"Joe Bob Goes to the
Drive-In" for 4/8/94
cutline: [TK]
By Joe Bob Briggs
Drive-In Movie Critic of Grapevine,
Texas
The
suspense is killing me.
Let's
get right to it.
Here
are the one, the only, 1993 Drive-In Academy Awards, better known as the
"Hubbies." (The name Hubbie was invented in 1983 when the official
award was first engraved on a 1968 Oldmobile Toronado hubcap. It is a tradition
that continues until the present day--except when we can't find an Olds hubcap,
in which case we use a Chevy.)
And
our first category is . . .
BEST FOREIGN FLICK
The runners-up are:
"Day of Atonement" (France), the
finest movie ever made about the true inner workings of the French-speaking
Jewish Miami Mafia, and the reasons they hate the Spanish-speaking Chilean-born
German gangsters who don't respect their heritage.
"Prison Heat" (Israel), the
bimbos-behind-bars flick about four college friends who decide to rent a van
and drive to Turkey while singing "O, Susanna," but get framed on
cocaine charges instead and sold into a white-slavery operation.
"Split Second" (England), the
sci-fi flick set in the year 2008, when "global warming" has turned
the whole world into one giant sauna, and where all the streets are knee-deep
in water, and where some kind of genetic DNA mutant with the brain of a rat is
out there ripping out human hearts and chewing on em like Reese's Peanut Butter
Cups while topless dancers dress up like Hannibal Lecter in underground
nightclubs.
"Tokyo Decadence" (Japan), the
story of a little sad-sack call girl who will do ANYTHING she's asked to do in
the finer hotels of Tokyo. The only thing creepier than what the men want to do
to her is what the men want her to do to THEM.
And the winner is . . .
"The Killer" (Hong Kong), the
story of hitmen trying to murder hitmen trying to murder other hitmen, with
shootout scenes that would make Sam Peckinpah feel like a total wimp. One
hundred twenty-seven dead bodies, and 47 million rounds of automatic-weapons
fire.
BEST SLIMEBALL
The runners-up are:
Eric Braeden, "The Ambulance," as
the creepola doctor who abducts diabetics and uses them as guinea pigs for his
experiments with pig-pancreas transplants, and says things like "Yes, I
will eventually kill you, but I assure you you'll be in perfect health when you
die."
Uri Gavriel, "Prison Heat," as
the sadistic warden who runs a white-slavery operation and grins a lot while
he's raping the inmates and saying "Soon you will come to enjoy
this."
Christopher Walken, "Day of
Atonement," as the arrogant Chilean-German drug trafficker with vicious
attack dogs who agrees to accept a ton of cocaine that's coming in on a
mattress barge and says "I should have known--never work with Jews."
Doug Wert, "Dracula Rising," as
the evil vampire who says "She has very sweet blood--I can smell it--it's
what we vampires call Blood Lite."
And the winner is . . .
Lance Henriksen, "Hard Target," a
sadistic piano-playing killer who charges rich guys $500,000 to play a
"game" where a homeless guy is given $10,000 and told that, if he
makes it ten miles to the Mississippi River, he gets to keep the money. If he
doesn't make it, the hunters kill him with a gut-ripping laser arrow.
BEST FEMME FATALE
The runners-up are:
Kathleen Kinmont, "C.I.A.: Code Name
Alexa," as the head-butting, machine-gunning ninja agent and sensitive
foreign terrorist killer who doesn't mind murdering ten or twelve of her fellow
hoods, but crumples into a little whimpering pile of pancake makeup when they
show her Crayola drawings by her daughter.
Sally Kirkland, "Double Threat,"
as an aging actress trying to make a comeback while making the sign of the
four-winged heliotrope with her live-in boytoy. (Are they real, or are they
Mammarex?)
Tracy Scoggins, "Alien Intruder,"
as the evil alien in lipstick, spiked high heels, and a red mini-dress, vamping
around the spaceship, saying things like "Violence makes me soooo
horny" and "Enjoy your meat" and "Tell me you don't like
nasty," until all the guys are blowing one another away.
Shannon Whirry, "Body of
Influence," as the wildwoman who shows up one day in a shrink's office,
rips off all her clothes, and basically twists his body into a pretzel until he
agrees to do anything, including murder people.
And the winner is . . .
Drew Barrymore, "Doppelganger,"
in a dual role as a Psycho Bitch From Hell busting out of her skin-tight body
stocking, dancing like Madonna at Hollywood parties on the one hand, and a
"nice girl" who likes to tidy up on the other. She's mentally
disturbed, nubile, and looking for a new apartment--a deadly combination as the
members of her family die horribly from multiple butcher-knife wounds.
BEST DIALOGUE
The runners-up are:
Louis Homyak, "The Age of Insects":
"You and your smelly lingerie, all over town!"
Dingo Jones, "Gorotica":
"Look, he's my friend, and I say we cut him up."
Margie Peterson, "Strike a Pose":
"Some guys know the difference between foreplay and four minutes!"
Gary Roberts, "Alien Intruder":
"Are we slipping into some black hole of hairless space?"
Kathy Shower, "L.A. Goddess":
"If you keep feeding me like this, I'll no longer be a body double but a
DOUBLE BODY" and "Sorry, Mister Mogul, my script and my body are not
for sale!"
And the winner is . . .
Leslie Hope, "Doppelganger":
"Okay, I'm a slut, you're a slut. Who wants coffee?"
BEST FU
The runners-up are:
Sam Jones, "Fist of Honor," as
the Irish kung-fu loan-shark collection agent who looks like Billy Ray Cyrus on
steroids and has a lot of sex with a lounge singer and has about 17 fights per
day and never collects from anybody without beating him senseless first.
Martin Kove, "To Be the Best," as
the tortured kickboxing brother who says "I sold my soul for a hundred
grand, and blew it straight up my nose."
Lorenzo Lamas, "C.I.A.: Code Name
Alexa," as the macho CIA agent who works in a sewage plant which is
actually the secret headquarters where killer kung-fu teams are trained and
luxurious concrete-bunker apartments are kept full of champagne in case
beautiful foreign agents are arrested and brought there and taken to fancy
dinners until they agree to go back and kill their terrorist bosses and
retrieve microchips that could end the world.
Melissa Moore, "Angelfist," as
the gal who gets tied up by terrorists, tortured, raped, and made to suffer a
LOT of lewd remarks, before she breaks loose, leaps onto a train, chokes a
ninja to death with her KNEES, and rushes into the kickboxing arena to warn Cat
Sassoon they're trying to assassinate the ambassador.
This one wasn't even close. And the winner
is . . .
Jason Scott Lee, "Dragon: The Bruce
Lee Story," who becomes the man himself as he says "Be like
water" and "Emotion can be the enemy" and "It's not
strength that matters, it's focus" and "I'll beat any man in this
room in 60 seconds."
BEST GROSSOUT
The runners-up are:
"Carnosaur": Clint Howard getting
his head eaten off by a dinosaur while chewing on a drumstick.
"Children of the Corn II: The Final
Sacrifice": Wheelchair Lady creamed by a dumptruck and launched through
the plate-glass window of a bingo parlor.
"Doppelganger": The big
morph-a-rama finale of gooey Silly Putty skeleton mutants.
"Satan Place": Intestine
force-feeding, closeup chest surgery, and projectile vomit.
This one wasn't close either. And the
winner is . . .
"Flesh Gordon 2: Flesh Gordon Meets
the Cosmic Cheerleaders": The inter-galactic hemorrhoid field sequence,
and the place inhabited exclusively by excrement beings who sing the song
"When I Met You in the Bowl of Love."
BEST DIRECTOR
The runners-up are:
Luca Bercovici, "Dark Tide."
Larry Cohen, "The Ambulance."
Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, "Running
Cool."
John Woo, "The Killer" and
"Hard Target."
And the winner is . . .
Rob Cohen, "Dragon: The Bruce Lee
Story."
BEST ACTOR
The runners-up are:
Red Buttons, "The Ambulance," as
a cantankerous 74-year-old New York Post reporter with indigestion and a heart
problem who's convinced he's gonna win the Pulitzer Prize if he can help Eric
Roberts figure out why an evil ambulance is terrorizing the streets of the
Apple, picking up diabetics and taking them away to some place where they're
Never Seen Again.
Rutger Hauer, "Split Second," as
the coffee-swilling, chocolate-chewing cop who descends into the sewers of
London in search of a genetic DNA mutant creature who enjoys human-heart
burgers.
Andrew Stevens, "Eyewitness To
Murder," as the sensitive El Lay cop who falls in love with a beautiful
blind artist he's protecting from the evil drug dealer who's coming back to
finish her off, but not before Andrew can teach her to ride horses and steal
some nookie under a tree and whine about his failed jazz-clarinet career.
D.B. Sweeney, "Fire in the Sky,"
as the tree-cutter who gets zapped by an alien space ship into a giant brown
fetus pad, and then floats around like a circus midget, chasing his car keys,
until he falls into some kind of alien animal-research laboratory where HE'S
the animal, and then gets dragged, gouged, poked, punctured, and SHRINK-WRAPPED
so the aliens can do eyeball surgery with a drill, until he's found five days
later, nekkid and scared out of his jock strap.
And the winner is . . .
Andrew Divoff, "Running Cool," as
the sensitive, misunderstood biker who thinks the way to solve the world's
problems is to "put on a run" with wet T-shirt contests and
greased-pig chases.
BEST ACTRESS
The runners-up are:
Brigitte Bako, "Dark Tide," as
the hot scuba-diving French-bikini-wearing heroine who aardvarks in the sacred
pool of the Cave of the Snake, where insane women wander around raving about
the "spirit of the goddess."
Ghetty Chasun, "Gorotica," as a
corpse-loving, bustier-wearing party girl who happens onto a dead diamond thief
while he's still fresh, takes him home, washes him off, shaves his head, and
begs his punk friend to let her sell him to a sleazeball with AIDS.
Traci Lords, "Intent To Kill," as
a cop who trolls Hollywood Boulevard as an undercover hooker, gets lured into the limo of a Colombian drug
dealer, threatened with a knife, flung out on the pavement, led on a high-speed
chase with multiple crashes and burns, then blamed by her captain for killing
too many people. She kicks off the spiked heels for some stunning kung fu work,
squeezes off a few semi-automatic rounds, drives like a bat out of Hong Kong,
and roams around El Lay, throwing rapists off balconies to make herself feel
better.
Stacey Travis, "Dracula Rising,"
as an art restoration expert who suddenly gets summoned to Romania to repair a
painting in an abandoned monastery owned by two vampires and finds out she's
actually returning to the village where she lived 500 years before and
aardvarked in the local lagoon with Christopher Atkins and was burned at the
stake for being a slut.
And the winner is . . .
Charlie Spradling, "To Sleep With a
Vampire," as a lonely topless dancer who gets taken home by a vampire and
ends up thinking it's kinda kinky.
BREAST ACTRESS
The runners-up are:
Brigitte Bako, "Red Shoe
Diaries," as the pouty-lipped brunette who has a nice boyfriend who wants
to marry her, but she gets a chance to have wild animal sex with a construction
worker and part-time ladies shoe salesman, and so, of course, who can resist
that?
Sandahl Bergman, "Body of
Influence," as the sensitive confused young housewife who has hot sex with
Nick Cassavetes on his shrink couch and then says, "You know what? This
might qualify as sexual harassment."
Jessica Hahn, "Bikini Summer 2,"
as the nymphomaniac Home Shopping Network addict who rolls around her bed all
day dressed in Victoria's Secret lingerie, fantasizing about Jeff Conaway.
Elena Sahagun, "Intent To Kill,"
as the hooker with a heart of lead, who dances around nekkid to amuse herself,
works Hollywood Boulevard for the fun of it, pours three pounds of cocaine down
her throat, and says "I'm gonna tell him how you treat me!" right
before "he" shoots her.
And the winner is . . .
Brigitte Nielsen, "Chained Heat
2," as the evil, kinky warden of the meanest women's prison in
Czechoslovakia. Her hair is cropped, her abs are toned, her thunder thighs are
rippling beneath her Dacron bodystocking, and she has this mean whiskey-voiced
laugh that begs to be slapped by her sadistic lesbo lover.
And finally . . .
BEST FLICK
The runners-up are:
"Dark Tide," about a bimbo scuba
diver who goes to a tropical island paradise to meet her boyfriend, who's on a
mission to find deadly poisonous sea snakes and sell their venom for medical
research, only she doesn't realize that she's entered a country dedicated to
the ancient religion of Woman-Hating, and she's liable to be fresh meat for the
local creepolas.
"Fit To Kill," the classic story
of beach-bunny spies taking a bath in a waterfall when they're suddenly
interrupted by a paint-ball attack, strafed by miniature-helicopter artillery,
then sent to a meeting with a nude disc jockey, her hot-tubbing assistant and a
topless lounge singer who are all, of course, crack undercover agents trying to
foil R.J. (son of Roger) Moore's play to steal the Alexa diamond, which is
being given by the Russians to the United States because it was stolen by the
Nazis.
"Running Cool," the first
environmentalist handicapped-rights biker movie, where all the Harley-riding
tattoo freaks band together to save the swamps of South Carolina and the honor
of the local crippled-girl waitress.
"To Sleep With a Vampire," about
a guy who takes a topless dancer home on his motorcycle, confesses he's a
vampire, and asks her to "tell me about the day," reminds her that,
yes, at dawn he'll be required by legend and his nature to digest her like a
Swanson's TV dinner--but meanwhile, "Let's party!" Pretty soon we've
got Duelling Fashion-Model Bloodsuckers in a REAL nineties relationship. It's
not pretty.
And the winner is . . .
Was there ever any doubt?
"Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story,"
about a little boy who has nightmares all the time about a giant demon in a
spiked helmet, but learns kung fu, beats up some drunk Australian sailors at
the high school dance, flees Hong Kong so he won't have to go to jail, washes
dishes in San Francisco's Chinatown, fights a HELLACIOUS comedy fight with four
cleaver-throwing fellow dishwashers, beats up four muscle-builders at the WASP college,
starts teaching jujitsu to white people, gets in trouble with the Kung Fu
Supreme Court for giving away ancient Chinese kung-fu secrets, falls in love,
goes to the movies and gets very sad when he sees Mickey Rooney doing the
Chinese guy in "Breakfast at Tiffany's," writes papers on Hegel, gets
married, fights with his mother-in-law, fights a giant Kung Fu master who
cheats and injures Bruce's spine, wakes up in the hospital, writes his book,
goes to Ed Parker's first big karate tournament in Long Beach and gets booed
for his theories, gets a job as Cato on "The Green Hornet," becomes a
movie star in Hong Kong, makes "Enter the Dragon," and then his head
explodes.
Joe Bob says check em all out.
JOE BOB'S ADVICE TO THE
HOPELESS
Republican Alert! The Go-West Drive-In in
Missoula, Mont., is up for sale after many years of distinguished public
service, and the locals are terrified that someone is going to buy it for the
land values and rip down the screen. Aid needed immediately. Doug Lawrence
reminds us that, without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. To discuss
the meaning of life with Joe Bob, or to get free junk in the mail and the
world-famous newsletter, "The Joe Bob Report," 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,
If two young lovers in Arkansas get married
straight out of high school, then get divorced six months later, are they still
brother and sister?
Kevin Lassiter
Carrollton, Tex.
Dear Kevin:
Only if they are older than the legal
marrying age of seven.
Dear Joe Bob,
I live in Jakarta, which is something of a
cultural void. I get your column through friends in the states who are kind
enough to clip your columns and send them forth. Censorship is alive and well
here, but some videos are available, especially Linda Blair flicks. (Why?)
Another favorite here is "Blood Salvage."
Bonehead
Jakarta, Indonesia
Dear Bonehead:
Indonesians watch "Blood
Salvage," which is about a weirdo in Georgia.
People in Georgia watch "The Year
of Living Dangerously," which is about a weirdo in Indonesia.
This makes perfect sense to me.
Dear Joe Bob:
In Saudi Arabia, like many other annoying
Third World countries, it's a common practice to install VCRs on buses. While I
was stationed there during the war, our Bangladeshi driver played perhaps the
greatest drive-in movie of all time. I think it was called
"Showdown," starring the Kung-Fu Kid: David Carradine.
Anyhow, as we drove toward our basecamp on
the Iraqi border, David Carradine led a band of good vampires who take over a
small town and set up an artificial blood factory so they won't have to keep
doing the neck tango on underdressed actresses. A couple of evil vampires, who
just can't kick the blood habit, arm themselves with wooden-bullet-shooting
machine guns and take on David Carradine and crew. In a vampire "High
Noon" sequence, Carradine kicks butt and saves the world for vampires with
a social conscience.
Well, since I got back to the United States,
I can't find this movie anywhere. Is it still in circulation? Help me, Joe Bob,
you're my only hope.
Sincerely yours,
Captain Erik Larson
Emeryville, Calif.
Dear Captain Erik:
You've been looking for the wrong flick.
The David Carradine movie about vampires who join a twelve-step recovery
program is "Sundown," not "Showdown," and it's available on
video. I gave it three stars.
Dear Joe,
You are too cool. Could you possibly know
how happy you've made me? Well? Just another satisfied reader to you, I
suppose.
Your last column on Lenny Bruce really
intrigued me. Having been born in the early seventies, I guess I just kind of
missed him. What I did not miss, however, was "Rocky Horror Picture
Show" in downtown Berkeley every Saturday night for a couple years. Before
the show they would always run the same cartoon called "Thank You, Mask
Man." This was one of the highlights in my small life. I liked it more
than squishy raisins. Years later I still remember almost every line. I just
never knew who made it, who was in it, or where I could ever see it again.
Could you help me? I'd be most enormously, totally and completely grateful. I'd
even let you tell people you were my friend. Is this compelling you? If not,
think of that cow that wrote you a while ago, Chery, or Cherisse, something
like that, who said all those awful things about you. Think of her, then think
of someone just the opposite of her, and that would be me, okay?
Anyhow, I hope you can help. Thanks for all
the good times.
Christine Lasher
Columbus, O.
Dear Christine:
Go to your video store, and rent a copy
of "The Lenny Bruce Performance Film," and on the very front end of
it, you'll find a bonus--"Thank You, Mask Man."
Thank you, mask woman, you're a peach.
Joe Bob,
Help. I need the spiritual guidance I'm
certain only you can provide.
My life is a shambles. I've read every
theological work I can find. The Tao Teh Ching, The Koran, The Road Less
Traveled, most of C.S. Lewis' works, and most recently the February and June
issues of Club International magazine. Yet I still find myself with no
guidance.
My only source is late at night when the
snow arrives on Channel 2 and the room is dark as the Cramps drone on from my
stereo--as only the Cramps can drone. If only Poison Ivy would be mine, maybe
life would have some meaning. I plead to you, Joe; guide as my Virgil, show me
the light.
Screaming with
sincerity,
Ralph Laporta
Richmond, Va.
Dear Ralph:
Have you read "How To Pick Up
Girls"? Not the NEW one they sell in Hooters Monthly. The ORIGINAL 1963
version. It can change your life.
© 1994 Joe Bob Briggs All Rights Reserved