Heads will roll

My latest random-book read is one of Josh's childhood favorites, Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In by Joe Bob Briggs [aka John Bloom] (1987), a collection of reviews of drive-in movies that originally ran as a weekly column in The Dallas Times.

Joe Bob Briggs is the chauvinistic and non-politically-correct alter-ego of journalist John Bloom. His reviews of drive-in movies are interspersed with a running narrative of the fictional girls and good-ole-boys in Joe Bob's life, and always end with a count-up of the number of breasts, killings, rolling heads, and kung-fu moves featured in the film.

The reviews of the movies are really fun to read, and I appreciate the handy statistics at the end of each column. Even the running gags with Joe Bob and his series of girlfriends are entertaining -- and almost read like a novel when you put all the pieces together in a book like this. Sometimes the dumb humor is funny, but most of the time it reads like bad Jeff Foxworthy or Larry the Cable Guy jokes (are there any good ones?), and kind of falls flat. Joe Bob's constant bating of NOW and the entire city of San Francisco also gets a little old. As you might expect, since it was originally published as a newspaper column, many of the references in the reviews are very dated, and reading the book takes one back to the 1980s with constant referrals to the Communists, Vidal Sassoon, and We Are the World.

Overall the book is worth reading, and the most disappointing thing about it is that hardly any of Joe Bob's beloved drive-ins have survived in the 20 years since this volume was published.

As Joe Bob would say: Check it out.