Ben Nagy reviews ‘Clownado’: Evil clowns get sucked up in storm and slaughter folks in the Midwest
First an announcement: If you’re a filmmaker and you haven’t submitted your flick to the World Drive-In Movie Festival, the deadline’s in about three weeks (July 14th). I did a video explaining everything to everyone that you can find here: Full details about the WDIMF are here. Don’t wait much longer to start shooting your […]
Ben Nagy reviews ‘Butcher Boys’: Writer of the original TCM weaves a tale of urban cannibalism
It’s been said time and time again by Joe Bob that “‘Saw is king,” meaning that, apart from it being narrowly defeated by the original Night of the Living Dead in his 1982 newspaper poll about the world’s greatest drive-in flick, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre probably will be pointed at for all time as […]
Ben Nagy reviews ‘Bad Ass’: We celebrate Danny Trejo’s 79th with a feature ripped straight from the Internet
Fans of drive-in fare are very, very familiar with the work of Danny Trejo, whether it be from his frequent collaborations with Robert Rodriguez (The two Machete flicks, Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, etc.) or the constant stream of roles, both wide release and direct-to-video/streaming he’s accumulated in genre […]
Ben Nagy reviews ‘Garden Party Massacre’: It’s comedy over carnage when a guy with a pickaxe shows up
So before we get to the latest installment of The Screening Room, there’s a question that I’ve been struggling with. It’s not one of those easy ones. Stuff like, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Or, “Who shot JFK?” (Which, by the way, Joe Bob has already solved if you know where to […]
Ben Nagy reviews ’30 Miles From Nowhere’: Things get tense for middle-aged college chums at funeral/reunion
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A bunch of old school friends are brought together by the death of one of their old college pals, and that person’s passing gives them an opportunity to head out to a cabin in the woods. Yeah, it’s the premise of The Big Chill, which was one […]
Ben Nagy reviews ‘The Gardener’: When Robert Bronzi’s not handling plants, he’s wasting home-invading scum
I’ve kinda gotten behind on my Robert Bronzi flicks. If you don’t know who he is, he’s the 21st century Hungarian incarnation of Charles Bronson whose genre-flick career has taken off because he bears an uncanny resemblance to the Drive-In Hall-of-Famer. Bronson, for those of you who haven’t read Joe Bob’s old columns or gotten […]
Ben Nagy reviews ‘Spree’: Ride-share driver runs amok and streams the whole dang thing
An astute commenter on Facebook a few months back reminded me that April was Distracted Driving Awareness Month. Here in Ohio, that now means that using a phone while driving is a pull-overable offense. Post-pandemic, because I’m one of those folks who has been re-indoctrinated into the experience of having a lengthy commute five days […]
Ben Nagy reviews ‘The Thaw’: It’s what you get when you blend ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ ‘Cabin Fever’ and ‘The Thing’ and add 100% more Val Kilmer
For about three years there in the late oughts around the time Arthur C. Clarke said that Roy Scheider was supposed to use a monolith to turn Jupiter into a second sun, thus saving us from a nuclear war with the Soviets (whoops), Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert (they’re still around but Roy isn’t), launched […]
Ben Nagy reviews ‘Recoil’: Stone Cold faces off with Danny Trejo in revenge-on-crime flick
As usual, I’m running late again with another one of my themed flick reviews. I really, really wanted to get this one up in time for “Stone Cold” Steve Austin Day on 3/16, but this research project came up for Joe Bob that involved a bunch of in-depth discussions about time-traveling rabbits and so I […]
Ben Nagy reviews ‘Red 11’: In which a big-budget filmmaker heads back to his roots to tell his low-budget origin story
It’s the stuff that 1990s filmmaking legends are made of. Back in the old days when a guy named Tarantino was transitioning from being a video clerk to a guy who would become an in-demand screenwriter and revered director, another guy named Robert Rodriguez also wanted to make a dang movie. Rodriguez, a Texas guy, […]