Joe Bob Briggs
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Joe Bob Briggs is a pseudonym and persona of John Irving Bloom (born January 27, 1953 in Dallas, Texas), a syndicated American film critic, writer and actor. Bloom was raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, and attended Vanderbilt University on a sports-writing scholarship. He began his writing career at Texas Monthly.
Joe Bob's persona is that of a unapologetic and unreformed male chauvinist with an avowed love of the drive-in theatre. He specializes in humorous but appreciative reviews of b-movies and cult films, which he calls drive-in movies (as distinguished from "indoor bullstuff"). In addition to his usual parody of urbane, high-brow movie criticism, his columns characteristically include colorful tales of women-troubles and high-spirited brushes with the law, tales which inevitably conclude with his rush to catch a movie at a local drive-in, usually with female companionship. The reviews typically end with a brief rating of the "high points" of the movie in question, including the types of action (represented by nouns naming objects used in fight scenes suffixed with -fu), the number of bodies, number of female breasts bared, and, for gory movies, a "vomit meter". A typical such concluding paragraph would be, "No dead bodies. One hundred seventeen breasts. Multiple aardvarking. Lap dancing. Cage dancing. Convenience-store dancing. Blindfold aardvarking. Blind-MAN aardvarking. Lesbo Fu. Pool cue-fu. Drive-In Academy Award nominations for Tane McClure. Joe Bob says check it out."
Originally, Joe Bob's film reviews were limited to pictures shown at local drive-ins. Later, after a tongue-in-cheek 'battle' with his own convictions, Joe Bob also began reviewing films released on VHS and DVD. Joe Bob's unabashed fondness for violence, political incorrectness, and female nudity earned him considerable enmity from left-wing feminists, social activists, and bible-belt moralists alike, to the undisguised joy of Bloom and his large fan audience.
In 1998, Bloom retired from writing newpaper reviews, only to return two years later due to popular demand and continue his column as Joe Bob with UPI. Bloom has also appeared on television as a host of TNT's MonsterVision horror movie marathons, and has an internet website, The Joe Bob Report, with collections of movie reviews and other articles.
Bloom was president of the Trinity Foundation of Dallas, Texas, a non-denominational, non-profit public foundation that serves as a religious watchdog group and publishes The Door, a Christian satire magazine, of which Bloom was a regular columnist and investigative reporter. The most famous of products of The Door staff was a parody videotape of televangelist Robert Tilton, with flatulence dubbed in whenever Tilton grimaced (The Farting Preacher). Some of the efforts of Bloom's religious watchdog reporting and satire were featured in God Stuff, a regular segment in the first two seasons of The Daily Show. In addition, some of his writing can be seen in Choice: The Best of Reason, a compilation of the libertarian magazine's work over the past four decades.
Joe Bob Briggs' movie reviews are collected in the now out-of-print books Joe Bob Goes to the Drive In and Joe Bob Goes Back to the Drive In. His most recent books, Profoundly Erotic: Sexy Movies that Changed History and Profoundly Disturbing: Shocking Movies that Changed History, contains all-new material. Recently, Briggs has contributed audio commentaries to DVDs released by Media Blasters and Elite Entertainment including Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter, The Double-D Avenger, Blood Sisters, Warlock Moon, Samurai Cop, "I Spit On Your Grave", and several Ray Dennis Steckler films including The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies and Blood Shack.
[edit] Bibliography
- Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-in (1986), ISBN 0-385-29442-5
- A Guide to Western Civilization, or: My Story (1988), ISBN 0-385-29671-1
- Joe Bob Goes Back to the Drive-in (1990), ISBN 0-385-29770-X
- The Cosmic Wisdom of Joe Bob Briggs (1990), ISBN 0-394-58890-8
- Iron Joe Bob (1992), ISBN 0-87113-488-8
- Profoundly Disturbing: Shocking Movies that Changed History! (2003), ISBN 0-7893-0844-4
- Profoundly Erotic: Sexy Movies that Changed History (2005), ISBN 0-7893-1314-6
[edit] Filmography
- (2007) Hogzilla
- (2004) All That You Love Will Be Carried Away
- (1999) The Storytellers
- (1997) Face/Off
- (1995) Casino
- (1994) The Stand
- (1989) Great Balls of Fire!
- (1986) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (scenes deleted)
