Illustration by David Malan
Audio By Carbonatix
The man who coined the phrase “The drive-in will never die” with his own television resurrection is returning to town to a place that runs deep in his bloody veins.
Drive-in movie critic and Shudder horror host Joe Bob Briggs will make his third appearance at the Texas Theatre on Thursday, June 30, with a double feature of brainy movies. And by brainy, we mean there will be brains splattered all over the screen.
Briggs’ appearance is part of a four-theater tour called Joe Bob’s Indoor Drive-In Geek Out with a series of special screening in conjunction with the American Genre Film Archive. The series will also make stops at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Boston, the Music Box in Chicago and the Hollywood Theater in Portland, Oregon.
Briggs called these four theaters “trendsetters in the world of genre and cult programming” in a released statement and likened the experience of doing a live commentary in these historic movie houses to “like going to Carnegie Hall for me.”
Each stop will include screenings of two slash ‘n dash horror favorites encased in a special “Cerebellum Night” themed experience with two brain splitting classics from 1988. The evening will start with the Canadian cult horror hit The Brain, in which a pop psychologist uses an alien creature that’s basically just a giant, slimy brain with an evil looking face to brainwash his audience. The film stars David Gale, who’s best known for his villainous roles, most notably as the evil Dr. Hill in Stuart Gordon’s 1985 remake of H.P. Lovecraft’s Re-Animator.
The Brain was also the movie that Dallas film fans got to see in the 2018 at the Majestic Theatre during the maverick movie-riffing comedy series Mystery Science Theater 3000’s live 30th anniversary tour. MST3K, as fans call it, is returning for its 13th season in its own online channel called The Gizmoplex.
Briggs will also show the satiric horror story Brain Damage, directed by drive-in movie favorite Frank Henenlotter, the lauded cult filmmaker behind the beloved Basket Case trilogy. Brain Damage is a story about a centuries old, brain-eating parasite that injects an intoxicating, stupefying “juice” into a person’s brain to help it feed on human victims. The parasite finds a host in a man named Brian, played by Dallas-raised and future soap opera star Rick Hearst, who cuts himself off from his friends as he becomes addicted to the brain sauce and the parasite takes control of him.
Briggs is more than just a little familiar with Brain Damage. He featured Henenlotter’s allegoric tale in the second season of his Shudder show The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs. The drive-in movie sage called Brain Damage “a non-stop puke-a-rama” and gave it his rarely used, full four-star rating.
Barak Epstein, the president of Aviation Cinemas, which oversees the Texas Theatre, says he expects a sellout by the time Briggs returns to his old stomping grounds. Briggs was a regular patron of the Texas Theatre during his time as the drive-in movie critic for the defunct Dallas Times-Herald in the early ’80s because the place was one of the few remaining movie houses that showed the B-grade films he’d feature in his regular column on the grislier side of cinema.
“This is going to be a huge show,” Epstein says. “Tickets are moving fast. Joe Bob used to actually come to the Texas Theatre back in the day to watch drive-in movies indoors, so this show should be full circle for him as a legendary monster-movie programmer.”
