Josh Bell
Decades before “fandom” became a major cultural and commercial force in entertainment, Joe Bob Briggs was at the forefront of a burgeoning community of aficionados of the kind of B-movie detritus that never received mainstream attention of respect. Briggs, the alter ego of writer John Bloom, bills himself as the “world’s foremost drive-in movie critic,” and he has been a standard-bearer for horror, exploitation, and cult movies since he began reviewing them in print in the early 1980s.
Along the way, Briggs has himself become a cult figure, thanks to his books and his stints as a TV host, first on The Movie Channel and TNT in the 1980s and ’90s, and currently on Shudder’s The Last Drive-In, which premiered in 2018. In the years that Briggs was off the air, the kind of movies he had been touting achieved a level of popularity that Briggs’ early writing never anticipated, thanks to the proliferation of conventions and other fan events, along with online forums connecting enthusiasts who in the past might have been sitting alone at home, reading Briggs’ books or watching him on TV.
So Briggs arrived in Las Vegas this past weekend for his third World Drive-In Jamboree as a genuine icon, a patron saint of B-movies who could gather hundreds of members of his so-called “mutant family” at a drive-in theater without even telling them exactly what movies to expect. Previously held at venues in Pennsylvania and Tennessee, the Jamboree began in 2021 as a celebration of the movies and the venues that Briggs loves, the drive-in theaters that have diminished in number over the past few decades but became a lifeline for film-goers during the early days of the pandemic.
Las Vegas’ West Wind Drive-In is one of the country’s oldest and largest, opened in 1966 and currently operating six screens with capacity for nearly a thousand cars. The Jamboree takes over five of those six screens, offering on-site camping, a mini-convention featuring vendor booths and photo opportunities with genre celebrities, and Briggs himself as event host and figurehead. It’s part film festival and part tent revival, with Briggs leading services in the church of the B-movie.
As strong as Briggs’ affinity for vintage low-budget cinema may be, he’s just as dedicated to encouraging the next generation of genre filmmakers, and the first night of the Jamboree is a showcase for new films, culled from more than 300 submissions. Briggs treats these movies with the same mix of reverence and irreverence that he gives to B-movie classics, and his level of excitement for the world premiere of Mutilator 2 is on par with his excitement over the in-person appearance of Roger Corman the following night.
Earlier on the first day of the festival, legendary B-movie filmmaker Charles Band is on-hand for what is billed as the Charles Band Roadshow, a retrospective on the career of the man behind movies like Puppet Master and Trancers. Instead, Band takes the stage to film a scene for his next movie, featuring his surprisingly long-running Barbie and Kendra characters, first played by Cody Renee Cameron and Robin Sydney in 2020’s unfortunate covidsploitation movie Corona Zombies.
Band and his Full Moon production company are Briggs favorites, and Band appears to be returning the favor in a scene featuring Briggs, his Last Drive-In co-host Darcy the Mail Girl (played by actress Diana Prince), Sleepaway Camp star Felissa Rose, and Barbie and Kendra themselves. Band runs through multiple takes as Barbie and Kendra warn Briggs that Rose’s evil developer plans to raze the drive-in to build a golf course. Each time, the scene ends with Briggs proclaiming, “Drive-ins like this one will never die!,” as the audience cheers. The eventual movie will almost certainly be terrible, but everyone involved, including the crowd, is having fun.
The movies that Briggs presents on that first night follow in the same spirit, beginning with writer-director David Liban’s Publish or Perish, a dark comedy about a college English professor (Timothy McCracken) who goes to extreme lengths in pursuit of tenure. Although it eventually racks up a decent body count, Publish or Perish isn’t really a horror movie, and its satire of the competitiveness of academia is pretty mild. The performances are strong, though, and Liban generates a few laughs from the protagonist’s single-minded pursuit of an ultimately meaningless distinction.
Up next is Mutilator 2, filmmaker Buddy Cooper’s extraordinarily belated follow-up to his 1984 slasher movie The Mutilator. Cooper’s passion is clear, but the movie is a tiresome self-aware reflection on The Mutilator itself, set during the filming of a supposed Mutilator remake, featuring some of the original stars playing themselves. It’s not clever or funny, with haphazard plotting, confusing character relationships, and underwhelming kills. The ending arrives so abruptly that the movie seems to stop right in the middle of a scene.
Opening night’s final feature Cannibal Comedian is similarly one-note, although at least its single joke is occasionally amusing. Aaron Prager convincingly captures the rhythms of a hacky regional comedian as the title character, who’s a Leatherface-type killer living in a remote desert shack, killing and eating various passersby. What he really wants is to try stand-up, though, with an act full of cannibal-based puns. There’s not much else to the movie, but it gets by for a little while just on Prager’s charm.
All three of the opening night features are awarded Briggs’ Hubbie, a drive-in trophy engraved on a Chevrolet hubcap. They also get the full rundown of “Drive-In Totals” that Briggs compiles for every movie he presents on TV, cataloging the murders, dismemberments, and other creatively gruesome moments, along with a full accounting of nudity. All eight of the short films in the night’s closing program get their own Drive-In Totals as well, including three for filmmakers who aren’t present, which Briggs records for posterity. For members of the mutant family, getting Briggs to recount your Drive-In Totals is the equivalent of Martin Scorsese declaring your film to be true cinema.
The focus on the next two nights shifts to older movies, starting with a taping of The Last Drive-In’s sixth-season premiere, featuring Briggs and Darcy introducing a Roger Corman double feature. The 97-year-old B-movie titan himself, along with his filmmaker wife Julie, makes an appearance in between features, and while he speaks a little slower these days, his drive for making movies has clearly not diminished. Corman caps his interview with Briggs by announcing that he’s working on a new remake of his 1960 classic The Little Shop of Horrors.
The Corman program begins with 1959’s A Bucket of Blood, a delightful parody of beatnik culture starring Corman favorite Dick Miller as a coffeehouse busboy who finds unexpected acclaim with his sculptures created from the corpses of his murder victims. Briggs makes an odd choice for the second feature, though, skipping the rest of Corman’s directorial oeuvre in favor of 1983’s Deathstalker, a dreadful sword and sorcery movie distributed by Corman’s New World Pictures.
For attendees who stick around until the wee hours, though, there’s more Corman goodness after The Last Drive-In ends, with two of Corman’s energetic and creative counterculture movies, 1966’s The Wild Angels and 1967’s The Trip. Both star Bruce Dern, who shows up as a surprise onstage guest during the Corman interview and proceeds to hijack the discussion with his own long-winded but entertaining stories about working on Corman movies.
Dern rambles on out of sheer love for the movies he made with Corman, who “perpetuated the movie business,” as Dern puts it, and that sheer love also accounts for the much less endearing rambling from pro wrestler Chris Jericho the next night. Jericho is a Sleepaway Camp II superfan, and he takes over the franchise marathon following a showing of the enjoyably nutso 1983 original, with Rose returning to chat with some of her co-stars. Jericho and his podcast hosts commandeer the stage before the showing of the second and third movies, which are presented with live commentary from a clearly inebriated Jericho.
At an event like the Jamboree, there’s a good chance that most of the attendees have seen the entire Sleepaway Camp series already, but Jericho squanders the chance for some insightful anecdotes, constantly talking over the reunited cast members. The Jamboree is a joyous celebration of the power of fandom, the way that it’s connected people with common interests and encouraged new artistic creation. But fandom can also be loud and obnoxious, and Jericho ends the event on a somewhat sour note.
Briggs brings an elegance and erudition to his B-movie appreciation, and at best the Jamboree embodies that perspective. He’s the kind of ambassador that fan culture deserves, and the Jamboree affirms his position.
Photos by Jonathan Ruggiero.
