The Joe Bob Report

Double Standard
Super Deluxe Edition

Share |

October 31, 2009

To tell you the truth, I got real problems with Halloween III. I don’t know about you, but when I see the word “Halloween” on the big screen, I start thinkin' Splatter City. When we’re talking Halloween, we’re talking all-time classic of the drive-in screen. We’re talking the original Jamie Lee Curtis, creepola-with-a-butcher-knife-hypodermic-in-the-eyeball, barf-on-the-floor mats show-stopper. We’re talking a movie where anybody can die at any time.

So, okay, I have the following questions about this so-called Halloween III.

Numero uno: Where the hell is Donald Pleasance? How can we have believable corpses in a Halloween flick unless Donald shows up thirty seconds after they die and says, “You don’t know what you’re dealing with here. Only I can stop him.”

Numero two-o: Where the hell is Jamie Lee Curtis? And, if we can’t have Jamie Lee Curtis because she’s off making indoor bullstuff somewhere, then where are the little nymphos who provide the raw meat for the slasher?

Numero three-o: WHERE IS THE SLASHER???!!! I’m talking about the guy with the white stuff smeared on his face who walks around breathin like a Hemi ‘Cuda and picking up spear guns that people have left laying out in their yard. If this guy is not in the movie, I’m sorry, but this is not Halloween III. No way, José Feliciano. This is something else.

Now, the people who made Friday the 13th, Part 3, those turkeys had integrity. They made the exact same movie three times, which is not easy. These Halloween jerkolas have Gone Hollywood. They obviously got stoked up on cocaine and forgot their roots, and, get this, the flick is not even in Haddonfield, Illinois, anymore, where it belongs, but is some wimpy jerkola town in Northern California.

Okay, so what have we got here? What we got is a direct rip-off of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, another all-time D.I. classic, only instead of a town full of outer-space Communist zombies, the town in this flick is full of motorized bionic dead people that this Irish maniac makes in his Halloween mask factory.

But instead of Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter, we got two immortal turkeys named Tom Atkins and Stacey Nelkin. For the head Communist, we got a guy named Dan O’Herlihy. He’s riggin all the Halloween masks with detonators and—this is the only good part of the movie—ever kid in America is gonna get his head squashed into Jell-O on Halloween night because the masks are gonna be detonated by a TV signal. There’s a test kid who gets it first. His eyes get lasered out of their sockets, and then bugs start crawling out of his mouth, and then finally rattlesnakes start crawling out of the insides of his body and eating his parents. This was actually one of the better scenes in the movie; the kid can really act.

But the rest of this so-called Halloween movie is not so hot. The reason: bionic gore. If all these people in the factory aren’t really people, what difference does it make when they get parts of their bodies ripped off? It’s just a bunch of springs and wires and stuff.

There is one fairly decent scene where this zombie puts a power drill through a nurse’s ear, but there’s not even any gurgles or gasps or anything. In other words, totally unrealistic.

If you think about what would happen if somebody drilled you through the ear, it would probly be a kind of squishy sound after the steel popped through the skull, and then if he twisted it around inside like the zombie in the movie does, it would probly gush blood like one of those instant modern art twirling painter toys.

Okay, so what we got here is a rip-off plot, but it’s ripped off from one of the classics of our day, so what the hey. We got zombies. We got fingers stuck through eyeballs. We got exploding automobiles. We got a drunk who gets his head ripped off by two bionic people. We got two breasts on this Stacey Nelkin person. We got a fat woman who gets lasered to death. We got a big mass death scene for the zombies and the Head Communist.

In other words, we got all the elements for a great movie. But I got an idea what went wrong. The first words that come up on the screen of this thing are “Moustapha Akkad presents.” Are you kidding me? Some turkey named Moustapha Akkad tried to make a Halloween movie? He sounds like a Communist-speaking person if you ask me.

You can go see it anyway because this is not Communist Russia. Body count nine. Zombie body count fifteen. Two breasts. Not much kung fu, unless you count a little zombie kick-boxing. Hands roll, arms roll, and, yes, heads roll.

Only two stars because it was made by Arabs.

Joe Bob says check it out.

October 30, 2009

It’s the time of year for that heart-warming classic. Time for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (TCM)
We all have our favorite scenes in TCM. I guess mine is the one where Leatherface puts Pam on a meat hook so he can continue his Homelite work on Kirk. I also rather enjoy the armchair in Leatherface’s house. When Leatherface says armchair, he means armchair.

But, of course, the most brilliant thing about Chainsaw is that it can scare the bejabbers out of you to the point where you think it was made by a cannibal. A lot of people say Psycho is the scariest movie ever made. Bullstuff. Chainsaw is the movie in which anybody can die at any moment. It’s also the first movie with three psychos who are buddies workin shifts, so as soon as Sally and Franklin veer off that main highway, they’re potential meals. Think about that the next time you stop for gas in a strange place.

Now, I’m gonna put all your questions about TCM trivia in one place, and I want you to print this sucker out and save it. I don’t wanna have to tell you again.

Okay, here goes:

Numero uno: Did the story of Chainsaw really happen?

Whenever I get asked this, I don’t hardly even wanna dignify it with a response. Of course it happened. There’s two movies based on the same real-life event—Psycho and TCM—but Psycho gets all the publicity. Actually, TCM is a lot closer to the true story of Edward Gein, a handyman in Plainfield, Wisconsin, that liked to dig up fresh graves, cut the skin off of corpses, wear it on various parts of his own body, and dance in the moonlight. When the guys in white suits finally got him in 1957, they said he’d been collecting body parts for year—had skulls on bedposts, a human heart in a saucepan, and a lady out in his barn dressed like a deer. Eddie died in 1984 the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where he was making rock jewelry.

Numero two-o: When Tobe Hooper made TCM, why did he locate it in Texas?

Tobe was livin in Austin, but he didn’t really care where it was located. They only made it Texas when somebody came up with the title, which, you got to admit, is one of the all-time greatest titles in the history of the universe. It was shot in Round Rock, Texas, for about 40 cents.

Numero three-o: Where was TCM first shown to the public?

Empire Theatre, San Francisco, fall of ’74. They sneaked it on the back of a Walter Matthau picture, and the audience barfed, stormed the lobby, demanded their money back, and started throwin punches. A legend was born.

Numero four-o: Is it true TCM has been banned more than any other movie in history?

Naw, not really. Deep Throat has been sued a lot more times. But the difference with TCM is, it’s the first R-rated flick ever to get 11 continuous years of flack. When the National Organization of Bimbos or the Babtist Church wants to get on my case, they always say, “This guy is so sick he LIKES movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” They use it like some kind of put-down, like they never saw it. Or maybe I should say, they never got sawed by it.

Numero five-o: Is it true that Leatherface—“Mr. Chainsaw”—never worked again?

Sort of. After Saw, Gunnar Hansen, the actor that played Leatherface, moved up to Maine to write poetry and build rock houses. I’m not makin this up. In the 90s he started appearin in movies again.

Numero six-o: Is it true that the director had trouble gettin work after TCM?

Sort of. Tobe Hooper was just a boy from Austin that liked movies, and TCM was his first crack at it. After that he made Eaten Alive, also known as Horror Hotel Massacre, where Neville Brand runs a little swamp motel where he feeds the overnight guests to the alligators. Then Tobe made Salem’s Lot for TV, and that was pretty decent. Then Spielberg let him make Poltergeist, but nobody could figure out whether Tobe was doing it or the Spielman. Then Tobe made his masterpiece, Lifeforce, about nekkid outer space bloodsuckers and has been back on track ever since.

Numero seven-o: Where did Sally, the only survivor in the movie, learn to scream like that?

Marilyn Burns, “The Screamer,” is truly acknowledged to be the finest motion-picture screamer known to mankind—far better than Jamie Lee Curtis and other imitators. But that might be because she had so much to scream about. When they were makin this picture it was 110 degrees inside the Cannibal House, and all the meat on the table was dead rotting animals filled with formaldehyde. The smell, plus all the sticky blood they poured on Marilyn, plus she got dragged through the underbrush for a couple weeks and busted up both knees, and you start figurin those were real screams.

Numero eight-o: Is it true TCM is one of the most successful films in history?

Yep. Nobody knows exactly how much, but it’s probly made $100 million at the box office. The reason we don’t know is that the sleazoid distributors ran off with all the money for the first 10 years.

Numero nine-o: Is it true you were in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2?

Yep. I was chain saw meat for Tobe Hooper. That’s Tobe “Mr. Chainsaw” to you. I play myself gettin shishkebabbed by the TCM Family. Then, exactly 11 days before the national release, my scene was ripped out of the movie. I was devastated, Tobe Hooper said he might not be able to ever direct again, and the movie was boycotted nationwide. The movie wasn’t hardly worth seein so when they released it to DVD, they restored my part. In the Extras. Under Deleted Scenes.

Numero ten-o: A lot of slasher movies are based on TCM. Don’t you think they’re gettin a lot more scary with all the special blood effects they have now?

Nope. No way, José Feliciano. You take somebody to see TCM that hasn’t ever seen it before, and you’ll know what I mean when I say:

TCM is still the king. A classic. Four stars.

Joe Bob says, at least once a year, check it out.

October 29, 2009

Return of the Living Dead is the greatest face-eating gut-spewer since Basket Case and deserves serious consideration as one of the finest zombie exploding-head comedies of all time. What we got here is a bunch of corpses that the U.S. Army decides to stick in pressurized Spam canisters, perfectly preserving them like giant Starkist Tunas on Quaaludes. But a bunch of guys in the mailroom get the cadavers confused with some C-rations and ship the human Spam specimens off to a medical supply warehouse in Louisville, Kentucky. Before you know it, the canisters spring a leak, and what’ve we got? If you’ve ever been to Louisville, Kentucky, on a Saturday night, you know what we’ve got — brain eating zombies walking around downtown goin' “You got 20 cents for a blood transfusion?”

Course, soon as one of these zombies gets out of the can, it’s all over for the two Rhodes scholars that found him. Here’s the best part of it, though. First they try to kill the zombie with a pickaxe to the head — don’t bother him. Then they saw off his head. No way, José Feliciano. He just keeps on talkin' and twitchin'. Then they start choppin' him up into little pieces and sticking parts of him in Hefty bags, but what they end up with is a bunch of Hefty bags that hop around like Meskin Jumping Beans.

Pretty soon they go across the street and talk the funeral parlor into burning the Hefty bags in the crematory, but all that does is shoot a bunch of zombie gas out the top of the building and turns some punk rockers into nekkid heavy-metal foaming-at-the-mouth contestants on American Idol.

The bottom line here is: everybody gets real sick, specially when the zombies start eating their brains.

You got yerself a Zombie-Rama here.

Ten breasts. Two zombie breasts. One hundred twenty-five zombies. Body count 19 (plus fragments). Mummy dogs. One-half zombie dog. Ten gallons blood. Brain eating. Gratuitous embalming. Nekkid punk rocker fondue. Gratuitous midget zombie. Torso S&M. One motor vehicle chase (totaled by zombies). Heads roll. Brains roll. Arms roll. Hands roll.

Drive-In Academy Award nominations for Linnea Quigley, for takin off all her clothes in the graveyard, flashdancing like Jennifer Beals on meth, and saying, “Do you ever fantasize about horrible ways of dying?”; Don Calfa, as Ernie the mortician, for getting attacked by an arm; and Dan O’Bannon, the writer and director, the same guy that wrote Alien.

We’re talking four stars.

Joe Bob says check it out.

October 28, 2009

We have a new Numero Uno. We have the best zombie-mutant medical-experiment flick since Basket Case. We have blood, we have breasts, we have beasts. We have instant drive-in classic. I’m talkin, of course, about Re-Animator, the only movie ever made where an actor gets his head cut off halfway through the movie but finishes the movie. David Gale, the actor that accomplished this for the first time in motion picture history, is a Drive-In Method Actor. What this means is, he actually lives out his parts before he does em for the camera. So Gale had to master the difficult trick of playing half the movie with his head on and half the movie with his head off. You can imagine what a wise guy he was around the set! You never knew whether he’d have his old noodle on straight or be haulin it around like carry-on luggage.

What we got here is a story about Herbert West, this nerd-face space-cadet medical student who starts messing around with secret-formula juice the color of urine—and finds out he has the power to bring somebody’s brain back to life after it gets smushed under an 18-wheeler. So he goes up to Massachusetts, where they have an oversupply of dead brains, and moves in with a med student who’s sleepin with the dean’s daughter, and the first thing he does is pump so much juice into a dead cat that he almost gets his face clawed off.

So then Herbert cons the roommate into going down to the med school dean and trying to get some more help on cat-brain research. “I’ve conquered brain death,” he says. “We can defeat death!” And the dean basically says to get his hiney out of the office and also they’re both kicked out of school and stop sleepin' with his daughter.

Next thing, these two guys sneak into the morgue and start juicing up stiffs, until one guy gets out of hand and they have to ram a bone-saw through his back to make him stop breakin down doors and —whoops!— killing the dean. They look at the dead dean, look at each other, and then no problema. They juice him up and pretty soon he’s standin' up, waving his arms and slobbering all over everything.

They do have to put him in a rubber room and watch Dr. Carl Hill do a laser lobotomy on him, but other than that he’d fine.

But now the evil Dr. Carl Hill knows he’s got these guys, and so he goes over to the secret brain-juice laboratory and tells Herbert West that he wants all the records so he can win the Nobel Prize. Herbert West’s answer is a shovel through the neck. The he thinks, “What the hey, nobody’s ever juiced separate body parts before,” and from there on out Dr. Carl Hill tries to get himself back together, carrying his head around in a slime tray, doin' laser lobotomies on all the other corpses, and pretty soon gettin up his own private army of walking mutant corpses. There’s this one scene where he straps the dean’s daughter down to the autopsy table, holds his head in his hands, and starts making love to her with it. That’s about as far as I can go without getting the plug pulled by the high sheriffs.

A classic. Twenty-five gallons blood, the modern-day champion. Eight breasts. Twenty-seven dead bodies. Ten dead born-again bodies. One dead attack cat (three lives). Twenty-two zombies. Head smashing. Cat smashing. Flesh-ripping. Brain-fondling. Heads roll. Arms roll. Bone-saw fu. Lobotomy fu. Intestine fu. Drive-In Academy Award nominations for Jeffrey Combes as Herbert West, for wielding the green needle and saying, “Come on, why not, this is the freshest body we have” ; David Gale, as Dr. Carl Hill, for performing without his head and saying, “I will be famous!”; Bruce Abbott, the med student, for saying, “I’m sorry, honey, but your dead father’s been lobotomized”; and Stuart Gordon, the director, for painting the room red.

Four Stars

Joe Bob says check it out.

October 27, 2009

Basket Case is about this kid named Duane who carries a picnic basket around with him wherever he goes. The first time we see the actual basket Duane checks into this Times Square walk-up hotel full of hookers and geeks and then goes out for junk food. Then he throws the junk food into the basket and we can hear whatever it is having dinner. The next morning Duane takes the basket to see an old friend, and pretty soon whatever it is doesn’t need so much junk food because he’s biting into other things.

It turns out that the thing in the basket is not so bad after all, once you get to know it. You see, there’s a reason that thing lives in a basket. There’s a reason it wants to squeeze people to death. There’s even a reason that the monster is sexually kinky. And it all has to do with a very unhappy childhood when the thing was separated from his brother Duane.

That’s all I’m saying. This film was made by Frank Henenlotter, who I don’t know from Adam, but who uses excellent blood, specially in this one scene where a lady doctor gets about six scalpels plunged into various parts of her face, and who has the good taste to dedicate this movie to Herschell Gordon Lewis, the master of gore.

Drive-In Academy Awards nominations for: Kevin Van Hentenryck, as the spooky kid with the basket; Terri Susan Smith, as a blond receptionist with a big mouth and big garbonzas, who falls in love with the kid but finds out that his friend likes her better; Robert Vogel, as the walk-up hotel clerk; and Belial, the thing in the basket. Heads roll. One-half bare top. Some kung fu.

Four stars.

Joe Bob says check it out.

blog comments powered by Motta Industries

October 26, 2009

I’d like to get disgusting here for a minute if you don’t mind. I’d like to talk The Evil Dead.

The Evil Dead is a classic, because it follows the Joe Bob Briggs ultimate test of a splatter flick:

Anybody can die at any time.

This flick was made for about three dollars by a guy named Sam Raimi who says he’s from Detroit. Sam is probably a psychopath.

Remember, when you see this one, that Sam is capable of anything.

How about a woman raped by the woods? Not raped in the woods, by the woods. These vines start snaking around her arms, and her legs, and her neck, and she struggles and the woods throws her down on this wet ground, and then things start to grow all over her, and then for the big finish this enormous tree limb comes down and…well, it’s not something the high sheriffs of the internet tubes are gonna let me get away with anyway.

We’ve got your basic Spam-in-a-Cabin plot. These five teenage pork chops go to a cabin in the woods, like Friday the 13th, only it’s a better cabin and better woods, and you know from the first five minutes this is gonna be some weird bullstuff because of all the unseen presences everwhere. You just don’t know when it’s gonna start. And I’m not gonna tell you.

How about a scene where a zombie with superhuman strength stabs a guy in the ankle with a No. 2 wooden pencil - rams that baby all the way through?

How about a chainsaw scene where this girl has to be sawed up into itty-bitty pieces by her friends because she turned zombie on 'em?

Now we’re getting down to the nitty. They find this book in the basement that’s written in human blood and bound in human flesh, and it says that zombie-ism is contagious, and that the bottom line is, they’re all goners. Just in case they don’t get the message, the unseen zombie presences also leave them a reel-to-reel tape recorder.

“You will die,” they say. “One by one we will take you.”

The movie then starts raising a lot of moral questions, like: If your girlfriend turns zombie on you, what are you supposed to do?

Only one thing you can do:

Go get a meat cleaver and start making like the butcher at the local Piggly Wiggly.

This is the first mistake they make, see.

When this girl starts spewing white slime out of her mouth and going around breaking people’s arms with her bare hands and growing Dracula teeth, instead of everybody just getting together and saying, “Hey, hold it a minute, heads have to roll here,” they monkey around and try to stuff her in the basement for a while till they figure out what to do.

The star of the flick is this guy named Ash (Bruce Campbell, who gets the Drive-In Makeup Award for effective use of blood on the body; we’re talking gallons on the face alone.) And Ash can’t get his act together. Like when his girlfriend finally gets stabbed in the back, turning her back into just a normal dead person instead of a zombie woman, Ash knows what he has to do. He takes her into the chainsaw room and starts to make her into a chicken-fried steak, but then he sees the locket he gave her and he breaks down and decides to just bury her instead. You can imagine what happens to old Ashley.

I’ve decided I won’t even try to tell you about the girl who has to cut off her own hand. Or the scene where the zombies start decaying and aging two thousand years in about two minutes.

I’ll give you an idea what I’m talking about: this one may make Chainsaw eligible for the Disney Channel.

We’re talking nineteen gallons of blood. One breast. Four beasts, unless you include the raping forest. No kung fu. No motor vehicle chases. Drive-In Academy Award nominations for Raimi the psychopath; Bruce Campbell; Ellen Sandweiss as Cheryl, the forest rapee; Sarah York as Shelly.

No question about it: grisly, nasty, disgusting…four stars.

Joe Bob says check it out.

October 25, 2009

Bloodsucking Freaks

I can never resist this golden oldie called Bloodsucking Freaks. I get all nostalgic seeing it again. We’re talking women in cages, we’re talking torture, we’re talking bodily mutilation, we’re talking large breast quantities, and large breasts, we’re talking midget rape, we’re talking bondage, we’re talking mad doctors, we’re talking nonstop death.

It starts out with this stage show at the Theatre of the Macabre, where Master Sardu amuses his audience by having a midget named Ralphus take this woman’s blouse off, strap her in a chair, and tighten an iron tourniquet around her head until blood drips down her face. Then he sticks this nekkid girl’s hand in a vise and hacks it off. Then the midget rips her eye out and eats it. Pretty routine stuff. But after the show’s over, the wimp critic from the New York Times refuses to review the show. Sardu is a little p.o.ed.

So Sardu, the MC, played by the late great Seamus O’Brien, who has a voice like Vincent Price, tells Ralphus the Midget to kidnap the Times critic, which he does by shooting him with a blow dart at an art gallery opening after this bimbo pops open a raincoat and flashes her groceries.

While he’s waiting for Ralphus to bag the critic and bring him home, Sardu asks these two leather bunnies to paste him across the backside with a bullwhip. Ever once in a while he sends Ralphus down into a dungeon to feed some raw meat to these moaning nekkid pork chops in a cage. He’s just keeping them there until he can send his next shipment to the Middle East. The Arabs pay big bucks for Off-Broadway actress meat.

Okay, back to the main action. Sardu tells Ralphus to electrocute this bimbo by pouring five hundred volts through her breasts. This is so the Times critic will be impressed. It doesn’t work, so Sardu decides to have another show, but first he tells Ralphus to go blow-dart this blond ballerina named Natasha so he can have some choreography. He wants to brainwash her so she can kick the critic’s brains out in his next show. Ralphus hides out in her locker at Lincoln Center, knocks out her lights, drags her back to the theater, puts chains around her neck, hangs her up by her wrists, and starts playing the cymbals until she agrees to dance on opening night. They almost overdo it, though, and they have to call the doctor so she won’t die. When he gets finished, Sardu says, “How much do I owe you?” and the doctor says, “How bout letting me take it out in trade?”

“Another operation?” says Sardu.

Doc goes to work. First he straps a bimbo to a chair and pulls out all her teeth “so you won’t bite.” Then he decides to do “a little elective neurosurgery”—power drill through the head while he’s hummin “Marriage of Figaro.”

Once he gets in there pretty deep, he wiggles it around, sticks in a straw, and…well, you get the title now. Sardu gets grossed out, though, so he tells Ralphus to feed the doctor to the nekkid women in the dungeon.

Pretty amazing scene, specially when they rip out his heart and rub it over their flesh. Sardu and Ralphus stay upstairs playing darts on a slave girl’s backside.

There are just too many highlights to go into. The rest of the flick includes: a blonde who gets stretched on the rack, a guillotine demonstration where a girl has to hold the rope in her mouth and if she opens it the blade falls, Ralphus making love to a head, Sardu and Ralphus using human fingers as backgammon chips, another ballerina that gets her feet cut off by Ralphus, and a cop who goes down to Off-Off-Broadway to investigate the ballerina’s disappearance but gets fed to the starving nekkid women, and a pretty good fried-eyeball scene.

There’s also some stuff too sick for me to mention.

Seventy-six breasts. Heads roll (four times). Hands roll. Fingers roll. Feet roll. Excellent midget sadism and dubbed moaning.

Three and a half stars.

Joe Bob says check it out.

OLDER POSTS >>

Double Standard Super Deluxe Edition

Double Standard
Super Deluxe Edition