Hey OKC, Joe Bob Is Back In Town!
In which we hear from film legend Joe Bob Briggs...
If you’re a deep fan of cult cinema, there are few things that perk your ears up higher than hearing the deep Texas drawl of Joe Bob Briggs cutting into a break during a low-budget film. Whether you grew up with Joe Bob’s Drive-In Theater, MonsterVision, or have newly discovered him on The Last Drive-In on Shudder, it’s exhilarating. You’ll see somebody get their head chopped off, and a quick cut to him lounging in his iconic Western wear drinking a Lone Star and casually saying something along the lines of, “Well, ya see, that guy there who just got his head chopped off, he was an esteemed character actor who studied at Julliard in New York City back in the ‘70s, and was mostly known from their stage career. Tom Savini orchestrated that brilliant decapitation, and I know all y’all mutants know him. Anyways, back to the film” and then he goes on a tangent about something completely different.
Joe Bob Briggs will be in Oklahoma City at Rodeo Cinema on Saturday, March 25th for a sold-out double feature of ‘Bubba Ho-Tep’ (2002) and ‘Donnie Darko’ (2001), two films distributed through the American Genre Film Archive, a badass non-profit that exists to preserve the weirdest and wildest films for future generations. I spoke with the man himself about the current state of watching cult cinema in the theaters.
The last time Joe Bob was in town was for his ‘How Rednecks Saved Hollywood’ road show, which had as many charts and slideshows as it did film clips. But that is the magic that works for freaks like us.
“It’s like a geek hang-out,” Joe Bob tells me. “I think this is the future of theatrical exhibition. It has to be special. You have to have, at the very least, a Q&A, a director there, or even a local curator who fosters an environment like we’re doing at these shows.”
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The tentpole summer blockbusters will always have a place, but building community and having hosts to provide context is what Joe Bob is driving to keep theaters alive in a time where people can just watch a movie on their phone. He champions films that fall outside of multiplexes, specifically independent horror and exploitation movies made by people outside of the traditional system.
“The task of the exploitation filmmaker is to invent new genres,” Joe Bob explains. “They invented the biker movie, they invented the kung-fu movie. Every time there’s a new genre, it comes from the indie guy, It’s never going to come from the studio, it’s never going to come from Netflix.”
We’re in a precarious era where it is cheaper than ever to make a movie, but harder to get it seen. You don’t need to worry about burning through filmstock when you can film it all with your phone. Getting eyes in front of it is the hard part.
“It’s an interesting time, it’s very difficult for the guy with no money or limited funds to get financing. It’s not that he can’t get his movie made, he just can’t get distributing,” Joe Bob exhales. “It’s becoming increasingly common that the channels of distribution are being handled by five, six, seven companies, and you don’t really have much of a chance of being noticed unless you can do massive social media promotion, which some guys can do. I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie ‘The Barn,’ or ‘The Barn 2,’” Joe Bob laughs, “but that guy has a massive social media audience. You can do that if you’re a maniac.”
“It’s not like the old days of Roger Corman and AIP when they could put out twenty, thirty movies a year, go to the drive-ins, get distribution,” Joe Bob continues. “I think these things are cyclical, and I think there could be a time when the majors- I don’t mean so much the traditional studios, but I do mean them- but I mean the Silicon Valley guys, the Netflix’s of the world, the thing about them is that they’re not like traditional Hollywood. They work on algorithms, they work on ‘the big new thing.’ ‘Terrifier’ was the big new thing, and algorithms won’t identify that.”
When ‘Terrifier’ came up on the conversation, there was an excitement in his voice. The sequel opened up in theaters across the country without an MPAA rating, something unheard of these days, and managed to do gangbusters at the box office through word of mouth of people excited to see perhaps the most gruesome and gory big release horror film in decades.
“In the late 40’s and early 50’s, when film noir appeared, polite people didn’t go to those movies,” Joe Bob says. “A certain kind of filmmaker would make those, and a certain kind of filmgoer would avoid those. At the time, we had the golden age of the Westerns, and the Westerns were upholding the status quo of the times, and the film noirs were saying, ‘This country is kinda fucked up.’ They were really flawed people who were on the seedy side of the railroad tracks.”
To be fair, Joe Bob Briggs is a man who is excited about shopping in Oklahoma City’s Stockyard District for the unique Western wear, but he’s arguably one of the largest champions for the most unpolite films out there. After all, his Valentine’s Day special on Shudder involved him marrying a couple in Vegas during a break from ‘Nekromantik’ (1988), possibly one of the most perverse films anyone has ever streamed live on a major network.
That kind of multi-faceted personality is what brings his fan community together, lovingly calling themselves "The Mutant Family,” an international group of people who have maybe felt on the outside of society for liking what Joe Bob laughed as he described as, “That fancy academic term: ‘transgressive’ films.”
As long as there are still mutants like us out there, the drive-in will never die.