The title is reassuringly lurid and the cover comfortingly nasty, but, on opening this book, anxious readers may worry that Joe Bob has left the drive-in. Now that would be profoundly disturbing. Author, journalist, cable-TV stalwart, and former NR columnist, Briggs overcame fictitious origins and nonexistent competition to become America’s finest drive-in-movie critic. He saw Nail Gun Massacre and he watched All Cheerleaders Die. Who else could take on that sort of responsibility?
He is the Zagat of the Z-movie, the one indispensable guide for those who like slaughter, sex, and lethal household tools with their popcorn. He wallows in the movies that other critics flee. Ebert on Shrunken Heads? Silence. Kael on Fury of the Succubus? No comment. But Joe Bob was there for them both. He’s funny, well informed, and succinct (The Evil Dead is “Spam in a cabin”), and he tells his audience what it needs to know (Bloodsucking Freaks: “pretty good fried-eyeball scene . . . 76 breasts . . . excellent midget sadism and dubbed
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