I'm Joe Bob Briggs, and you are SO fortunate. I think we're the ONLY network to have "Body Armor," the story of an enterprising American capitalist who designs killer diseases so that he can then make a miracle drug that CURES those diseases. Fortunately, supermodel Carol Alt is a government agent on the case.

Carol does have a macho-man bodyguard to take care of her in this movie, though. You know, this guy was telling me the other day how neurotic his girlfriend is. How she worries about her weight, whines about the hired help, obsesses about how scared she is that her car is gonna break down on the freeway. After a while I said, "Well, aren't you the man?" And he said "What?" And I said, "Can't you just kinda TAKE CARE OF IT?" And he launched into an explanation of how I'm a jerk for saying that, because today men aren't supposed to "take care of it."

That's an outdated idea, he said. That's like a 50s idea. Women are not weepy whiny little delicate flowers that men are supposed to TAKE CARE OF all the time. So I dropped it. After all, I wouldn't want him to think that all the weeping and whining was caused by his girlfriend being . . . uh . . . weepy and whiny.

Remember when dads used to say, "Who wears the pants in this family?" All us kids would laugh. Because whenever Dad had to TELL you that he wore the pants in the family, it was because he'd lost his pants, right? But at least we basically KNEW WHAT HE MEANT. When it was time for Attitude Adjustment, it was always Dad who did it. There was a time when Dad would just TAKE CARE OF IT. It would be over. Finished. If you couldn't make up your mind about what to order, Dad would order for you. If you couldn't stop crying about losing the baseball game, Dad would come over and say: "Okay, that's enough. There's another game next week." In other words, whatever needed to be done to take care of it, Dad would TAKE CARE OF IT. And he would ESPECIALLY take care of it with Mom. If Mom cried, Dad would stop the crying. If Mom was scared about something, Dad would say, "Don't be scared." If Mom thought she was fat, Dad would say something funny and insulting that would make Mom mad for about five minutes, but we all knew it was just Dad TAKING CARE OF IT. When did men quit doing this job? When did women ASK men to quit doing this job? Who's doing the job now? Oprah? What are men doing instead? Reading Details Magazine? This is yet another area where I Just Don't Get It. Anyhow, I'm gonna take care of the drive-in totals now and start "Body Armor." We have: Twenty-eight dead bodies. Dart to the back. Two bewtocks. One car chase with explosion. Decapitated station wagon. Needle to the neck. Flaming virologist. Exploding island laboratory. Kickboxing. Kung fu. Virus fu. Supermodel fu. Gratuitous Clint Howard. Three stars. Go.

[fading] I have a question. Why are there no whiny, crying, obsessive women on the Lifetime Network? That's where you find your TAKE-CHARGE kinda gals. With whiny HUSBANDS. Right? Explain that.

This is one of those Macho Macho Man movies, isn't it? "What should we do next? Suppress a revolt in Sri Lanka? White slavers in Polynesia? Ho hum. What? My ex-girlfriend is SEEING somebody?" What a secure guy, right? Nice little cameo by John Rhys-Davies as the sleazeball with the pliable wife in a thong bikini. And, of course, that was my pal Clint Howard as the nerdy accountant. Clint's got a big role coming up this year. He co-stars with Jim Carrey in "Grinch," directed by his big brother, RON Howard. Anyway, here's my question for the screenwriter. The old girlfriend-who-broke-the-macho-guy's- heart-and-now-she's-back-and-she-needs-him plot . . . give it a rest, okay? Seen it, de-constructed it, mailed it to Alaska. Okay, some commercial action and then back to "Body Armor."

[fading] Where's the body armor, by the way? Has there been any body armor? Well, John Rhys-Davies, he has that NATURAL body armor. You could roll John Rhys-Davies down the face of Halakeala and it would make more dents than the original volcano. That's some body armor. . . . What IS Halakeala? There is no Halakeala. But it made you THINK I've been to Hawaii, didn't it?

Excellent station-wagon slicing, wasn't it? Very realistic. See, what we basically have here is a movie directed by and starring stunt men. The director is Jack Gill, who did stunts in movies like "Con Air" and "The Rock" and "Volcano." Actually, he did "Volcano" AND "Dante's Peak," so I guess he's the volcano stunt expert. And, of course, we can't forget one of our "MonsterVision" favorites he did: "Look Who's Talking." He did the special baby-puke gymnastics work in that movie. So we got Jack Gill. If you remember the doctor who was killed in the big escape scene at the beginning of the movie, that was Jack. Then we got Matt McColm playing the lead. Matt's done stunts for guys like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Clint Eastwood, Steven Seagal, but I like to remember him as the stunt-double for David Hasselhoff in the classic TV series, "Night Rider." So I'm surprised we don't have a lot MORE stunts in this flick. Oh, and you know who Jack Gill is married to? Morgan Brittany, who plays Krago's bimbo, Sloan, in this movie. And you thought she got this part based on her outstanding work in the show "Dallas." Okay, let's do some ads and get back to the flick.

[fading] You guys know what Morgan Brittany's first acting role was? She played Baby June in the 1962 version of "Gypsy," opposite Natalie Wood. It's true. That was when she still went by her real name, Suzanne Cupito. Hey, don't underestimate Morgan Brittany. Not to be confused with Brittany Morgan. She works in porno. Also Morgan Britt. She works in lesbian porno. And Morganna. She just has enormous breasts. Also J.P. Morgan. He was a banker.

Ahhhhh, the old "Buy me a drink" ruse. The line normally spoken only by girls in Bangkok bordellos. And the guy FALLS FOR IT. You gotta give him credit, though. Thirty seconds with the bad guy's computer and he figures out the whole Windows operating system AND the secret files. That is, of course, Ron Perlman as the evil Dr. Krago. Most everybody remembers Ron from "Beauty and the Beast," that show where he skulked around the subway tunnels and mooned over Linda Hamilton. Ron DOES tend to get cast as Neanderthal types, and you can kinda see why. In fact, his first movie role was AS a Neanderthal in "Quest for Fire." Ron was on the swim team in high school, and one day the whistle blew while they were doing their laps, and they all looked up, and the coach said, "Perlman, out of the pool. You see this guy standing next to me? He's the drama teacher. He's holding auditions for his play. I've been watching you swim for two months, and he can use you a whole lot more than I can." So Ron Perlman became an AC-tor. Okay, my favorite retired supermodel, Carol Alt, is gonna be featured a LOT more prominently now, so stay with us. Wait a minute, does that rule out Anna Nicole Smith? Is she retired? Does she still have those bulge pouches?

[fading] It took me a while to figure out that Ron Perlman is a virologist. First I thought they were saying urologist. Then I thought he was a moralogist, whatever that is. A VIRologist would be an expert in veers.

You know, if you're gonna get hit over the head with a bedpan, you want Carol Alt doing the job, don't you? We've got a BEVY of beauties here, don't we? That's what the guy at the State Fair strip show always said -- a BEVY of beauties. That's Annabel Schofield as Marisa, the busty blonde Kelly Preston look-alike ex-fiancee. We already mentioned Brittany Morgan -- Morgan Brittany as the evil Ron Perlman's head bimbo. Then you've got Carol Alt, eighties supermodel. She was waiting tables in college when a photographer gave her the old "You could be a model" line, so she decided to blow off her ROTC scholarship and try it. She walks into the Elite Modeling Agency, and the first person who sees her shouts, "Chain that girl to a chair, don't let her out of here." But Carol's an actress now, stars in the TV show "Amazon" -- did that make it past the first season? And she's actually a BIG star over in Europe; she's done a ton of films over in Italy. Okay, commercials and then back to "Body Armor."

[fading] "I'm big in Europe." Don't you love it when they say that? "Every person in Liechtenstein knows who I am. I can't even go to the Pyrenees, it causes riots. Take a look at these box office figures in Kiev."

I have a question. Does Ken live in a Japanese botanical garden? In that sappy love scene, weren't they aardvarking in a pagoda or something? Also, I guess you'd have to really really really be in love to do that, wouldn't you? Smack somebody right on the lips. Kinda like nuclear mononucleosis. And don't you love when they describe in detail the gruesome way the character is gonna die? "You have to stay still for 48 hours. Then the virus will block your veins, and your body will make more blood until your organs explode, ending in a death spiral that lasts about fifteen seconds." Oh, and don't you love the FBI's response to Conway wanting to go after the vaccine? "That's impossible -- it takes 48 hours for approval on something like this; it'll be 55, 60 hours till we can get on the island." Was that, like, the Inspector Clouseau part of the movie? "In 36 hours you're going to die a horrible death. Go lie down for a few days, we'll get started on the paperwork." Of course, one thing Conway DOES have time for is making the sign of the furry-fisted Siamese panda in the ole love pavilion. Was that one of the longest nookie scenes we've had here? All that rolling around, hands on the back stuff. [turns around and demonstrates hands on the back] Anyhow, let's do the commercials and get back to it.

[fading] That was like a fifth-grader's version of a love scene, right? [demonstrates again] "Oh, yes, oh, baby, you're the best . . . " Actually, I better stop -- I'm gettin a little excited here.

Carol Alt looks cute in her little FBI outfit, doesn't she? Almost as good as she looked in that silver bikini. The silver bikini -- that's standard FBI issue, by the way. And, of course, we know Carol Alt and Matt McColm are the good guys because good-guy bullets always find their target, whereas bad-guy bullets fly around the good guys, even if the good guys have no cover whatsoever. Cinematic rule number 308. You know, I may have to put those on our Web site someday. You guys know the Web address? tnt.turner.com/joebob. And while I'm on the subject, you can e-mail me at joebob@turner.com, or snail-mail me care of TNT, 1010 Techwood Drive, Atlanta, Georgia, 30318. Okay, let's roll the ads and get back to the flick. I wanna see Conway's organs swell up with viral blood surges.

[fading] This place they're in -- really doesn't look like a LAB, does it? Looks like a water purification plant. In fact, I would say that just about every movie we show ends up in a water purification plant. Either that or an electrical transformer station. I wonder if the FBI has thought about this. You could just do regular sweeps of all water purification plants, electrical transformer stations, and Coca-Cola bottling plants, and eventually you would find every single guy who's trying to take over the world. Right? You know who first discovered this? Mannix. In the sixties. Oh, bad guys -- let's see, where would they be hiding? Cut to . . . Mannix running through a warehouse by the wharf, in his thousand-dollar suit. He was the first to discover that, if you wanna find the criminals, look for the industrial pipe.

Don't you love it when they get to kill the bad guy two or three times? Wait, why did Marisa need a doctor? Cause she fell down and got a boo-boo? Did I miss something? Great firesuit stunt, though. You gotta be tough to be a stuntman for a stuntman. Anyhow, tonight's flick was an "Outbreak" rip-off, and next week we have an "Alien" rip-off, the 1989 underwater classic, "Leviathan." That's it for me, Joe Bob Briggs, reminding you that nothing says "I love you" like sex.

That reminds me of a joke. A priest and a rabbi are flying in a plane. After a while the priest turns to the rabbi and asks, "Is it still a requirement of your faith that you not eat pork?" Rabbi says, "Yes, that is still one of our beliefs." The priest then asks, "Have you ever eaten pork?" Rabbi says, "Yes, on one occasion I did succumb to temptations, and tasted pork." The priest nods in an understanding way and goes on reading. A few minutes later, the rabbi asks the priest, "Is it still a requirement of your church that you remain celibate?" Priest says, "Oh, yes celibacy is a requirement." Rabbi asks him, "Have you ever fallen to the temptations of the flesh?" Priest says, "Yes, Rabbi, on one occasion, I broke with my faith." Rabbi nods in an understanding way, then says, "A lot better than pork, isn't it?"

Joe Bob Briggs, reminding you that the drive-in will never die. [fading] Why did the man cross the road? He heard the chicken was a slut.