few consistent filmmakers come along that not only make great contributions to the genre, but make films that have the power to remind both critics and audiences that the horror genre is capable of being classy, well made, and even emotional.

I could rattle off a half-dozen horror filmmakers who have proven consistency with both quality and scares -- Ti West, Jim Mickle, Adam Wingard -- but no one is doing what James Wan is doing: straddling that line between satisfying mainstream audiences with films not too far outside their comfort zone while also finding ways to shock and scare horror-loving fandom who have seen all the tricks countless times before. (That last sentence makes me feel bad, so major hat tip to Mike Flanagan, who is doing the same thing.)

The Conjuring 2, like its predecessor, contains very little that hasn't been seen a dozen times already in films both classic and campy. We've seen the ghosts and the demons, we've heard the loud knocks in the middle of the night or the creepy children hiding in the darkness, and we've seen the power of God, harnessed by the mortal, vanquish these things back into the pit, but Wan has an uncanny ability to use these old tricks in clever new ways. The Conjuring 2 contains much of Wan's repertoire -- the clever use of editing giving creepy figures snapshot movements, the yellow-eyed demons, the unseen monster in the darkened corner -- but he's also got a whole bag of new tricks to try, and all of them work. The Crooked Man, for instance, doesn't quite feel as grounded as the rest of the ongoing terror, but its construction makes for the eeriest scene in the entire film. The Conjuring 2 is more ethereal, more dreamlike, more daring in its risk-taking. And it makes for a more satisfying experience with the Warrens.

What makes The Conjuring 2 stand out from the pack, and even from Wan's previously successful horror outings, is the relationship between Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), playing the real-life married couple who spent decades doing the kind of research that the franchise only touches on. As Wan says in the supplements, he wanted to create a love story for them but disguise it as a horror film, and in that regard he was successful. Like the first film, he takes the time out from the horror to offer them -- and the haunted Hodgson family -- small moments of peace. Scenes like Ed playing the guitar and singing an Elvis song to the family -- but really to Lorraine -- or even the ending, when Wan forgoes the anticipated creepy/shock final scene in favor of something lovely and beautiful, are what make The Conjuring 2 such a success. Putting aside how "real" and "true to life" the Conjuring series claims to be, the films, regardless of what you believe, also wholly exaggerate the stories that inspired them. However, in the midst of this, Wan's ability to make his characters feel like real people are what set the series off from the rest of the genre.

Avoiding the sophomore slump, The Conjuring 2 boasts a less clunky and more naturalistic screenplay than its predecessor, and with less characters to focus on, a bit more streamlined. Knowledge of the first film isn't required to enjoy the sequel, but by now the Warren dynamic and what they do is established and it helps in getting to the action a little quicker. Wilson and Farmiga -- especially the latter -- are fantastic in their roles, with Wilson toning down his take on Ed, making him less gruff than his prior iteration. The Hodgson family as well, led by mother Peggy (Frances O'Connor) and terrorized daughter Janet (Madison Wolfe, trying on a genuine sounding accent), are fleshed out into real people. The Conjuring 2's opener serves as a concluding bookend to the tease on which the first film ended -- that of the legendary Amityville controversy, which inspired the never-ending film series The Amityville Horror. (While it's a bummer not to have gotten an entire feature film dedicated to this particular case, I can understand the legal quagmire it would have the potential to become.) But the bits we do get -- the DeFeo massacre, which was a very real occurrence, and even an impressively simple recreation of perhaps the most famous photographic "evidence" of paranormal proof in the Amityville home -- are more satisfying than probably every officially sanctioned Amityville film so far.

Director of Photography Don Burgess successfully recreates the look of Wan's past collaborations with his former DP John R. Leonetti (who may or may not have been too busy directing the Conjuring spin-off Annabelle to join Wan for this second go-round with the Warrens). The presentation successfully recreates that look which is slowly becoming iconic for the Warrens' universe: a blue-hewing, bleached-white world where even during the daylight there's a detectable darkness. The interior of the Hodgson home, with its cracked walls and its busy but fading wallpaper, somehow adding desolation and subtly contributes to the claustrophobic horror the family begins to experience.

The Conjuring is among one of the scariest sounding films ever made, and The Conjuring 2 continues that trend. The film makes very effective use of the paranormal bumps in the night, and the requisite sounds of the genre are all accounted for: knocks on doors, thuds on floorboards, creepy child laughter...and the disembodied voice of the dead. As usual, the creepy score by Joseph Bishara (who has played the marquee demon in every James Wan film so far), complete with its whirling male choir, heightens the horror the characters are experiencing.

After the disappointment of Insidious 2, the most previous horror film from James Wan, the potential for capturing the class and effectiveness of The Conjuring didn't seem like a sure thing for its sequel. I'm happy to report that it's every bit as good as its original, and in some cases, even superior. Wan has sworn off horror films before (prior to making The Conjuring 2), and he's repeated that following its release, but here's hoping when it comes to the exploits of Ed and Lorraine Warren, he'll always make an exception. The Conjuring series prints money for Warner Bros., so more films will be made with or without him in the director's chair, but he and his screenwriters seemed to have cracked the code for making them so effectively horrific as well as realistic and emotionally involving.

THE HOUSE WHERE EVIL DWELLS (1982)

Long before the short-lived J-horror phenomenon breached American shores, resulting in one good remake and boatloads of bad ones, The House Where Evil Dwells was already proving that Japanese ghosts could be so, so entertaining. Best described as a bold-faced rip-off of The Shining attempting to coalesce with America's then-fascination with everything ninja, this 1982 oddity about an American family living abroad while its patriarch finishes writing his "story" - and who then confront a trio of hilarious looking ghosts  - has to be seen to be believed. Hopefully the included screen grabs have done a pretty good job of indicating the sheer stupidity on hand and have enticed some unaware lovers of cinema cheese into pursuing this title: how utterly mad The House Where Evil Dwells is willing to go is a thing that every horror fan needs to experience.

The opening of the film, in which a full-on sexy affair is taking place while the unknowing husband is out walking around holding his lantern thing you only ever see in movies set in Japan, does a pretty good but albeit strange job of establishing the conflict of the plot: after the cheating wife gives to her lover a netsuke (a small totem) that she obtained from a witch, and which seems to be of a woman fucking the devil, the husband comes home to see their tryst in full kimono-shedding mode, so he understandably flips out and kills them both before committing harakiri, which is suicide by blade, not the former sports newscaster. (You know, this guy.)

At this point - yep, you guessed it - our American characters enter the story, and the house where all this sexy murder stuff went down, and are immediately haunted by the aforementioned ghosts of an Asian flavor.

The House Where Evil Dwells is insane, lovingly pedestrian, and earnest in its stupidity. Its attempts to be horrific consist of blue-tinted superimposed ghosts walking around, knocking shit off the wall, or temporarily possessing our married couple characters solely to puppet them into saying really inappropriate things and cause marital distress. But what those silly ghost appearances set up, the screaming ghost faces appearing in soup, or the hilarious moaning haunted crabs that chase a young girl up a tree, definitely help to knock down.

What sucks about The House Where Evil Dwells - that is, beyond the typical kind of suck you come to expect from very low-budget horror flicks - is its pace. To be honest, unless ghostly things are occurring, The House Where Evil Dwells isn't really that interesting. It's slow, and dull, and momentarily brought to life by okay performances (unless we're talking about the daughter character, who's at her least offensive when she's not saying a word). If blue ghosts are egging each other on to commit harm or tomfoolery, then great; otherwise, The House Where Evil Dwells is boredom on celluloid. Still, it's a house where I'd want to spend all my time where I'm probably shooing demon crabs out of my nagaya with my bamboo houki.

Fans of campy and "oops, it's stupid!" horror entertainment shouldn't miss it, or else moaning ghost faces will end up in your soup, and they will be so awful.

ECHOES (2016)

Anna (Kate French), a blogger who has been offered her first screenwriting assignment, is struggling to get a workable draft to her manager (and lover), Paul (Steven Brand), so Paul suggests they abscond to his house in the desert to give her a change of scenery and perhaps a bout of inspiration. There only a day, Paul announces that he has to leave to go deal with a client, and Anna suggests she stay behind, hoping that her isolation will force her to be productive. Without a car, and with Paul's dog, Shadow, her only company, Anna tries to do just that, but instead begins to suffer from increasingly worsening instances of the nightmares she's been having for a while now - that of an ash-faced figure with black eyes. With each new visitation from his demon figure, she is left with a new piece of the puzzle, so Anna begins to follow the trail of clues until she pieces together the mystery of her haunting - and what she discovers might have best been left undiscovered.

Echoes, simply put, doesn't really work - not as a ghost film, not as a mysticism film, and not as a murder mystery film. It really wants to be all three, but because of the time it has to share among those other sub-genres, all of them are left feeling unfinished and obligatory. What's suggested by the film's opener - someone haunted by sleep paralysis, a genuinely fascinating phenomenon - is abandoned nearly immediately after in favor of more waking-nightmare/possession nonsense that audiences have seen so many times before.

Speaking of things audiences have seen before, it would appear that writer/director Nils Timm has certainly seen The Conjuring, being that more than one visual trick is stolen from James Wan's surprise 2013 shocker. From flapping sheets revealing ghostly forms to black-eyed monsters possessing their victims, so much of Echoes has been done before and in far better ways that its title is actually perfectly ironic.

One of Kate French's eyebrows alone is sexier than any screenwriter I've ever seen, so her casting as such is dubious at best, and shameless at worst. As a lead she's merely competent, although the script doesn't demand she do much beyond look scared or take sad sit-down showers. Her constant appearances in tight tank tops or skintight exercise pants do more to show off why she was cast than anything having to do with her range as a performer. Alternately, Steven Brand offers up a nice performance as Paul. At first the audience isn't sure what to make of him, but he's likable and charming, and proves to offer the most defined character and solid performance in what is admittedly a small and intimate film with less than a handful of speaking parts.

Echoes brings nothing new to the table, but perhaps it will bring more attention to the phenomenon of sleep paralysis. Leafing through its Wiki entry is infinitely more intriguing and entertaining than anything that Echoes has to offer. Even the most die-hard aficionado won't feel the need to add Echoes to their collection. It's a bland and generic story that jumps from one overused trope to the next, none of which is as satisfying as what the summary promises. Sleep paralysis, also known as Old Hag Syndrome, is a strange ailment affecting an alarmingly high number of people, and has slowly become more and more common knowledge over the years - a shame that the film did away with the concept after an intriguing opening. Echoes is a rental at best.

EVEN A FEW MURDERS

BACKTRACK (2016)

The ghost film is my weakness. It's one I will always go out of my way to watch, regardless of pedigree or budget, because I am endlessly fascinated by the supernatural. If I were a human being still capable of actually feeling fear, instead of having been dulled by a steady diet of horror films since I was in elementary school, you might say ghost films come the closest to providing me with a handful of reasonable scares. And that makes sense--that of the more metaphysical sub-genre, the ghost film rides the closest alongside the idea of life, most certainly death, and perhaps something beyond it. The concept of ghosts and haunted houses still pervade so much of our pop culture. Even the Travel Channel has built an audience of millions off their only popular program, "Ghost Adventures," the tie that binds ghost-hunting to traveling being that the hosts often get in a van and drive somewhere.

It's rare when a good ghost film is released. And unless James Wan is directing, chances are those good ghost films aren't at the multiplex, but rather somewhere hovering in the ether between VOD and direct-to-video. Much like any other genre, but especially horror, there's a reason why you've never heard of most titles found on page 37 of Netflix's streaming titles. So much bad horror is released in one calendar year that it's almost staggering. It's also sad, because so many of these so-called filmmakers aren't trying to make a film. They're assembling 90 minutes of forward momentum and spending most of their budgets on the Photoshopped cover that does its best to shield the fact that the film isn't even worth falling asleep to.

Somewhere between this Redbox fodder and James Wan resides filmmaker Michael Petroni's Backtrack, an Australian-produced supernatural mystery that offers up a handful of fine performances, an intriguing concept, and even a few well-timed and well-staged scares that actually border on frightening. Make no mistake that Backtrack is very aware of its influences, taking most of its DNA from The Sixth Sense, but it goes about it in the freshest way possible: that the patients of Brody's Peter Bower are actually ghosts isn't a twist that's saved for third-act reveal (obviously this factoid is included in the home video release's official synopsis anyway), but rather it's something discovered early on which kicks the main conflict into gear.

Brody, too, seems aware of the influence of Shyamalan's still-best film, as he likely realized he was also playing a sad psychologist a little too close to the dead. Brody, strapping on a serviceable Australian accent, is very calm, stoic, sad, and still in his performance, but not in a way that's boring to watch. He's supposed to be playing a man barely holding it together following the death of his daughter, for which he blames himself, and it's reflected in his every scene, during which he always seems moments away from bursting into tears.

The beloved Sam Neill makes scattershot appearances as Bower's own psychologist, looking pretty distinguished in a rounder face and full beard, though the motives of his character are unclear and never fully explained, leaving his presence in the film somewhat unsatisfactory.

 Above all, writer/director Michael Petroni didn't want to make a horror film so much as  a film about life that just happened to contain elements more commonly found in genre films. He tried something similar with a previous film, Till Human Voices Wake Us, which could likely be used as a litmus test to determine if Backtrack is for you. Again, like The Sixth Sense, Backtrack vies to be something more than just a ghost film. It wants to be about life, regret, the significance of the past, and the pain of memories. It does all those things quite well, marrying it to a traditional mystery propelled by supernatural elements (and no lie, the use of "ghosts" in the film are definitely eerie), but what it results in feels a little too similar, however well made it may be.

Despite being a ghost movie, which, yes, does allow for a few jump scares here and there, Backtrack is actually kind of a quiet film. The dread and sadness dwell in the silent corners of every scene in which Bower appears, complemented by a melancholy score by composer Dan Cornelius. Backtrack is the kind of film whose strength comes from the quiet rather than screaming ghosts.

Backtrack is a horror film (kind of) for adults. What this means is that it's not interested in using ghosts to constantly scare the audience, but rather to make our lead character tap into his subconscious to determine why he is seeing them in the first place. Ghosts are used as a concept but not a catalyst. And, is Peter Bower seeing ghosts for real? Or ghosts from his past that won't let him rest until he confronts the memories he's long since buried? If you're looking for a straightforward haunt film, keep walking, but if you're up for something a little different and a little more mature, then give Backtrack a try.