"Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In" for 4/20/90

cutline: Patty Mullen as "Frankenhooker"--when she says "Wanna date?" you better say yes

By Joe Bob Briggs

Drive-In Movie Critic of Grapevine, Texas

First there was "Frankenstein." Then there was "Bride of Frankenstein." Then there was "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein."

Now, the movie that will still be grossing us out twenty years from now--no, I'll go farther than that, this is a movie MORE disgusting than "Let Me Die a Woman," the 1978 classic showing actual surgical footage of a man being turned into a woman. You've heard about it. It's here. A perfect 100 on the Vomit Meter.

I'm talking about "Frankenhooker."

It's not that we haven't seen the story before. Or stories. It's a combination of every brain-research, mad-scientist, and psycho movie of the past 30 years. It even reminds you of Ed Gein, the famous Plainfield, Wisconsin handyman and psycho who collected body parts, dressed them like deers, and danced around in the moonlight with their skin strapped to his body. "Fun Ed," as we like to call him around the trailer house, was the inspiration for "Psycho" and, more important, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

But this is not just another exploding-head flick. This is a romantic comedy. I'm not kidding. It's a black comedy, but it's so far beyond black that it's more like a black-hole comedy. It's a movie that will probly get laughs on Friday nights at the Nevada State Institute for the Criminally Insane. And, as you all know, that's the highest compliment I ever give.

Let me put it this way. When they sent the movie over to the MP double-A ratings board in El Lay to have it screened, the head honcho called up the distribution company and said, "I'm gonna do you guys a favor. I'm going to rewind this film and send it back to your office and return your check for the screening fee, and then we're both going to act like it never happened. Because we don't have an 'S' rating over here."

The distribution executive said, "S rating? You mean for Sexy?"

"No! For 'S---'!"

So the movie company sent it over to the MP double-A appeals board instead. Those are guys who meet in New York and frequently overturn decisions of the El Lay board. But the last I heard, they still didn't have any rating on the movie.

The company is considering an ad campaign that says "Frankenhooker! First movie in history to be rated S!"

Here's the plot: Little Jeffrey lives in the New Jersey suburbs with his mother, the blimpola Louise Lasser. Usually Jeffrey is happy just tinkering around with live brains in petrie dishes, trying to make them grow eyes and live in fish tanks. But then one day Jeffrey's fiancee gets Cuisinarted by a runaway lawnmower, and the only thing Jeffrey can salvage is her head. That's okay, though, because he has a plan--the same plan formulated by Fuad Ramses, the maniac Egyptian caterer in "Blood Feast." Jeffrey will collect body parts until he has a complete Elizabeth again.

Where to find his body parts? Forty-Second Street--where else?

How to hook his hookers? With crack--what else?

But this is no ordinary crack. This is New Jersey mad-scientist electrically-charged Super Crack. It has only one bad side effect. When you take it, your whole body explodes into twenty or thirty pieces.

"After all, I'm not killing anybody," mumbles Jeffrey as he mixes his solution. "It's the crack that's gonna kill em. If they don't wanna do it, they can just say no."

The scene where Jeffrey pays for nine hookers at once, takes em to a dingy hotel room, and measures their equipment turns out to be . . . well . . . explosive.

I've never seen anything like it.

And it gets worse.

Let's take a look at those totals: Twenty-seven breasts. (Thirty-five if you count the ones that are . . . never mind.) Fourteen dead bodies. Exploding heads. Brain in a jar. Brain in a fish tank. Drill-through-the-head psycho-therapy. Head slicing. Girlfriend-eating lawnmower. Bunion filing. Candlelight dinner with a severed head (Beaujolais poured through her mouth). Spewing body parts. Exploding hookers. Cameo appearance by John Zacherle, the creepy late-night movie host of the fifties and sixties, the man who started it all. Excellent Morton Downey impersonation by Tom Hair. Heads roll. Arms roll. Legs roll. Everything rolls. Gratuitous Swede. Drive-In Academy Award nominations for James Lorinz, as Jeffrey, for saying "Medical schools upset me, mother--I'm anti-social--I'm becoming dangerously amoral" and for apologizing to the splattered corpses; Joseph Gonzalez, as Zorro the pimp, for setting a world neck-chain record and saying "My women just blew up on me"; Patty Mullen, a former Penthouse Pet of the Year, as "Frankenhooker," for staggering down 42nd Street with suture marks all over her body and giving new meaning to the phrase "Wanna date?"; and, of course, producer Edgar Ievins and director Frank Henenlotter, the geniuses who created "Basket Case 1 and 2," "Brain Damage," and have now established an even lower standard in horrible taste. My kind of guys.

Four stars. Best of '90. Joe Bob says check it out.

JOE BOB'S ADVICE TO THE HOPELESS

Communist Alert! The Lumberjack Drive-In in Nacogdoches, Tex., has vanished without a trace. You know, the woods are real deep out there, and, according to Chuck Garner of Coppell, Tex., it was one of those Stephen King things. Remember, without eternal vigilance, it can happen here. To discuss the meaning of life with Joe Bob, or to get free junk and his world famous "We Are the Weird" newsletter, write Joe Bob Briggs, P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, TX 75221. Joe Bob's Fax line is always open: 214-368-2310.

Dear Joe Bob:

My kid brother put my multi-vitamins in the microwave & nuked them on "high" for three minutes. Later, I found that he had squirted all of my facial beauty products into a bowl and froze them in the meat freezer. Why is this happening? Just this morning I saw him suspiciously eyeing a bottle of my soft contact saline solution.

Shelley Rae Cuffman

Carrollton, Tex.

Dear Shelley Rae:

What's your brother's name?

I'd like to invite him to a party.

Dear Joe Bob,

I support your ideas concerning censors; the double standard is alive and well if you've seen "Die Hard," "Rambo 3," or any action film in the near future. Incidentally, who is Tipper Gore? I've heard the name before and I'm pretty sure it's another self- righteous goody-goody who thinks horror is responsible for every death since WWII. What can be done to stop the MPAA? I've been writing to them non-stop for a few months now and I won't give in until they install an "A" rating for more gore. Someone's got to fight these moronic windbags. I hope you can offer me some opinions on the censors. It's nice to find someone who knows enough about horror to be familiar enough to censor bash.

Sincerely,

Robert Erater

Twin Falls, Idaho

Dear Robert:

Tipper Gore is a woman who was named after a dog to magnify her intelligence.

Dear Joe Bob,

During the late fifties and early sixties I went to the drive-in as often as possible, usually with nubile lasses. One movie I saw parts of eight or ten times was "Three Faces of Eve." How did that ever turn out?

Sincerely,

Jim Eslinger

Terre Haute, Ind.

Dear Jim:

The third face won. Then Joanne Woodward went on to a whole new career called "Three Facelifts of Eve."

Dear Joe Bob,

I was cookin' up some bar-b-q armadillo the other day in my new teflon-coated frying pan when suddenly one of those fundamental questions of life occurred to me. Maybe you can help. If teflon really is non-stick, how do they get it to stick to the pan?

Jon Bowner

Richardson, Tex.

Dear Jon:

There's a half-inch layer of congealed bacon grease UNDER the Teflon.

Dear Joe Bob,

Once again, the paranoid and narrow-minded are waging the age old attempt to censor music. This time under the guise of something as seemingly harmless as a sticker. A new approach perhaps, but censoring music is hardly a new idea.

You remember the story of David in the Old Testament? As a loyal subject of King Saul, he killed the Philistine giant and led the King's armies into numerous victories. Everything was fine until the jubilant Israelite throngs began singing "Saul has slain his thousands and David his ten thousands." Upon hearing that one, Saul plotted to have David silenced permanently. All because he didn't like the lyrics of the number one song on the hit parade.

Back in merry old England, Lady Greensleeves wasn't at all amused by the ballad named after her. "Greensleeves" was a tongue-in-cheek poke at the Lady (a notorious bed-hopper), who had never "cast off discourteously" any lover and everybody knew it. So, how do you stop the music when it's the latest rage among the common fold? In that case, somebody was hired to write religious lyrics to the tune in substitution. That's right--"What Child Is This?", that Christmas classic, was the product of deliberate censorship, not divine inspiration. (Don't remind the Baptists about that one. They'll think it's a great new idea.)

But, that's all ancient history--we've put all that behind us now, right? Hardly. Paranoid white folks banned the singing of negro spirituals during the Civil War. Black artists continued to have their music subjected to censorship for the next hundred years or so, but nobody seemed to notice. Or care.

Then, the first white vocal group to have their music banned caused quite an uproar. The song was "Wake Up, Little Susie." You know, the one about the two kids who fall asleep at the movies. The lyrics were said to be "suggestive." Suggestive of what?! Does it suggest that innocent kids will be presumed guilty and their reputation shot if they don't get home by ten o'clock? If that were the message, parents would have had that song on the required listening list. Never mind that "Wake Up, Little Susie" is about a couple of kids who didn't do anything, the lyrics are about S-E-X. Slap a sticker on that one.

Among the numerous songs by blacks that were banned, "Dancin' In The Street" ought to be remembered as the most ludicrous example of musical paranoia. That song was said to be directly responsible for inciting race riots in Chicago and Detroit during the Civil Rights Movement. Of course, the minute "Dancin' In The Street" was banned, it soared up the charts. Everybody wanted to hear the song they weren't supposed to hear.

Which brings me to this point: Slap a sticker on a recording to indicate it contains explicit subject matter ant it inevitably draws attention to it, not away from it. Do sticker advocates think that when a kid sees a warning sticker he'll put that recording down? Has the movie industry's rating system succeeded in preventing kids from viewing adult subjects? Ask any kid who has ever sneaked into the movies if it was a G-rated flick that they risked bodily expulsion for.

Many people are of the opinion that parents should decide which music is suitable for their children. I'm for that. But then they go and form a coalition like Parent Music Resource Center for the purpose of collectively deciding for every parent what every child should or should not hear. They probably claim the right to do so based on expert credentials, unlike most ordinary parents. My own mother, a music education major, retired kindergarten teacher of 30 years and church organist with perfect pitch, would probably be elected to the P.M.R.C.'s board of directors. But, I can tell you, my mother still insists that "Puff the Magic Dragon" really is a song about drugs. So much for one learned expert.

Joe Bob, despite your noble effort to enlighten the public about this insidious plot, parent groups and the state legislature will probably succeed with some form of regulation in the music industry. When they do, you should not think that you have failed. Somewhere, a radio station will boost its audience share by hundreds of thousands when they announce their new format. They'll probably call it something like "American Banned Stand." Listener discretion is advised.

Suits me fine. The Drive-In audience will finally have something to listen to during intermission.

Keep up the good work, Joe Bob. Sit up straight and tell the truth, just like your Texas mamma told you to.

I'd better go now. I've got a flag in the oven.

Warm Regards,

Amy Craig

Topanga, Calif.

Dear Amy:

Unfortunately, most of the record store owners are weenies, so the way it works is: 1) Somebody complains about a record, 2) The record company slaps a sticker on the record so they don't get in trouble with The Law, and 3) The record company decides not to carry that record in the store, because it has a sticker on it, and a sticker on it means "you're asking for trouble."

The world is not full of courageous people, Amy. We've got to attack the sticker itself.

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