"Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In" for 10/27/89
cutline: Two undercover narcotics agents in "Savage Beach"
By Joe Bob Briggs
My friend Shank Struthers came by last week to play golf. I didn't wanna do it. There's still green grass on the courses, and I normally refuse to play until everthing's turned yellow and there's dead sweetgum balls laying around and all the leaves are gone off the trees so I can find my golf ball. But Shank said we can't wait all year long for winter to come, and, besides, he had the new 1990 model golf balls, which we needed to test out.
So we went out to the Highway 80 nine-hole course that looks like a cow pasture, and I tested out the balls on the first tee with my driver. Here's the results, in case you're planning to play golf this year:
Titleist: 87 yards.
ProTest: 42 yards in the air.
Jack Nicklaus: 16 yards, scootin along the ground.
XXXXXXXXX: 132 yards.
I don't know about you, but I think that's pretty conclusive evidence that the XXXXXXXXX people have done a lot of work on the aerodynamics of their ball during the past year. We only played nine holes, but I used 34 XXXXXXXXX balls just on that one day.
One thing I noticed about golf this year, though, is that people are FORGETTING THEIR GOLF ETIQUETTE. For example, here are some golfing no-no's you should be aware of if you're planning on going out:
1. If people see you wading through the weeds, swinging your five-iron like a machete, trying to get down in the bushes to find your ball, they'll only stand there waiting for about ten minutes before they start screaming "Get out of the way, you stupid idiot! Your ball is lost!" I believe the correct term is "Fore."
2. Inexperienced golfers get very upset if you drive your motorized electric golf cart too close to the hole. For example, on the par-three seventh hole, I hit a five-iron, a seven-iron, and a nine-iron to the green--and left my ball just INCHES from the hole. I parked the cart about two feet on the NON-PUTTING side of my ball, holed the putt, and then yelled back "Look out for the tire tracks on the right side of the green!" And they got upset. What did they want me to do, NOT warn em about it? Next time I'll keep my mouth shut, let em use sand wedges to putt with.
3. You know those guys that wear the white shorts and white socks and white shirt and white shoes? There's more of em this year. But if you do stuff like flip on the automatic sprinkler system when they're not looking, chunk rocks at their thousand-dollar set of Ping-brand golf clubs, make fun of their hair, most of em will eventually leave.
4. If the pond goes dry, they don't let you go down in there and hit your ball off the old tires. They say too many people never did come back up out of there once they went in.
5. If you put black paint in the ball-washers, they make you go home. I don't see why. Anybody that can play golf with a white ball, or one of those fluorescent atomic-radiation orange balls, can play with a black ball. I personally use a black XXXXXXXXX with two giant cuts in it so I get double reverse English on every shot. But I guess not everybody has that level of golfing expertise.
Shank Struthers shot a 32 on nine holes. I won't tell you my score, but if my handicap ever went up to 194, I might could beat him.
And speaking of lost causes, I called up Andy Sidaris last year--the ABC sports director who spends most of his time pointing cameras at the nekkid breasts of Playboy Playmates--and I said, "Okay, Andy, listen. You've made eight movies now, but the last five have made absolutely no sense."
And Andy said, "I resent that. 'Malibu Express' made sense. There are only FOUR that made no sense."
And so I begged him. I said, "Andy, you are by far the finest director working with Playboy Playmates, machine guns and exploding helicopters today . . ."
"What about the deadly mutant killer snake in 'Hard Ticket to Hawaii'?"
"Okay, you're the greatest director of deadly rubber snakes, too. But when you write this next script . . ."
"I've just about finished it," Andy said. "It weighs about a pound and a half."
"Well, Andy, put some scenes in there that make sense, okay? It would be a lot more enjoyable if, when people blow up, we know who they are and WHY they're blowing up. It would help also if the girls that jump into the hot tub every ten minutes had NAMES we can remember. Little things like that go a long way, Andy."
And so Andy promised he'd do better, and then--I swear to God, I'm not making this up--he had to leave to go to Florida and direct the space shuttle Challenger launch for ABC News. "Andy!" I said. "Andy!" He came back to the phone.
"'Savage Beach,'" he told me.
"What?"
"'Savage Beach.' That's the name of the new one."
And ever since then I've been waiting for it to come out. And now, from the man who's won six Emmys, Andy Sidaris, comes the sequel to "Malibu Express," "Hard Ticket to Hawaii," and "Picasso Trigger," the only movie ever made with four Playboy Playmates of the Month, a Playgirl Man of the Year, Miss Tecate 1988, the two-time world champion Indoor Speedway Motorcycle Racing Champion, the "regional media spokesman" for Panasonic, and the world kung fu champeen.
The basic plot is that Dona Speir and Hope Marie Carlton, the two undercover DEA agent Playboy Playmates from the last movie, are still running around in jungle shorts, cowboy boots and spaghetti-strap T-shirts, firing their machine guns at drug smugglers, Filipino communist guerrillas, and corrupt federal agents while their two friends, Lisa London and Miss May 1984 Patty Duffek, lounge around the pool a lot and talk on speaker phones that look like Fax machines. There's something in there about how the Japanese stole all the gold from the Philippines in World War II, and there's a crazed Claymation Ninja living on a deserted island with the gold, and our two Playboy Playmate agents just happen to find him while they're delivering life-saving serum to poor dying orphan children.
In other words, way too much plot getting in the way of the story, but Andy has done it again. In an act of totally unethical behavior, Andy put a scene in the movie of HIMSELF sitting in an office reading a copy of "We Are the Weird," the official Joe Bob Briggs newsletter. Just so he could get a halfway decent review.
In other words, Andy, you're my kind of guy!
Thirty breasts. Thirteen dead bodies. One necessary-to-the-plot "Let's all get in the hot tub and relax" scene. Exploding van. Exploding boat. Exploding Yuppie. Cocaine-infested pineapples. Machete through the back. Rooster shot with Uzis. Hari-kari. Kung Fu. Uzi Fu. Drive-In Academy Award nominations for Dona Speir, Miss March 1984, for flying an airplane through a terrible storm and saying "Shouldn't we get out of these wet clothes?" and putting the plane on auto-pilot so she can change blouses, and for being tied up by her cowboy boots but not figuring out how she could possibly get loose; Hope Marie Carlton, Miss July 1985, for getting stranded on a desert island and saying "What do you say we check out the beach?"; Michael Shane, Playgirl's Man of the Year, for having absolutely nothing to do in the movie; Dann Seki, as the dying Japanese admiral, for saying "The cancer clutches ever tighter at my heart"; Teri Weigel, Miss April 1986, for saying "My ideology means far more to me than fame and adulation" right before she whips off her blouse; Rodrigo Obregon, for exploding people for no reason and then saying "Don't spend it all in one piece!"; and Andy Sidaris, for writing a plot about computers and lost gold and satellite systems and "probability vectors" that not even ANDY can understand.
Four stars. (They've made FOUR of these!) Joe Bob says check it out.
JOE
BOB'S ADVICE TO THE HOPELESS
Communist Alert! Tacoma is down to ONE--uno--drive-in. The Auto-View is dead. The Fife is gone. The 112th Street is being torn down. That means the Star-Lite Drive-In is the last one in the city, and there are only two more in the whole rest of the county. George Meeks of Gig Harbor, Wash., is so furious that he's going to . . . well, he doesn't know exactly WHAT he's gonna do. Remember, without eternal vigilance, it can happen here. To discuss the meaning of life with Joe Bob, or to get his world-famous newsletter, write Joe Bob Briggs, P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, TX 75221. Joe Bob's Fax line is always open: 214-368-2310.
Joe Bob:
My favorite bad film of all time is "Destroy All Monsters." Filmed in Korea by a production company half-Italian and half-Israeli, Plasticville buildings, airplanes on visible strings, Godzilla with a visible Bernz-O-Matic torch in his mouth, the plot is something like this: Due to a nuclear accident, the big ones rise up and join together to lay waste to the world. Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, Ghidra and several others, all in cohort with each other. NOTHING, not even nuclear bombs, can stop them. An emergency session of the Japanese government is called to order, and what I think is the greatest line in the history of film is spoken: "Gentlemen, the situation at this point is SO BAD, it's worse than it's ever been before!" Now THAT'S A MOVIE!!! I forget how it ends, because even I have never sat through the whole thing, but it contains several scenes which appear to be outtakes of other films that have nothing whatever to do with this film at all, such as the conference of veterinarians showing a medical film of lancing a huge, football-sized boil on the trunk of an elephant, resulting in the pouring out of several buckets of maggots and worms!
Gary Olszewski
Tomales, Calif.
Dear Gary:
When does it
get to the bad part?
Dear Joe Bob,
Help! I am a Master's degree candidate at The Ohio State University, and the only meaningless junk that I have the opportunity to encounter comes from graduate school textbooks. I have determined that there must be more to life than academia, but I am not so sure as to what it would encompass (outside of the obvious importance of mass quantities of beer and the preservation of our most valued natural resource, the drive in theater).
Reply soon, a mind is a terrible thing to waste.
Chris Bleiholder
Worthington, O.
Dear Chris:
Stay in
school. Get that degree. Of course, first you have to choose a topic--something
like "Pre-Cambrian Liquids." No, that's too general.
"Pre-Cambrian Liquids in the Works of Ovid." Try that one. And the
world will be a better place.
Dear Joe Bob,
When your movie review lists two breasts, is that two separate breasts or two pairs of breasts? (I've never seen "three breasts.") If you see the same breasts twice, do you count them again, or is that considered a single sighting?
Please clear this up for us. I need to know as this may determine whether or not to see a certain movie.
Also, do you have special training in this field? Did you go to school to become a "breastologist"?
Help me,
Mike Hundt
Walnut Creek, Calif.
Dear Mike:
At least
once a year I have to explain this all over again.
1) I do not
count pairs. Each breast is an individual and is treated as such. Think of what
you're asking here. How would you be able to count side views, or Roman togas
that only expose a single?
2) Breasts
can be counted more than once in the same movie, but only if they EARN it. I'm
not giving credit for breasts that lay in the same position, doing nothing,
throughout the movie. Those would only be counted once. But for breasts that
have a wide range of tricks, they can be counted an unlimited number of times
in the course of a movie.
3)
Breast-fed until the age of 26.
Dear Mr. Joe Bob Briggs,
I am a Peace Corps volunteer sweating my hiney off here in Mali, West Africa, and am desperate for something to make me laugh and take my mind off of this oven I call my house. Yes! I really am in Africa! I've got the malaria to prove it.
Let me tell you a little about Mali. I bet you never knew that Timbuktoo exists and it's here in Mali, way up north in the desert. I live in a town called Bla, and that about describes it best, a big greasy truck stop at a major crossroads. Oh, by the way, did I mention that it's hot here?!
Stay cool,
Buddy Polovick
Bla, Mali, West Africa
Dear Buddy:
After all
the jack I've ponied up at rock concerts the last five, six years, I thought by
now you guys would at least have a few window units. Just shows you the
corruption in rock-and-roll.
Dear Mister Briggs,
As an honorary spokesperson for the Society for the Prevention of Machinational Bureaucrative Poetdeath I applaud your work, sir. You are a real American. As an individual fan, however, I must confess I have a skeleton in my rumble seat: I've not been to a drive-in since 1971! I and a young coed went to see "Gone With The Wind" at a charming little place which is now a BANK in Gainesville, Florida. Although the girl was willing and, as an "older" woman might have taught me much, I'm afraid I stubbornly insisted upon watching the film through it's entirety. Since then my life's been a total mess! And while I acknowledge some major character flaws, do you think it's possible I may have angered the Drive-In Gods?
Sincerely yours,
John Korb
Gainesville, Fla.
Dear John:
Say three
"Hail Jasons" and you're forgiven.
© 1989 Joe Bob Briggs All Rights Reserved