Flight Of The Living Dead (2007)

Ever get one of those "that was my idea" moments; when you see some film with a clever twist that you'd dreamed up years ago and never done anything about?

Well, I had one when I first came across adverts for this little beauty.

Flight Of The Living Dead: the title alone tells you pretty much what you can expect from this wonderful piece of trash cinema.

Just when you thought every aspect of the zombie genre had been milked dry; and wannabe writers like my good self were scratching around fruitlessly to come up with different take on this popular subject.

If you think about it, really, Flight Of The Living Dead is an obvious conceit, and it's hard to believe no one had tried it before... a zombie outbreak on a passenger plane at 30,000ft.

It's the ultimate "spam in a cabin", to quote legendary drive-in film critic Joe Bob Briggs.

The acting may be pretty awful and the script not much better, but once the carnage begins all the half-baked 'character stuff' is forgotten (along with logic - as guns are fired left, right and centre within the aircraft) and the bloodshed takes over. And let's be honest, that's what we watch zombie films for, isn't it?

And once the chewing, dismemberment and shooting kicks off, Flight becomes a great little horror flick. Unfortunately it takes over half an hour to get to the good stuff, but the wait is worth it!

The plane is loaded with a typical Hollywood passenger list of potential inflight snacks: a group of renegade scientists with a suspicious cargo, a cop and handcuffed wisecracking convict, a nun, a professional sportsman and his disgruntled wife, the feuding teen couples and, best cliche of all, an aged pilot making that one last flight before retirement (guess who doesn't make it out alive?).

It swings violently from classic moments (watch for the laugh-out-loud umbrella sequence) to silly (the ridiculous crash landing stands out in particular), but really it doesn't matter; it's zombies on a [melon-flipping] plane! What were you really expecting?

Joe Bob's Going Back To The Drive-In

I guess it's fair to say that most adults have a book from their formative years that helped shape their life and thinking going forward.

However, as I've said before, mine wasn't full of fairy stories, but rather delightfully grungy reviews of even grungier movies.

My life-changing book was 1989's Joe Bob Goes to The Drive-In.

You can read here about how this book kindled a spark in me to review movies, which, of course, then propelled my life in a whole new direction, going to university, then heading into public relations, meeting Rachel, getting married etc.

The good news - no, great news - is the long-out-print Joe Bob Goes To The Drive-In is getting a funky reprint this October, courtesy of Dark Horse, in "a brand new updated and expanded art book-sized hardcover edition."

Scheduled for an October 14 publication, the 2025 edition will include "... new writing, movie reviews, and fan letters not seen in over 40 years, plus new artwork by comic book artist Mike Norton and an introduction by Stephen King".

Mike Norton is, of course, the genius creator of one of my all-time favourite comic books: Battlepug.

As well as Norton's new art, this 200-page tome boasts features "Joe Bob Briggs’ writing on beloved horror classics ranging from Basket Case to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to The Evil Dead, [and] is essential reading for all drive-in cinema and Joe Bob Briggs fans".

This is very exciting news for me. I haven't read Joe Bob Goes To The Drive-In for decades (and I discovered I actually had two copies the other year when sorting through my shelves), but the prospect of getting hold of an expanded, new edition fills my ragged little heart with glee.

Alien: Romulus (2024)

Locked into a seemingly inescapable Weyland-Yutani contract on a bleak mining colony in deep space, Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her lovable "brother" Andy/ND-255 the android (David Jonsson), a font of dad jokes, team up with some friendly rapscallions to loot a derelict space ship that has just drifted into orbit.

However, upon docking with the craft, they discover it's not a ship, but a hastily abandoned space station. The group hopes to scavenge the cryo-pods so they can put themselves into suspended animation for the nine year flight to another colony.

However, the pods aren't fully fuelled up, so they have to venture further into the station... where they accidentally awaken a legion of facehuggers that were napping there.

Unsurprisingly, chaos ensues.

Matters aren't improved when the young pickers find the only surviving member of the station's crew is the remnants of a droid called Rook.

Rook is the same model synthetic as Ian Holm's Ash from the original Alien... and just as trustworthy.

Slightly wonky CGI has been used to replicate the late Ian Holm's face which makes Rook look more like a Gerry Anderson Thunderbird than anything else.

I get that this was supposed to be a shorthand and an Easter Egg, but ultimately it comes over as a rather uncomfortable design choice.

Written and directed by Fede Álvarez (who gave us the superb Evil Dead remake in 2013), Alien: Romulus makes no attempt to conceal what it is and this is one of its major strengths, for instance there is no need to explain xenomorphs to its audience or hide the fact that Andy is an android.

The film's biggest flaw, however, is its continual blurring of the line between respecting the franchise's lore and replaying its greatest hits (Andy's quoting of one of Ripley's best-known lines was particularly egregious).

While it builds nicely on what has gone before (managing to tie its story, surprisingly, into key elements from Prometheus), the constant need for the script (co-written by Álvarez with Rodo Sayagues) chokes on a surfeit of heavy-handed homages to earlier Alien movies.

And the thing is, it doesn't need them: there's clearly a cracking slasher in space horror film here, with its cast of teenage chum ready to feed the unstoppable, acid-blooded, monsters haunting the floating house.

It is potentially, as Joe Bob Briggs would call it, a perfect "spam in a cabin" movie.

Important elements are nicely foreshadowed and the central performances from the young cast are wholly believable (and appropriate for a sci-fi spin on the slasher genre), this could have been another classic in the well-loved franchise.

And it is a fun movie, but it's let down purely by film's teeth-grindingly awkward urge to scream: "you know that bit you liked in that other Alien film, well here it is in our film!"

Joe Bob Was My Guru

Over the years, I've talked about how I was inspired to become a journalist by the adventures of Tintin and Clark Kent, and that it was reading a reprint of Fantastic Four #17 that got me hooked on comics, I've talked about my favourite authors (e.g. Philip Reeve, HP Lovecraft et al) and my introduction to the wonderful world of roleplaying games many decades ago.

But I'm pretty sure I've never discussed the man that inspired me to start reviewing movies - particularly movies that other people might consider "bad" (such as trashy horror flicks).

That man was the one and only Joe Bob Briggs (aka film critic John Bloom), and, in particular, his first book, Joe Bob Goes To The Drive-In - a collection of his tongue-in-cheek reviews from The Dallas Times-Herald.

Joe Bob Goes To The Drive-In

The Penguin Originals edition of the book was published in 1989 and I'm pretty sure I picked it up soon after that.

At that time, mainstream movie critics, epitomised by the BBC's Barry Norman, felt completely disconencted to my own movie-watching experience.

They were a snobbish elite who either ignored the sort of films I loved or looked down their noses at them, dismissing with snarky asides and patronising put-downs.

All they ever praised - it seemed to me - were dull, earnest films that I had zero interest in.

Then I read Joe Bob Goes To The Drive-In.

And suddenly I knew how I wanted to review films.

Joe Bob, for instance, coined the phrase "spam-in-a-cabin" - which I use freely in reviews and conversation - to describe a certain style of horror film where the protagonists are trapped in a small environment by their attackers - supernatural or otherwise - and anyone can die at any time.

He was funny, clever, crass, and carefree. He'd talk about the T&A content in a film as well as the volume of blood spilled and body count.

Suddenly film reviews didn't have to read like dry, academic dissertations in Sight & Sound (a magazine designed to suck the fun out of films since 1932).

Seriously, if you love horror movies, trash cinema, drive-in fodder, you need to find a copy of Joe Bob's book and read it now.

I was surprisingly lucky that when I was allowed to create the position of "film critic" on the local newspaper that I worked for, I was pretty much given free reign.

Although I was never clever enough to go full Joe Bob, I'm pretty sure I was the first to use the phrase "spam-in-a-cabin" in the pages of the Kent & Sussex Courier.

My guru's inspiration shone through even brighter when I broadened my reviewing to the latest, trashy VHS tapes. I somehow got myself onto the mailing lists of several "low budget" video houses and, for a time, was reviewing three or four low-budget sci-fi/horror/action flicks a week.

It was in seeking to ape Joe Bob's style that I found the first inklings of my own "voice".