A Lonely Red Christmas

Around six years ago, I reviewed the remake of Sam Raimi's seminal The Evil Dead, and I ended up spending nearly half of that review talking about the original film, mostly because I had very little to say about the remake, a film that disappointed me in 2013 and still disappoints me today. The circumstances around my first viewing, discovering an old VHS cassette in my basement with the words "The Evil Dead" handwritten on a plain label in big, bold letters, seemed almost mythical to me at the time. Where did this videotape come from?

Back in the VHS heyday, my father took his home entertainment seriously. He would buy blank tapes in bulk (only the high quality stuff, mind you. For my old man, it was Memorex or bust) and record all sorts of movies on TV, mostly stuff from HBO and Cinemax because he preferred the content of his collection to be uncut and commercial-free. Over the 1980s, he accrued a rather impressive collection of movies, a sleek and uniform assemblage of video cassettes in identical black sleeves dominating the custom shelving in one corner of the rec room in our old house. The vast majority of these titles he had recorded himself on nights and weekends, but some of the tapes were donated from a friend who owned a satellite dish, a thing that sounded like pure science fiction when somebody attempted to explain it to my eight year-old self.

This guy had a giant dish in his backyard that he could remotely adjust at will in order to point to different patches of the night sky and pick up all sorts of amazing-sounding transmissions broadcasting directly from outer-fucking-space. What, was this guy a millionaire? Did he work for NASA? One of the channels this giant among men could receive with his vaunted satellite dish was The Movie Channel, which wasn't available on our cable package. And the man came by one afternoon with a handful of freshly-recorded tapes, filled with movies and assorted ephemera from his explorations of the far-out reaches of satellite television. One of the tapes was labeled "The Evil Dead", and that title haunted me. If you've read my old review, then you know what happened next, but you don't know the whole story. I left this part out in the old blog post because it really had no bearing on the story I was telling, but it's crucial to the story I'm telling today.

When I finally popped that mysterious VHS tape into my battered TV/VCR that magical summer of 1995, I wasn't immediately assaulted with the sights and sounds of Sam Raimi's DIY masterpiece. No, the first few minutes of the tape were dominated by a geeky-looking redneck in a black button-up shirt and cowboy hat complete with bolo tie, standing in a junked-up trailer set, enthusiastically singing the praises of the film I was about to watch. He was knowledgeable, he was charming, and he was funny. He was hyping up the movie so much, that I was on pins and needles when it finally started. And when the movie was over, he was back, talking about how he'd like to host the sequel, how star Bruce Campbell was set to direct his own movie called The Man With The Screaming Brain in the near future, and mentioning something called The Great Sky-Copter Rescue before the image abruptly cut to a flurry of static that made up the rest of the cassette's run-time.

I had no idea what I had just watched. So many things were passing through my brain. The movie I had just watched absolutely blew me away and I had to watch it again immediately. The enthusiastic cowboy was identified via text insert as "Joe Bob Briggs", but I'd never heard of this guy before. Was he hosting other movies? How could I watch those? And The Evil Dead was directed by the guy who made Darkman? I'd seen Darkman! I loved Darkman! And the guy who played Ash in the movie played Darkman at the end of Darkman! And that guy was going to direct a movie called The Man With The Screaming Brain?! When was that coming out?! I needed to see that movie yesterday! Wait, there was an Evil Dead 2?! Holy mackerel! I needed to see that movie last week!

This one nondescript videotape had just unzipped my young mind and filled it with an enthusiasm for so-called "drive-in cinema" that abides within me to this day. None of the other tapes in my father's forgotten collection featured this Joe Bob Briggs fellow at all, which I learned much to my disappointment that summer. So I watched The Evil Dead again. And again. And again. Not just because I loved the movie so much (which I did), but because the guy who hosted this movie's presentation was so completely unlike the film critics to whom I had been exposed thus far in my life. People like Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel were informative, to be sure, but they seemed so dull to me, at least in their onscreen personas, that I was never truly excited to watch their reviews on television. I tuned in, but if I missed an episode of Siskel & Ebert At The Movies on any given week, I didn't sweat it much. I always felt like I was attending a staid lecture when I watched their show, but watching Joe Bob Briggs talk about The Evil Dead was a revelation. He was filled with enthusiasm, an animated presence on my screen, rattling off a series of factoids about the production at a breakneck pace, as though he couldn't contain his passion for the film he was about to watch. and he needed to share that passion with his audience.

By the time school started back up in the autumn, I had resigned myself to the knowledge that this one brief clip on an old VHS tape would likely be the first and last time I would ever see Joe Bob Briggs talk about movies. None of my friends at school had ever seen The Movie Channel, so they had no idea who I was talking about. By the time next June rolled around and I was out of school once more, I had almost forgotten entirely about that old videotape and its precious contents. And then one Friday night, while tuning into TNT and not really paying attention to anything in that particular way a young man can zone out while half asleep on a hot summer night with absolutely nothing going on, a familiar voice snapped me out of my stupor.

There he was. Joe Bob Briggs was on my TV, hosting MonsterVision, a show I had forgotten all about since I had seen Penn & Teller hosting old episodes of The Outer Limits on the show a few years back. Here was that near-mythical figure, the excitable cowboy who had imprinted himself so indelibly on my mind a year ago, back on television, on a channel I could actually watch. This was a miracle. Over that summer, as well as the next five years, I would tune in nearly every Saturday night (TNT moved the show to Saturday nights the following June) and watch whatever aired on MonsterVision, simply because Joe Bob Briggs was hosting it. Not just horror movies, but sci-fi misfires, campy action flicks and thrillers, good, bad, or ugly, you name it and I was there, rain or shine, because Joe Bob was there, guiding me through the morass, like a brilliant beacon in a dense fog.

I wasn't just tuning in each weekend to watch a pair of weird movies and have a good time. I was tuning in to watch Joe Bob Briggs talk about a pair of weird movies, and we would have a good time together. And I knew it wasn't just me tearing the heart out of each Saturday night. There was an entire community of people watching MonsterVision each week, writing letters and sharing their own experiences with Joe Bob and with each other. That was the most important aspect of this whole experience to me. I was a lonely teenager. Sure, I had a few friends, and we were thick as thieves, but outside of school, we didn't get to hang out nearly as often as we wanted. And being a rather extreme introvert, even when I really did want to go out and spend some time with my friends, I often found myself crippled with anxiety and, being conquered by my own self-doubt, I would just end up cancelling any tentative plans and staying home alone, because it seemed the less painful option at the time. I would spend these times beating myself up for being so weak, for not allowing myself to take advantage of these rare opportunities to spend quality time with the few people who actually cared enough to call me their friend. It's an unfortunate truth that we are often our own worst enemies in life.

But when MonsterVision came on each Saturday night, I never felt quite so alone. When I sat in front of my glowing television screen on those late nights, I could feel the presence of a horde of other lonely weirdos out there, gathered in front of their own televisions, watching the same movies, having the same experience, guided by the steady hand of Joe Bob Briggs. I wasn't alone, after all. I was part of a community. We had never formally met, but we were out there, feeling each other through the airwaves, being called together every weekend to take part in a shared experience that meant a whole lot more to us than we could have believed at the time.

Then suddenly, MonsterVision was just gone.

I remember watching Joe Bob host Children Of The Corn 2: The Final Sacrifice on a Saturday night in June (the network had dropped the second feature back in January, the final in a series of moves to "salvage" the format beginning in late 1999, beginning with moving the filming location from Dallas to Los Angeles and changing the name to Joe Bob's Hollywood Saturday Night, with the first movie of the evening being more mainstream, modern fare, allowing the more familiar MonsterVision format to return with the second feature, when all of the "normies" were in bed), and then when the next weekend rolled around, he just wasn't there anymore. Joe Bob Briggs was gone. No explanation. No reasons given. MonsterVision technically continued for a few months afterward, returning to its original host-less format, but it didn't matter. The show that I had loved so dearly, the show that had made such an impact in my young life, that made me feel like I belonged somewhere, was gone.

I was, in a very real sense, devastated. I know some people simply wouldn't understand why the end of a television show would affect somebody in such a profound way, and I don't know how to articulate why this bothered me so deeply to those people. This wasn't just losing a television show; it was losing a community. One weekend, I was watching MonsterVision with multitudes of like-minded individuals, part of something larger than myself. The next weekend, I was all alone again, sitting in front of my television and feeling just as isolated as I had before that wonderful summer evening back in 1996, when I stumbled upon the program that would change my life forever. Over the ensuing years, I never forgot about the joy that MonsterVision and Joe Bob Briggs had given me during those awkward teenage years. I missed the simple pleasures of watching cheesy movies together with friends all over the country that I would never meet, feeling united in knowing that we were all watching these movies together as a family of sorts, with Joe Bob Briggs standing in as that cool uncle who you loved to hang out with because he would tell you off-color stories that never failed to make you laugh, maybe even sneaking you a sip of beer when your parents weren't looking.

As time passed, I gave up hope that I would ever be able to recapture this experience, as the television landscape continued to evolve into a more segregated, isolated thing. People watch everything on their own time, now. Nobody wants to adhere to a schedule, so nobody ever knows how much of any given program they can discuss with anybody else. The communal experience of watching something on TV at the same time is nearly extinct. But in July of 2018, horror streaming service Shudder tried to resurrect that experience with The Last Drive-In, a 24 hour+ marathon of some of the best and best-worst the genre has to offer, hosted by the man, the myth, the legend, Joe Bob Briggs himself. I signed up for Shudder exclusively to watch this marathon live, and on Friday, July 13th, I opened the app on my TV and...

...It didn't work. The live feed wouldn't load. I thought maybe my house's garbage internet was too slow or something, so I opened the app on my phone, switched to 4G and... it didn't work. Shudder just wasn't working. This was a nightmare. Something I had waited over seventeen years for, a blessed event I never thought I would live to see... and I was missing it. Finally, endless hours later, I managed to get the live feed to load on my television, just in time to catch the final two movies in the marathon: Hellraiser and Pieces. Watching Joe Bob introduce the films, it was clear the man hadn't lost any of his knowledge or passion for genre cinema over the years. For a little while, I was back in time, sitting in front of my glowing television screen, sharing a singular experience with multitudes of people all over the world. I was part of a community again, plugged back in like no time at all had passed.

Only this time, things were different. The "community" back in the day was more theoretical for me, because I had never met another person who ever actually watched MonsterVision. I knew other people were watching mostly through the letters delivered to Joe Bob by his revolving cast of "mail girls", letters from people he would read on the air, many of them written by folks serving hard time, the very definition of a "captive audience". But none of my friends watched MonsterVision, and when I recommended it to them, they never really gave it a chance. It just didn't interest them, which mystified me. How could anybody not want to watch a middle-aged cowboy sitting in front of a dilapidated trailer on a run-down sound stage extol the virtues of the works of Frank Henenlotter on a Saturday night? What, you have something better to do?

But things had changed in the intervening years. The internet had happened. MonsterVision had a minor presence on the web, but I didn't have internet access at the time, so I couldn't take advantage of that. But now with the rise of social media, things had evolved. The community had evolved, and it was abuzz with excitement as it followed the marathon that hot summer weekend. At first, I was upset that I couldn't watch most of the marathon since Shudder's servers had crashed, but I realized quickly that this had only happened because there was so much enthusiasm for The Last Drive-In, that the fans had turned out in such numbers that they overwhelmed the streaming service, crashing the servers with love, and that made me smile. This was real-time evidence that the community was alive and well, ready to support their patron with such fervor that they temporarily killed Shudder in the process. How appropriate. I was on Twitter, following the hashtags along with all of the other "drive-in mutants", finding myself now a very immediate part of the community that had only ever existed before as a sort of nebulous concept out there in the darkness.

At the conclusion of Pieces, Joe Bob Briggs got a little more serious as he addressed the fans who had supported him for so long, signing off for what he (and we) believed may very well be the final time. He got up out of his chair, leaving his cowboy hat behind as he took his leave and walked off-set. Then a moment later, he returned and sat back down, holding his hat in his hands as the lights dimmed and a melancholy acoustic version of The Last Drive-In's theme song "Joe Bob's Back In Town" began to play. I began to weep as the gravity of it all began to hit me. I didn't want it to end, and neither did anybody else who was watching that night.

Luckily, it wasn't long before we were rewarded with the news that not only was Joe Bob returning with two mini-marathons later in the year (one on Thanksgiving and one on Christmas), but in the new year he would be back with a regular weekly version of The Last Drive-In, hosting a double-feature every Friday night along with his new mail girl, "Darcy", played by Diana Prince, former adult film actor and horror devotee who also happens to be one of Joe Bob's biggest fans. Diana Prince has become the de facto leader of the drive-in mutant family over the past year, with her bubbly personality, boundless passion for all things horror and tireless commitment to making everybody who reaches out feel like they all belong to this community, that they all matter, helping transform this latest iteration of Joe Bob's "same old thing, just different" feel more important, more powerful than ever before. She keeps the drive-in's eternal flame burning bright in the off-season, doing everything she can to spread the gospel of the three B's (blood, breasts and beasts) to all corners of the world-wide web, and without her, The Last Drive-In wouldn't be what it is. Her role in the Joe Bob Briggs renaissance is of great importance, and she deserves all the credit in the world for helping make all of this a reality.

As I've mentioned earlier in the year, 2019 has been a rough year for me, to say the least. Back in April, I nearly died, and the recovery from that harrowing experience has been long and difficult, and I am in fact still struggling with many tasks I used to take for granted. When I was first discharged from the hospital, I couldn't walk more than two feet without the aid of a walker, and even then I couldn't make it far at all without being overwhelmed with tremendous pain, the kind of pain I had never had to deal with before in my life. The simple act of breathing was difficult and would leave me exhausted. unable to get out of bed for hours at a time. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't read a book. I couldn't go for a walk. I couldn't even sit upright for more than five minutes at a time without the pain forcing me on my back once again.

But on that first Friday home from the hospital, around 8 PM, I launched Shudder on my television and was greeted with their live countdown to the launch of the latest episode of The Last Drive-In. As the seconds counted down, emotion overtook me, and I started to weep. When the jovial theme song composed by John Brennan started up, I began bawling uncontrollably. I never thought I would have the chance to see my favorite show again. But here it was, and I was overcome with joy. I was always so tired in those early days, but I stayed wide awake through both features, Demon Wind and Wolf Guy, without any trouble, because for the first time since what felt like an eternity, I was happy. I will admit there was a scene in Wolf Guy where star Sonny Chiba is subjected to some rather graphic forced abdominal surgery that hit a little too close to home for me at the time, but I soldiered through the experience, because I wasn't dwelling on my own misfortune, on my own pain, and for a little while, I was outside of my own mind, which helped me immensely throughout my recovery.

And after my second surgery in September, I re-watched every episode of the show again as a necessary distraction for a few hours at a time from the physical misery in which I found myself. I'm not sure how this will sound to you, Dear Imaginary Reader, but watching The Last Drive-In helped save my life. It gave me a reason to struggle on for another week, to rejoin my drive-in mutant family each Friday night and forget about my own troubles. The Last Drive-In has been an invaluable source of comfort and joy during what has been one of the worst periods of my life, and Joe Bob Briggs and Diana Prince have my eternal gratitude for that.

You might be wondering why I've been rambling on and on about this seemingly unrelated topic on Christmas Day of all days, but Joe Bob Briggs, Diana Prince and The Last Drive-In have given me a priceless gift this year, something that means the absolute world to me. I feel like I belong somewhere once again, like I've found my tribe at last. I've proudly taken the Drive-In Oath, and I'm a mutant for life. This might be the best Christmas gift I've ever received.

On his latest mini-marathon, last week’s “Joe Bob’s Red Christmas”, Mr. Briggs shared a sad story about one of his lowest times, when he was flat broke after MonsterVision went off the air, trying to catch a bus in New York City to get to a job interview. Unfortunately, the man didn’t have any money left on his Metro Card, so he got kicked off the bus and found himself unable to get uptown. A fan who recognized Joe Bob offered to pay for his idol’s bus fare, but he found he was too embarrassed to accept this kind stranger's offer. Joe Bob told this story because it reminded him that even when he was reaching rock bottom, the fans hadn’t forgotten about him. The fans always cared, and he remembers and appreciates them for always being there. And we appreciate you, Joe Bob. My eternal gratitude to you, and to Darcy, for making The Last Drive-In the best damned show out there. Merry Christmas to you both, and to all you drive-in mutants. Thanks for being there. It means more than you could ever know.

And Merry Christmas, Titus. I'll see you in the stars tonight.