"Joe Bob's Drive-In" for 3/10/96
cutline: [TK]
By Joe Bob Briggs
Drive-In Movie Critic of Grapevine, Texas
I always wanted to use the word "penultimate" in a sentence, and this is the penultimate week of the 1996 Drive-In Academy Award nominations, better known as the Hubbies, the only awards that NEVER honor Emma Thompson under any circumstances.
And the nominees are . . .
BEST GEEK ACTING
Penny Arcade, "Hellroller," as the weirdbeard aunt who pushes the Wheelchair Kid around while screaming "I should have aborted you!"
Marina Del Rey, "Shatter Dead," as the breast-feeding zombie grandma.
James Gale, "Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre," as the mysterious body-piercing enthusiast who says "I want these people to know the meaning of horror--is that clear?"
Mike Moore, "My Sweet Satan," as the whiny little weasel who gets carved up in the woods.
Joe Stevens, "Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre," as the Machiavelli-quoting redneck with a cattle prod and bad teeth who says "Family values have gone straight to hell."
BEST KUNG FU
Roddy Piper, "Jungleground," as the target of every roller-blading drug dealer in the "Star Wars" version of the South Bronx.
Jeff Speakman, as the morose SWAT-team instructor who says "It's never gonna be over for me" while setting out in a rubber pontoon boat to fight 200 Death Row inmates.
Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, "The Dangerous," as the revenge-seeking super-ninja who tells his mama "We are no longer people--we are wind."
Shannon Tweed, "No Contest," as an ex-beauty-contest-turned-kung-fu-movie-star who battles Andrew Dice Clay to the death in a kickboxing match on a Vegas hotel roof.
Don "The Dragon" Wilson, "Ring of Fire III," as the mild-mannered doctor who breaks up a nuclear-weapons ring by machine-gunning helicopters from the roof of the hospital where he works, kung-fuing hitmen who get in his way while he's driving home, and going fishing in the mountains with their secret computer disk in his bag.
BEST MONSTER
Dan Blom, "Mind Ripper," as the twitching, vomiting, furball-burping super-mutant who says "You're the one that made me hurt!"
Steve Brown, "Darkness," as the blood-spurting groaning whiny zombie who leads the zombie pack, for saying "Forgive me, Greg" as he becomes a blood geyser and his head explodes.
Robert Jacks, "Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre," as a new, improved, more WOMANLY Leatherface.
Lawrence King, "Abducted II: The Reunion," as the pelt-wearing wildman who dances around screaming "You've got nice things! I like nice things!" and telling his three hostages "Choosing a wife is a big thing in a man's life."
Tony Todd, "Candyman II: Farewell to the Flesh," as the demonic Hook Man, who says "I am the writing on the wall, the whisper in the classrom" and "Swallow your horror and let it nourish you--come with me and sing the song of misery--share my world!"
BEST SERIAL KILLER
Brad Friedman, "Dead Boyz Cant Fly," as the murdering transvestite who gulps several quarts of pills, engages in a fight to the death with a Vietnam-vet-turned-janitor, gets his throat slit ear to ear, but FINISHES THE MOVIE.
Ron Litman, "Hellroller," as the wheelchair-bound hate-filled killer who keeps screaming "I want my own place!"
Robert Patrick, "Last Gasp," as a mild-mannered construction foreman by day, nekkid bloody-thirsty Toltec vampire by night.
Lisa Dean Ryan, "Twisted Love," as the unrequited psycho who says "You're such an amazing boyfriend, you know that?" and "Crazy? You have the gall to call me crazy?" and "Don't you leave me! You kill me now! I love you!"
Kim Strauss, "Street Angels," as the depraved, sadistic, muscle-shirt-wearing pretty-boy villain who beats up old winos, kills cops with a death punch called the Dim Mak, shoots his girlfriend for laughing at another guy's jokes, and says "That'll teach you to disturb me when I'm drinking."
Get them ballots in immediately. You can send em to me, Joe Bob Briggs, at P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, TX 75221, or Fax em to 213-462-5982, or e-mail them to 76702.1435@compuserve.com.
FIND THAT FLICK
This week's cranium cruncher comes from . . .
Charles "Bangkok Charlie" Fisher of Almonte, Ontario: "Last year I watched a 'short' on the tube that knocked me out. I wake up at night wondering how to find it again! (And how it got on that screen in the first place). This is the story: A young girl is going to bed upstairs in a suburban home. In the garden a lad is looking up at her window. He attracts her attention, she opens the window, they talk, and the young man climbs up the side of the house into her room. Soon they undress and engage in some energetic horizontal jogging. So energetic, in fact, that it begins to bring down the plates and move furniture in the sitting room below where ma and pa are trying to watch TV. Intervention attempted by parents is completely futile. Young man states he intends to take girl away with him; girl is set to go. Pa looks anxious but finally says: It's a bad night. Hadn't you better take my car? And the young man, who seems to be a well-known rock star, replies (and this is his big three-star line): 'No, thank you. I wouldn't like any of my friends to see me driving a station wagon.' Need hardly say this summary does no justice to a very funny, very sexy, and, finally, very daring movie featuring a most attractive girl (NOT 'stacked,' thank you very much!) Has anyone else seen this?"
[INSERT ADDRESS, ETC. HERE]
In the November 13 column, Nancy Peay of Norman, Oklahoma, wrote: "In the early seventies, I saw what was probably a TV movie. It was about a young couple living in one of those overpopulated futures where you have to have a special permit to have a child. They get a little careless, and the wife gets pregnant. If you don't have the permit, your child will be put in cold storage at birth. Later, if you can get a permit, the government will unfreeze the baby and give it back to you. They have a neighbor who has one of those kids, but he's never been quite right in the head since he was thawed out. The couple's only hope is for the husband to win a foot race whose first prize is an acre of land and a baby permit. All the other competitors have agreed that if they win, they'll sell the land to a Big Corporation. The husband won't sell, so the Big Corporation does various underhanded things to keep him from winning. I think he had to climb over a building to avoid them and win the race. At the end of the movie, the couple and their kid were frolicking on their land while a solid mass of people watched them through a chain-link fence. Can anyone remember the title of this one?"
We had two correct answers, so the winner was chosen by drawing. And he is . . .
Scott Davidson of Pennington, New Jersey: "I finally know one of these. The movie described by Nancy is 'The People Trap,' based on a short story by Robert Sheckley. If I remember correctly, it ran on an ABC series of short TV specials. (One of them, if my old brain cells are still working, was about Tying a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree, long before anyone knew who Iran or Tony Orlando was.)"
Additional information came from . . .
Rick Collarini of Birmingham, Alabama: "I don't know the name of the episode, but the flick about the race for land was originally an episode of ABC's 'Stage '67,' an anthology show that ABC tried out in the fall of 1967. The episode starred Stuart Whitman as a man entering a race for an acre of land. He was the only contestant that hadn't agreed to sell the land to the greedheads if he won the race, so they were out to stop him. He DID climb a building to get around one of the bad guy's traps, and kept the acre when he won. I always wondered how six feet of cyclone fence kept out twenty billion people, but what the hell."
© 1996 Joe Bob Briggs All Rights Reserved