Joe Bob Briggs on the ’80s B-movie renaissance and curating film
Movie critic Joe Bob Briggs is known for his reviews of drive-in movies, even if there aren’t all that many drive-ins around these days. He’s become something of a go-to guy for films with exploding heads, car chases, nudity, and all aspects of action, be it kung-fu, car-fu, or chainsaw-fu. While he was once best known for his hosting duties on The Movie Channel and TNT, introducing films as part of Joe Bob’s Drive-In and MonsterVision, he’s now an author of some repute, with the essential movie guides Profoundly Erotic: Sexy Movies that Changed History and Profoundly Disturbing: Shocking Movies that Changed History.
Lately, he’s been traveling the country, introducing films for the Alamo Drafthouse theater chain, providing all kinds of interesting and intriguing stories related to the likes of The Warriors and My Bloody Valentine. He comes to the Alamo Drafthouse Mainstreet this weekend, hosting a 30th anniversary screening of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 on Friday, January 20, and 1984’s Night of the Comet on Saturday, January 21. We spoke with Briggs by phone about what makes bad movies so good.
The Pitch: How have all of these screenings you host come about?
Joe Bob Briggs: I’ve had a relationship with the original Alamo Drafthouse in Austin for years and years. I can’t even remember the first time I went there – probably shortly after they opened. I used to do all-night shows at the Alamo Drafthouse Austin. I wrote a book called Profoundly Disturbing, and we showed clips from every movie in the book. [laughs] I sort of talked about the whole phenomenon of “too grisly for the public” movies and I was still talkin’ at 3:30 in the morning and nobody’d left.
I said, “I’m gonna wind this up really quick,” and they said, “No, no: we’re hear for the night!” The Alamo Drafthouse Austin was kind of a free-wheeling place where they did a lot of innovative cult film, curated shows, and they developed such a following that, after a time, we were able to do things we wouldn’t be able to do at any other theater in the country – things, if we tried them anywhere else, nobody would show up.
We built up such a great audience that trusted us, and would come, no matter what we did, so when they started expanding, I started doing shows in Yonkers, which was very different. We sort of had to start over: when you’re building a cult audience that will actually come to a theater and watch a presentation like this, you have to build up the trust. They could see it anywhere. They could watch it on their device or their phone, if they wanted to. So, you have to start with something like Evil Dead 2 – something that’s fairly common – and then, later, you can do the more obscure titles.
You’ve done Drafthouse presentations all over the country, as well as an annual show at the Chattanooga Film Festival. Is there any place in particular you like best?
Whoever wants me to come and do these [presentations], I enjoy doing them. I also think that, in the future, people will go to a theater – as opposed to watching a film somewhere else – is because it’s curated. It’s either curated by having some guy like me up there, or having the director there, or cast members there, or something. To get people to go to a theater, it has to be an event of some sort. The Drafthouse is kind of an event place: you can eat, and there’s a bar, and so they already have that extra element. But I think people want something special when they go to a theater.
It’s almost like going to the theater as it once was – people up on stage, kind of like theater with a capital ‘T’?
Yeah, and also, I think people want to be involved. People don’t want to just consume stuff. They want to be part of the party. When you have live events, you have people getting to all experience it together, and all contributing something to it. Whenever I do The Warriors, people show up in costume. Nobody told them to show up in costume, but they show up dressed up like the gang members in The Warriors. They just spontaneously decide to put on a gang costume to come to the theater, you know?
So, it’s participatory. That’s why I always hang around after – you can’t do anything before, because of spoilers. There’s always a small number who haven’t seen the movie. Usually a small number, though. After, though, you can talk about why the movie worked or didn’t work, what’s wrong or what’s right with it, so I always sort of hang around, because people want to hang around after and continue the conversation.
It’s a weird, thing, you know – to have a guy stand up and talk about the movie before you watch the movie? But it’s something that’s evolved over time.
You’d mentioned the idea that people want a curated experience. I’d imagine that, after your multiple books and people’s familiarity with your work on MonsterVision, that Joe Bob Briggs presenting a movie is enough to get people out to see a movie, even if they’re unfamiliar with it?
It’s like a DVD extra. Here’s some more in-depth information that will make you enjoy the movie more. Because I can tell stories about the background, things you wouldn’t necessarily know … there will always be one guy there, who’s the most fanatical fan of that movie in the entire universe, who’s read everything on the Internet ever said about it.
That guy is very welcome, because he’ll correct me. But for most people, they want people to distill the background: why’s this movie still being shown, especially when we show these movies from the ’80s.
Is there something about ’80s movies that appeals to fans of your type of presentation?
I’ll admit: I was very slow to come around on the ’80s, because I watched every movie shown in the ’80s. A lot of it was real crap, and so this renaissance of the ’80s – this sort of idealization of the ’80s – is very interesting to me. One of the movies we’re showing in Kansas City, Night of the Comet, that movie was not a success. That movie was a failure. I gave it a very favorable review, and always remembered it as a nice and different movie. A genre-busting movie, better than its genre, but it didn’t find its audience until now.
That’s the good thing about the ’80s, but you wouldn’t want to watch everything made in the ’80s. The good thing about the ’80s, though, is that you had the beginning of direct-to-video, where guys like Jim Wynorski could make really, really cheap movies at a price never before seen. And, there was shelf space for those direct-to-video titles, so you had a bunch of stuff come out in ’80s, and most of it was crap, but occasionally, there’d be a movie that stuck with everybody. It was a time of experimentation, and that’s always good.
Joe Bob Briggs hosts two movies at Alamo Drafthouse Mainstreet this weekend: a 30th anniversary screening of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 on Friday, January 20, and 1984’s Night of the Comet on Saturday, January 21. More information and tickets can be found at the Alamo’s website.
