Beyond the Call of Duty

"Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In" for 10/23/92

cutline: Jillian McWhirter and Jan-Michael Vincent comfort each other after being told they won't have any lines to say, in the exploding-bamboo Vietnam flick "Beyond the Call of Duty."

By Joe Bob Briggs

Drive-In Movie Critic of Grapevine, Texas

I was telling Wanda Bodine that it's been a long time since I've seen a good exploding-bamboo movie where they just crank it up and start blowing off the heads of Viet Cong soldiers.

You know that way they die in the movies?

They pop out from behind a palm tree in their little Mousey Tongue jackets, raise their rifle, and fire 4,000 rounds directly toward the camera. ALL of the rounds miss the camera AND all the American soldiers in the movie.

Then somebody like Jan-Michael Vincent takes aim with a PISTOL, fires twice, and the trigger-happy Viet Cong rifleman with the bad eyesight throws his arms up in the air, shakes his whole body like a man doing an epileptic monkey dance, and then falls forward head-first over a log. Sometimes there's nothing on the other side of the log except a 100-foot drop into a swamp.

"How come they always fall forward?" Wanda Bodine was asking me.

"What do you mean?"

"It just seems like, if you got shot in the stomach or the head, you would fall BACKWARD."

This is the kind of question Wanda has been asking lately. It's real irritating.

So I told her, "If he feel backwards, we wouldn't get to witness the death throes."

"What are death throes?"

"You know, that part right before he dies where he jerks around like a catfish with a thumb in his mouth."

"Yeah, and why DOES he do that?"

Wanda doesn't know the slightest thing about how movies are made.

"So we'll know which side he's on. If he was on our side, it would take him ten minutes to die, and he'd save 40 orphans by throwing his body on a live grenade."

Anyhow, that's not the point. The point is that finally, after twenty years, they still can't make a REAL Vietnam movie. Have you noticed that every Nam flick--no matter whether they star Stallone, or Chuck Norris, or whoever--always takes place AFTER THE WAR IS OVER? (I'm not counting art films like "Apocalypse Now." I'm talking about old-fashioned war films where there's an enemy, and the goal is to kill the enemy.) Stallone is always going over there to rescue missing-in-action prisoners. Chuck rescues MIA's and orphans. Then there's a whole bunch of "Assemble The Squad" pictures about Nam, where some guy is lost over there, or held in a secret Viet Cong dungeon, and so all his old buddies call each other up and say, "Hey, buddy, are you with us? It's time to ASSEMBLE THE SQUAD." And then ten minutes later these guys are quitting their jobs, climbing into camouflage suits, getting their M-16's out of the garage, and getting ready to boogie.

In other words, it's only okay to blow away Cong soldiers after they've stopped fighting.

Is this a great country or what?

"By the way," Wanda asked me, "why do they always blow up the guard tower? And why does the guard always jump out of the guard tower BEFORE it blows up?"

Some things cannot be explained to women.

"Because it looks neat," I told her. "It makes us think we won the goldurn war."

Anyhow, what I'm leading up to is "Beyond the Call of Duty," the latest flick from the king of Filipino directors, Cirio "What Can We Blow Up Today" Santiago. The following is the complete plot of this movie:

Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat Kaplooey Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat.

Jan-Michael Vincent, rebel American soldier, furrows his brow and starts evacuating his men from Nam.

Kapow Boom Kaplooey Budda-budda-budda.

Documentary filmmaker Jillian McWhirter gets some orphans out of the Catholic church and begs Jan-Michael to take em all with him as he escapes in a patrol boat down the Mekong River.

Kaboom Boom exploding stuff exploding stuff exploding stuff.

Jillian can't decide whether to sleep with Jan-Michael or fellow hunk soldier Eb Lottimer.

The obnoxious little orphans sing "Amazing Grace" when their nun gets it in the back with an AK-47.

Plowing down the river, kaplooey chuck-a-chuck-a, heavily armed bridge ahead, oh no, kablooey, "Don't worry, sir, I'll take it out," Pow Boom Bang rat-a-tatta.

In other words, there's about FIVE MINUTES of dialogue in this flick, and the rest is Viet Cong soldiers throwing their arms up in the air and dying like cockroaches that have been zapped with Raid. There's even a few scenes where Jan-Michael Vincent puts the machine gun on a turret, and they die IN ORDER, one after another. In fact, there's so much dying in this flick that there's no time for the flick. I had to read the press kit to figure out what was going on.

My kinda movie.

Two hundred fifty-four dead bodies--the new modern record. No breasts. One motor vehicle chase (the whole movie). Exploding bamboo. Two exploding copters, with fireballs. Exploding Filipino extras. Exploding guard tower (of course). Exploding fishing boat. Exploding house. Exploding truck. Throat-cutting. Two innocent civilians burned alive. Leech attack. Firefights. Riot. Kung Fu. Rocket launcher Fu. Drive-In Academy Award nominations for Jan-Michael Vincent, for saying "You know I'm a family man" to the woman he's sleeping with until he gets home to the states; and for Cirio Santiago, the director, for not letting any dialogue get in the way.

Two stars.

Joe Bob says check it out.

JOE BOB'S ADVICE TO THE HOPELESS

Bureaucrat Alert! The Studio Drive-In in Culver City, Calif., was originally scheduled to be ripped down after 42 years, to be replaced with a housing complex--because the GOVERNMENT wants it that way. The owners were still making money, but something called the Culver City Redevelopment Agency sent their commissars in to deal the death blow. Fortunately, the big-shot developer started fighting with the agency and eventually backed out of the deal, and now it's gonna stay open for at least one more year. Postcard heat would help. Laurie Specter of Hollywood, Tony Anthony of West Hollywood, Jamie Green of El Lay, David J. Schow (screenwriter of "Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III") of El Lay, David Lee Fein (screenwriter of "Cheerleader Camp") of El Lay, Barbara Johnson of El Lay, Janice Jacobson of Culver City and Ferold Kress of Culver City all remind us that, without eternal vigilance, it can happen here.

This week Joe Bob takes his rightful place as the leader of the Men's Movement, when his long-awaited "Iron Joe Bob" is published by Atlantic Monthly Press. To discuss the meaning of life with Joe Bob, or to get free junk in the mail or 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.

Joe Bob,

Greetings from the home of Island Drive-In!

Do Adrienne Barbeau movies discuss the duality of man?

Thanks,

Lewis Hurwitz

Almeda, Calif.

Dear Lewis:

I hate it when you guys make the question funnier than I can make the answer.

Dear Joe Bob--

Try to agree with me here.

We are living in perhaps the most boring time ever known to man. Our brains are overpowered. Everything falls a bit short.

We get all of the diversions. Television, cinema, affordable drugs. But after a while, that stuff won't work because we know it's just not real.

Here's the idea. We get our scientists to whip up a batch of genetic monsters, gargoyles and winged alligators. Everything they can unleash. The country can buy some cheap land with all this tax money, some place down in Florida maybe. We can create a real movie.

We can charge tourists two bucks for a harrowing bus ride. Japanese with cameras, flabby white-suburban families. We can soup up the buses with only 454 Chevy engines and glass packs.

Breathe some of your genius into this, let's see if it can be done.

Signed,

Hanging (by my neck) in there,

Troy Hyde

Murphy, Tex.

Dear Troy:

Let me get this straight. You wanna breed freaks who can take money from the Japanese.

We already have that. It's called "Hollywood."

Dear Mr. Briggs:

Your point on AIDS (God sending it "to show how mean . . . a healthy man can be toward a sick man") is well taken. At the risk of belittling and offending my stupid Christian brethren, I will point out that God rarely punishes people directly on earth, but He does allow you to sin and suffer the consequences. AIDS and much else is a matter of reaping what you sow. The disease would not exist if people behaved, and some Christians can't resist the urge to say, "I told you so." But if we lose our compassion, God will judge us all the more harshly because we ought to know better. The fundamentalists want justice, and I seem to be in a very small minority. I wonder what God will send us next.

Yours most sincerely,

James Isaak

Hillsboro, Ore.

Dear Jimbo:

AIDS would not exist "if people behaved"?

James James James James James!

Nobody BEHAVES, James.

Nobody.

I'm surprised if they don't teach this at your church.

Dear Joe Bob,

Any special reason why you have not declared an official Republican Alert against the "USA Up All Night" show, which routinely mangles such cinematic classics as "State Park" and "A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell?"

Natt Irons

Berkeley, Calif.

Dear Natt:

Did you know that, when USA Network shows movies like "Nightmare Sisters," they actually make the producer of the movie shoot NEW SCENES! So that nobody has to look at any NEKKID BREASTIES!

To which I say, "What the heck was cable invented for in the first place?"

These people are sick.

Dear Joe Bob,

Larkspur Landing is the Marin Countiest place in the whole world. You'd hate it. It's got a Mexican restaurant (but not a Meskin one), a seafood restaurant, a huge fitness place, lots of cute dress shops with cute names. The bookstore is called "A Clean Well-Lighted Place," and it's got a section on Men's Studies. There's a coffee house that serves espresso and cappucino and the gourmet-coffee-of-the-day RIGHT INSIDE THE BOOKSTORE. You'd hate it.

All over the country I tried to find a copy of "The Cosmic Wisdom of Joe Bob Briggs." Nowhere. Not Fayetteville (certainly). Not Chapel Hill. Not New York. Not San Francisco. Not Santa Cruz. Not even Berkeley. I was getting desperate enough that I was even thinking of using the coupon in the "We Are The Weird" newsletter except I didn't want to cut up a copy of "We Are The Weird" or I was too cheap to pay the extra two bucks shipping and handling. But finally I found a copy in A Clean Well-Lighted Place bookstore in Larkspur Landing, Marin County, only a couple feet away from where people were thumbing through the international art magazines. You should be proud. Random House should be ashamed.

This part is serious, and maybe important. I read "We Are The Weird" every week. Thoroughly. Every word (well maybe I don't always reread the masthead). I finally realized that the Grapevine section, where you pass along news of all the other fanzines, is as important as the rest of it. (Except that I notice you are using the first person plural--"We have just come across X's excellent . . ."--what is it, do you think "We Are The Weird" is "The New Yorker" or something?) It took me a while to catch on (I am an academic, so I'm a bit slow). I never thought of "We Are The Weird" as a "fanzine": my first exposure to fanzines, way back in 1963 or so, was a junky sci-fi fanzine put out on ditto masters by the wife of a prominent sci-fi writer, and "We Are The Weird" seems to me more substantial than that. I'm not wrong about "We Are The Weird," but I may be wrong about the quality of the others.

Something is happening out there that I (and many others) ought to know about. I can't subscribe to all, or even many, of those fanzines, not just because of the time it would take to read all of them and the expense, but because my tastes are not as extensive as yours and your readers' (I much prefer breasts to fu). So somebody ought to put out an anthology, or something, perhaps an annual, of the best, worst, most representative, good, bad, and ugly of the fanzines, for a few dollars or more. (Somebody HONEST, that is: somebody who will neither rip off the original producers nor flinch from the tasteless.) People are doing something vital--artistically and creatively as well as politically. If I say that those fanzines are the best of America, in the tradition of Walt Whitman, then I will sound like the academic I am, so I won't say that. But maybe there is hope after all.

Your friend,

Eric Hyman

Fayetteville, N.C.

Dear Eric:

Let's not compare these fanzine people to Walt Whitman, because, after all, Walt was a little bit of a sniveling weenie. But you're right. The REAL free press in America right now, uninhibited and independent, is in the fanzine world. That's why I write about it so much.

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