Joe Bob Briggs Tagged Articles at Cinematical

400 Screens, 400 Blows is a weekly column that takes an in-depth look at the films playing below the radar, beneath the top ten, and on 400 screens or less.

Lately I've been dreaming of a TV show I'd like to see. Ever since Roger Ebert hired Richard Roeper to be the permanent replacement on his review show, I've dreamed of something a bit edgier and funnier -- you know, like when Ebert used to fight with Gene Siskel. Now the network suits have made things even worse with the two idiots they have on now (I mean, really! Could they be any worse?). Here's my idea: Joe Bob Briggs and John Waters. That's a show I would pay to see each week!

For the uninitiated, Joe Bob Briggs was the world's first and only "drive-in movie critic." He was nationally syndicated from the early 1980s to the late 1990s and he reviewed horror and trash movies, rating them based on gallons of blood, number of "nekkid breasts" and so forth. (His favorite movie is the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.) John Waters, of course, is the director of such films as Pink Flamingos (1971), Hairspray (1988) and Cry-Baby (1990), but he is a big movie fan and occasionally writes about movies for magazines like ArtForum. (His favorite movie is Joseph Losey's Boom!) To put it mildly, they each have a slightly off-kilter view of movies that generally has nothing to do with hype; they tend to see through the B.S.

This list was harder than I thought. I honestly thought it would be easy to scrape up a handful of funny horror movies, or scary comedies, or even unintentionally funny, Ed Wood-type movies. But the more I started poking around, the more I discovered a healthy and thriving subgenre, packed with potential classics. This year's hilarious, disturbing Black Sheep is just one example, as well as Fido (which I missed). There were also many shades within this subgenre, ranging from flat-out comedies with supernatural elements (Beetlejuice, The Witches of Eastwick) to horror movies with just a hint of the absurd (The Invisible Man, An American Werewolf in London) to spoofs (Young Frankenstein, Scary Movie) So I stuck with my original impulse and went with the ones that I found the "funniest" that were actual "horror" movies. Oddly enough, most of my choices went -- arbitrarily -- to zombies. I guess vampires and ghosts just aren't as funny.

1. Shaun of the Dead (2004)
I've seen this four or five times now, and I just don't get sick of it. On a purely technical level, it moves beautifully, from the camera setups and tracking shots to the fluid editing. It's so well executed that the jokes are more or less imbedded within the film, rather than jumping out of the film, so that it remains funny each time. Some of the subtler jokes get better each time, such as Ed's "two seconds." What's even more amazing is how well it works as both a character-driven movie and a zombie movie. It's so good, it even earned the seal of approval from the zombie master, George A. Romero (the boys, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, went on to make cameos in Romero's Land of the Dead).

2. Army of Darkness (1992)
The debate rages on around Sam Raimi's Evil Dead trilogy: which one is best? I love them all, and Evil Dead II is my admitted favorite, but this third entry -- at one time entitled "Medieval Dead" -- is definitely the funniest. Bruce Campbell earned himself a lifelong cult following with his deadpan readings of lines like "boom stick," "primitive screwheads," "gimme some sugar, baby," etc. The drawback is that this film is definitely the least scary of the three films, but it does have its share of monsters, gore and creepy Harryhausen-like effects.

Yes, I loves me some horror cinema, but watching scare flicks isn't enough for me. I also love reading about them, finding out what went into making them, and learning about other movies I should seek out. Sure, there are some great online resources for that (Cinematical, for instance), but I love books, the feel, the smell, the way you can use one to settle an argument either by confirming a fact, refuting an erroneous claim, or by throwing it. I present you now with seven horror movie related books from my personal library, each perfect for reading by the fireplace while an angry storm rages outside and the howl of a distant wolf mingles with the wails of lost souls emanating from that deconsecrated cemetery across the street (you know, the one right next to Burger King). Many of these are out of print, but used copies can easily be found on Amazon or EBay.

The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film by Michael Weldon
Any self-respecting fan of trash cinema should have this 816 page tome. Exactly what constitutes a psychotronic film is a little hard to pin down, but it includes not just horror films, but science fiction, biker flicks, jungle adventure, juvenile delinquents, etc. When the book was published in 1983, home video was just coming into its own, so locating data on the likes of Dr. Orloff's Monster, Goliathon (a.k.a. Mighty Peking Man) and Ed Wood's Orgy of the Dead must have been quite an undertaking. Author Weldon, who for years also published Psychotronic Video magazine, was one of the first to deem this type of grade z movie swill worthy of cataloging. Dated, but still an invaluable resource.

As Kim mentioned earlier today, filmmaker/writer/photographer Gordon Parks died Tuesday. As a result, I thought it was only fitting to post a photo from Shaft, Parks' most popular film. I have only ever seen clips from Shaft, and ought to rent and watch the whole movie.

A few years ago, I attended an event in which Joe Bob Briggs showed clips from the movies listed in his book Profoundly Disturbing: Shocking Movies That Changed History. One of the movies was Shaft. Briggs noted that Parks had instructed Richard Roundtree (who plays the title character) never to look to the sides when he crossed a street in the film ... and kept the footage in which Roundtree was nearly hit by a cab. Briggs' essay on Shaft in the aforementioned book is worth reading and includes some good background on Parks, as well as commentary on the ways in which the movie affected the film industry, as well as the streets of New York.

Digging around the Web, I found a nice photo of Gordon Parks directing, although I decided to use a still from the movie here instead. I realize as I read his filmography that I watched his last film, a made-for-TV movie called Solomon Northrup's Odyssey, in a high-school history class. So I have seen one of his films after all, although I suspect it is somewhat different from Shaft. Maybe I should try seeing The Learning Tree first (although that movie is not currently available on DVD in the U.S.).