INTERVIEW: The many lives of Joe Bob Briggs
Image courtesy of Dark Horse / Provided with permission.
Exploitation film raconteur Joe Bob Briggs is everywhere on the genre film scene. He continues his successful Shudder series, The Last Drive-In, on select Friday nights, and this month he’s extra busy with programming also featured on AMC. He tours around the United States, bringing his monologues and Q&A sessions to adoring fans, and he appears at horror conventions, ready to sign autographs and take photos with his mutant family.
One of Briggs’ first forays into the world of exploitation occurred decades ago when he started writing a syndicated column for newspapers across the country. Many of these reviews were anthologized into a book called Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In, which has been out of print for years. Now the good folks at Dark Horse are bringing this classic title back from the dead, and they’ve added illustrations and anecdotes about the controversies surrounding some of the films on Briggs’ list.
The new edition of the text appears in bookstores Oct. 14, and Briggs will be signing copies at Movie Madness in Portland, Oregon, on Oct. 21. This event is in addition to his other appearances coming up, including Joe Bob’s Cult of Rockstar Night in New York on Oct. 23, Joe Bob’s Spooktacular Indoor All-Night Jamboree in Dallas on Oct. 31, Joe Bob’s Indoor Drive-In Geek Out in Michigan on Nov. 8-9 and another Geek Out in Houston on Dec. 13. This reviewer will be at the Oct. 23 event in Poughkeepsie, New York, reporting for Hollywood Soapbox.
“Well, this is a very surprising thing that Dark Horse wanted to do this because these articles were originally written for a newspaper back in the early-’80s,” Briggs said in a recent phone interview. “I’m surprised that they still have life, to tell you the truth, because they were written on deadlines. They were written fast. We haven’t changed them at all. I was sort of giving the finger to journalism when I first created this newspaper column because these exploitation films were considered trash by the journalism community, and they were ignored. It was considered wrong to even review these films, so this was the first column that celebrated the exploitation film in the mainstream media. Therefore I exaggerated everything to make it more of an insult to the taste of the day, and so people will read these today and say, ‘Well, why was this so controversial?’ It was controversial because we were honoring the films at all.”
The controversy 40-plus years ago came from organizations who complained that Briggs was championing movies that featured tons of sex and violence. In fact, back in the 1980s, there would be pickets outside places where Briggs was scheduled to give a talk. Today, that has completely changed; instead, Briggs sells out theaters wherever he roams.
“Many organizations complained and tried to get the column canceled,” he said. “It was a big deal at the time. It would be considered mild today by internet standards, but nevertheless, I consider it the pre-history of genre film criticism.”
Briggs said that religious groups objected to the blood and sex on display in the films, and he said this condemnation cut across many religions, from Baptists to Roman Catholics. He also came on the radar of the National Organization for Women because of a film called Pieces.
“There was a feeling that many horror films were anti-woman,” Briggs said. “And I reviewed a movie called Pieces that was on their target list, and that’s what created their efforts to get the column canceled. And then there was just taste police at mainstream newspapers. The column was syndicated, and it would run for a while in a newspaper somewhere. And it would be criticized by the taste police of whatever town that was, and they would say, ‘Well, we’re going to have to cancel this. We’re getting too much pushback on it.’ I would say, ‘Do a poll. Do a poll. Have the readers vote.’ And the readers would vote, and I would win by a landslide, 95-5 or something. And they would still cancel it. They would go ahead and cancel it anyway despite the vote because it was considered just not suitable at the time.”
Pieces, which has been featured on The Last Drive-In, is tame compared to horror films today. My God, Art the Clown would eat Pieces for breakfast, but at that time, this grungy, silly scare flick caused quite a bit of objection.
“When you had a lot of independent filmmakers, some knew what they were doing, and some didn’t know what they were doing,” he said. “That particular one [Pieces] came from Spain even though it was pretending to be an American film. The goofiness of it is part of the charm of it. It was considered misogynist, so that’s why I was attacked.”
Briggs added: “The hardest thing in the world to do is complete a motion picture, especially in the indie world, especially when you have no funds or no backing or no fame, and the fact that the movie exists is itself an accomplishment. To me, the only real sin is to be boring. Usually these films they’re anything but boring. At the time, there was no such thing. The term genre film didn’t exist. The term politically incorrect didn’t exist. There was no such thing as pop culture. The term popular culture had just been invented. It was invented at Bowling Green State University in the late-’70s by academics, so there was no way to talk about what I was doing. There was no vocabulary for it. The study of popular culture is a relatively recent thing. There was just culture and trash, and so I was dealing with everything in between those two things.”
Dark Horse is leaning into this unique cinematic history by including the stories associated with Briggs’ reviews in the new edition of the writer’s book. What they produced is a large hardcover book with art by Mike Norton and an introduction by Stephen King.
“Some people misunderstand what I do,” Briggs admitted. “They think I’m doing a Mystery Science Theater 3000 type thing, and I’m not. I’m not doing a so-bad-it’s-good thing. They’re good exploitation films; they’re bad exploitation films. I’m reviewing each film on its own merits, on its own terms. … Most of the output of Roger Corman — when he was a director and when he was a producer and when he was a distributor at New World Pictures — I mean most of that stuff, more often than not, those are extremely entertaining movies. Even the mid-range Roger Corman stuff is good. He had some turkeys, but very, very few. He was just a very intelligent filmmaker. It was just cheap. He made the movies for a small amount, but a lot of them were great movies.”
Briggs is showing no signs of slowing down. He still has new episodes of The Last Drive-In on the docket, and he has a full calendar in the coming weeks.
“I love to be out there,” he said. “I especially love the live shows. I’m always amazed when we can get 300, 400, 500 people into a theater to watch movies that are 40 or 50 years old, but it’s fun. I think it indicates the need for a certain kind of community, a certain kind of fan base. I’m happy to be out there talking to people and working hard.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In will be released by Dark Horse on Oct. 14. Click here for more information.
