The one and only, Joe Bob Briggs. (photo by the author.)
Cast your minds back to a simpler time, before the internet existed (or, at least, before it was readily available outside of major metropolitan areas and/or to people without technical knowhow and the money for a “home computer.”)
In this before time, in the ancient long, long ago (read: the 1990s), you simply turned on your TV and things would be on it. They were things that, if they weren’t hugely popular, you had no way of learning more about, outside of what you saw on the screen. You might be able to find a fleeting description of it in that week’s TV Guide magazine.
(My TV and movie consumption in those days lived and died by what I found in the thousands of listings printed in each TV Guide issue. Besides my parents’ HBO subscription, their decades-long commitment to keeping a TV Guide in the house as I was growing up helped spur my budding cinephilia. Thanks, mom and dad.)
One of the things you might have stumbled upon in the mid-to-late ‘90s was a program on TNT called MonsterVision. At that point, a mid-tier cable package consisted of about 30-or-so channels; the entertainment landscape wasn’t so supersaturated then – although, at the time, 30 different cable channels could feel overwhelming – that you never had to worry about running out of quality filmed entertainment. You had to really seek things out back then.
MonsterVision aired between the summer of 1991 and the summer of 2000, but I became aware of it after TNT overhauled the format in 1996 and added a new host named Joe Bob Briggs. Born John Irving Bloom, the man who would create the redneck character known as Joe Bob Briggs was born in the place I currently call home – Dallas, Texas.
Raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, then heading back to Dallas after studying journalism at Vanderbilt University, Bloom created the tongue-in-cheek persona of Joe Bob Briggs in the early 1980s while writing for the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald.
An unapologetic evangelist for a certain type of entertainment he categorizes as “drive-in movies,” Bloom, as the Briggs character, wrote funny and affectionate reviews for (in)famous movies of cult and B-level – but more often, Z-level – status.
We’re talking about grindhouse exploitation genre pictures with lurid (and hilarious) titles like Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter, Samurai Cop, I Spit on Your Grave, and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, which was also lampooned in an episode of the cult series Mystery Science Theater 3000. Briggs became a champion for dubious auteurs like Herschell Gordon Lewis (Blood Feast, She-Devils on Wheels) and Ray Dennis Steckler (Blood Shack, Sexual Satanic Awareness).
TNT’s MonsterVision aired titles in this vein alongside another of the cable channel’s offerings called 100% Weird, which I remember as screening mostly 1950s and ‘60s schlock horror and sci-fi, like the (arguably) worst movie ever made, Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space. Truth be told, I was a bigger fan of 100% Weird than of MonsterVision in those days.
Don’t tell Joe Bob.
The format that Briggs adopted for his revamped version of MonsterVision was along the lines of a popular format for the time. A cable channel would show a movie, but in the interstitial segments going into and coming out of commercial breaks would be a host or hosts who would discuss trivia about the movie they were screening or other humorous anecdotes about tangentially movie-related topics. There was one in the mid-90s called Dinner and a Movie, where two hosts would prepare a meal in these interstitial segments, sharing the recipe and how to make it. These types of shows were variations on the theme of the ‘60s and ‘70s horror movie hosts like Ghoulardi, and, later, characters like Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.
Confession time. I can’t swear that I ever watched one of Joe Bob’s MonsterVision episodes from start to finish. It was a show that operated, for me, as comforting background noise as I was doing other stuff. I’d look up periodically when something this funny bumpkin said caught my ear, or when the movie he was showing got really interesting. Over the years, Joe Bob Briggs became a character I was vaguely familiar with and who brought up nostalgic memories of late-night TV weekends during high school, but I never went out of my way to trace his career.
In 2018, the niche horror streaming service Shudder – which is owned by AMC Networks – announced a new show: The Last Drive-in with Joe Bob Briggs. Joe Bob has been resurrected, returning to his roots of screening exploitation grindhouse fare while satirically – but lovingly – championing these less reputable titles.
Between June 28 and July 5 of this year, Briggs partnered with the American Genre Film Archive (AGFA) for an exclusive series of double features at four storied independent movie theaters. The theaters were: Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, MA; Hollywood Theatre in Portland, OR; Music Box Theatre in Chicago, IL; and The Texas Theatre in Dallas, which is why you are reading this.
The AGFA is a 501(c)(3) non-profit, formed in 2009 and based in Austin, TX, dedicated to “preserv[ing] the legacy of genre movies through collection, conservation, and distribution.” As they say on their website, “AGFA will never rest until genre movies rule the world.” Rae and I went to an AGFA screening circa 2013 at an Alamo Drafthouse theater – Alamo founders Tim and Karrie League serve as AGFA advisors – for a movie called Never Too Young to Die, a 1986 action film starring John “Have Mercy” Stamos. It’s an absolutely bonkers movie and I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Brainy Joe Bob. (photo by the author.)
Briggs’s brain child (pun completely intended) for his rolling roadshow was called Cerebellum Night. It featured two late-1980s schlock-fests called The Brain (1988) and Brain Damage (1989).
Directed by Edward Hunt, The Brain concerns psychologist-cum-televangelist Dr. Anthony Blakely, who hosts a TV show called Independent Thinkers. His shtick is helping people find inner strength and fulfillment through his self-help-styled speeches. In reality, he is brainwashing people via the airwaves with the help of (CHORDS OF SUSPENSE) a giant alien brain!
The brain in The Brain. (photo credit: Brightstar Films)
The inimitable David Gale portrays Dr. Blakely. The blinding wattage of his scenery chewing and camp aesthetic in The Brain matches that of his best-known role, as the nefarious Dr. Carl Hill in the comedy-splatter classic Re-Animator. (If you haven’t seen Re-Animator, it’s a must-watch for any fan of over-the-top camp horror.) At one point, after the mysterious alien creature devours one of Dr. Blakely’s detractors, Gale quips, as Blakely, with a droll and deadpan delivery, “Well…that’s food for thought.” The audience erupted into cheers.
I won’t spoil the rest, but our hero arrives in the form of a troubled high school student who is sent to Dr. Blakely for pulling one too many adolescent pranks. While in session with the bad doctor, he discovers the existence of the brain, and goes about trying to foil Blakely’s insidious plot.
The Brain was a hoot, but Brain Damage really scratched the itch for schlocky, low budget ‘80s horror. Directed by exploitation maestro Frank Henenlotter, Brain Damage tells the story of Brian, a young man who finds himself the host of a parasitic worm-like creature named Aylmer.
In case you were wondering, yes, the creature design for Aylmer is extremely phallic. (photo credit: The Brain Damage Company)
The creature has moved from victim to victim since the Middle Ages. It injects a pleasurable and highly addictive drug into its host; while Brian is lost in the ecstasy of the trip, Aylmer controls his body to attack people so it can devoir their brains. When Brian realizes what he’s being made to do, he makes every attempt to isolate himself in an effort to keep Aylmer from killing more people.
There is a lot to love about Brain Damage. Henenlotter’s greasy, grimy aesthetic and sense of dark humor feel like a warm blanket (best not to look too closely to decipher exactly what’s making that blanket warm). The director of titles like Bad Biology and Frankenhooker – a movie I desperately need to catch up with; I mean, come on, with a title like that, how can I not? – Henenlotter is a master at what he does.
My favorite of his – and one of my favorites in this particular genre – is Basket Case. It was a high point of Brain Damage for me to see the protagonist of Basket Case, Duane, and his twin brother, Belial, turn up for a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo. The funniest part of the cameo is that Duane encounters Brian on a subway car and gets up from his seat because he’s too freaked out by the way Brian is behaving. If you’ve seen Basket Case, the fact that anything Duane sees could freak him out is hysterically funny.
Added to these shenanigans is the fact that Aylmer speaks perfect English, with a soothing, almost aristocratic voice. The little creature was voiced by actor/singer/TV horror host John Zacherle. During his introduction to Brain Damage, Joe Bob mentioned in passing that Zacherle was concerned about his name showing up on the film, because that would mean he would have to declare his income for the job to the IRS, to which he owed a significant amount of back taxes at the time.
Brain Damage is a hoot-and-a-half (on the meticulously crafted hoot scale); it must be seen to be believed.
It was a packed house for Cerebellum Night. For someone like me – what, in internet parlance, might be referred to as a “lurker” – it was phenomenal people watching. As you might imagine, Joe Bob Briggs draws in an exceedingly eccentric crowd. There was a sense of warm camaraderie and excitement in the air as we waited for Joe Bob to take the stage.
Full house at The Texas. (photo by the author.)
I attended the event with my brother, Jordan. He’s a bigger fan of Joe Bob than I am; he’s a regular viewer of The Last Drive-In. He is also a connoisseur of low-budget exploitation flicks. (Take note, this will likely be the only time I use the dreaded term “flick” to describe a movie. I typically loathe seeing any film critic use it in a review, but, come on, if any subset of movies yearns for the word flick, it’s this one.) Jordan’s knowledge of micro-budget gorefests is damn near encyclopedic, so I knew this was an experience that I wanted to share with him.
(Lengthy side-note: In an effort to get Rae interested in coming along – because I’m a masochist, but also… a little bit of a sadist – I convinced her to give one episode of The Last Drive-In a go. I knew it would not go well. I was correct. I set the over/under at her yelling “STOP” at 20 minutes to a few of our friends via text before we started. I desperately wanted her to live-tweet the experience, which, granted, would have been difficult, since her Twitter account has been inactive for years. She did make one glorious observation in the text thread: “[Joe Bob Briggs] is Big Tex. Drunk. And…horny?” She might not have liked it, but she understood it. Completely. She made it 5 minutes and 42 seconds before we moved on to something else. C'est la Rae.)
Because everything is political, I did have reservations about Joe Bob’s Indoor Drive-In Geek-Out Double Feature. In my mind, the kind of good ole boy, redneck vibe that Briggs has cultivated would play well at something like, I don’t know, a strip club on a Tuesday before 1pm.
Briggs used an anti-intellectualism lens to chide cineastes for devoting all of our time and snobby opinions to the works of art house directors like Jean-Luc Godard, instead of trashy gold, as exemplified in the work of someone like Herschell Gordon Lewis. I wanted to stand up and yell, “We can do both, you know!” Plus, it felt like he was trying to whip up an us-vs.-them sentiment in the crowd that felt right on the edge of what you would call nationalism in political speeches. I did not enjoy it.
Meanwhile, Briggs’s sidekick on The Last Drive-In is Darcy the Mail Girl, a scantily clad, and – what I’m assuming was crucial to getting the gig – buxom woman who reads fan mail and lightly banters with Briggs during his rants before the movie. (Darcy sat alongside Briggs for autographs during the Cerebellum Night screenings.)
It all has a very Hooters/strip club/male chauvinist pig vibe.
Hence one of Briggs’s staple statistics that he includes in his “Drive-In Totals,” which is the number of breasts you can expect to see in the movie. Before each movie he screens, Briggs rattles off, at warp speed, the total number of items within the movie that draws in lovers of this kind of cinema, plus his star rating.
Drive-In Totals Time. (photo by the author.)
A sample Drive-In Total (for the movie Rabid):
Seventeen dead bodies.
Eight breasts.
One dead Santa Claus.
Multiple bloody armpits.
Two riots (hazmat suit, rifle-toting assassins).
Two motor vehicle crashes with explosions and fire.
Porn music soundtrack.
Close-up skin graft surgery.
Vampiric post-surgical behavior.
One new sexual armpit orifice.
Zombie truck driver.
Stabbing.
Froth-mouthed green-goo psychos.
Rabid psycho on subway.
Gratuitous porno movie theater sequence.
Head rolls.
Finger rolls.
Construction worker drill Fu. (Author’s note: Any time something happens involving some sort of fighting style, Briggs appends the word “Fu” to it, as in “Kung Fu.”)
Plastic surgery Fu.
Hot tub Fu.
BBQ chicken Fu.
Shotgun Fu.
Drive-In Academy Award nominations for Terence G. Ross, Victor Désy, Frank Moore, Howard Ryshpan, and Marilyn Chambers.
★★★★
As I told my friends in the text thread, “Ok, yes, I might be wading into un-PC middle-aged white dude territory [by enjoying this sort of entertainment], but… I’m a middle-aged white dude, so…” After attending the show, I also came to the conclusion that it’s all fairly harmless fun, and there were also roughly as many women in attendance as men, if memory serves. As my parents used to tell me before I asked to see a movie that I might have been a little too young for: “Just don’t repeat anything you see or hear in it.” (Solid parenting, IMHO.)
110% Weird. (photo by the author.)
Briggs did a great job of introducing The Brain and Brain Damage with a primer on what he tongue-in-cheek-ily dubs “Brainsploitation” movies. He took us on a tour though the subgenres within Brainsploitation, like the they-saved-Hitler’s-brain subgenre, or the revenge-for-making-me-a-head-without-a-body subgenre, exemplified by the title The Brain that Wouldn’t Die.
They saved Hitler’s head! (photo by the author.)
Joe Bob gives us a history lesson on Brainsploitation. (photo by the author.)
Take notes, there will be a test. (photo by the author.)
Briggs is, at heart, a curator of cultural artifacts that most of society has discarded as worthless detritus. I’ve been thinking about curation a lot lately. We are entering a cultural phase – or, arguably, have been in it for a decade or so, now – where any and every cultural artifact you could ever hope to find is a few clicks of a remote or taps of a phone away. This can lead to a feeling of being overwhelmed by choice, a sort of paralysis-by-analysis. This phenomenon isn’t contained to entertainment. News is completely overwhelming at this point. Curators help cull the wheat from the chaff, as it were.
Through their expertise, curators do the hard work of shaping meaning out of massive amounts of raw data and overwhelming amounts of information. I like to think of myself as a curator, of sorts. Through my reviews, I try to evaluate movies in terms of how they relate to film history, their current cultural impact, and the odds that they will stand the test of time. Hopefully my readers find value in my curatorial expertise when it comes to cinema.
I’m attracted to the kinds of transgressive, subversive movies that Joe Bob Briggs curates in his TV and live shows because they’re like a pressure release valve. They let us laugh and be shocked and be grossed-out in a safe environment. They, like virtually all movies, allow me to experience the world in a way that is radically different from how I experience it. They overturn the acceptable behavior – or, more often, show it for the hypocrisy it often is – of square society. (And, yes, I realize that I’m about the squarest person you could ever meet, which adds to the appeal of these movies for me.)
I can’t think of a better overseer for these dubious masterpieces than the man, the myth, the legend, Joe Bob Briggs. In his immortal words, “The drive-in will never die!”