Joe Bob Briggs

Drive-In Movie Critic of Grapevine, TX

Today I wanna pay tribute to all the guys who are in love with ugly girls.
The best thing about them is that they never know the girl is ugly, so it saves the rest of us from a lot of embarrassment in later life.

She'll never find out that she's attached to a deranged blind man, and we'll never tell her.

Before I get into trouble with this, I should point out that women who are in love with ugly men are an entirely different matter.

These women already know the guy is ugly. They've convinced themselves to be in love with him anyway. This doesn't count.

I'm only talkin' about guys who have twisted their brain to believe that the triple chin they're looking at is actually a sign of immense character.

Let's start with my friend Randy (name changed to save my life). Randy apparently doesn't realize that his girlfriend's nose has more twists and turns in it than the Log Flume ride at Six Flags.

In fact, if you asked Randy what his girlfriend's most beautiful feature is, he'd prob'ly say: "It's that cute face, Joe Bob. I'm a face man."

Now let's move on to Stu, a very handsome musician friend who could have many women. He chose one with a rear end that looks like she's carrying around several sets of silverware in there.

Stu thinks she's "voluptuous." I guess he likes to...naw, I don't wanna think about it.

Then we've got Marv. Marv has the hots for one of those 6-foot-2, spindly-legged pig-stickers with the floppy shoes and the cartoon arms that look like they flop in the wind. To Marv, this is "slender." We're talking about a woman who would get sympathy from beggars in Ethiopia, and Marv thinks he's got a supermodel on his hands.

Like I say, I think it's great that there are so many mentally diseased men around.

The most glorious ones of all are the guys who love fat girls. They don't always admit it, since guys like me have been known to make the occasional joke about the gravitationally challenged.

But these guys imagine a perfect world where everybody is fat and we all worship the Pillsbury Doughboy. The more bones that can be hidden by layers of flesh, the happier they are. The more pressure they can apply to those bedsprings, the more they go into ecstasy.

To a true lover of heft, it's like diving into a giant vat of...No. I can't.
Just take my word for it. God has done a wonderful thing here. He's paired us up according to our mutual sicknesses.

And speaking of people who could use a little cosmetic surgery, we have a fairly decent zombie flick this week. It's called Shatter Dead, and it's been making its way through the video underground for a couple of years now.

It's basically a Night of the Living Dead for the '90s, only this time there's no way to kill the corpses. Bullets through the brain no longer do the job.

Some kinda weird plague has struck the world and nobody can die anymore.
As soon as their insides are drained of blood, they become walking, talking zombies with no desires except to hang out on the streets like homeless people and listen to a Preacher Man tell 'em what to do.

Hey, who wouldn't enjoy that? (I'm just giving you the premise here, OK?)
So suicide starts soundin' like a great thing, because, after all, if you do it now, you'll never get old.

But most people screw it up in one way or another and have these nasty oozing pus scars all over their faces, or else they're missing an arm or a leg, because once you lose something or screw something up, you can't get it back.

Anyway, there's one spunky gal who decides she'd rather just go on driving to the grocery store and tooling around the streets, and even though she looks dead half the time, she says "no" to death and gets an occasional charge out of shooting bullet holes through the heads of zombies who are a little too pushy.

But her boyfriend is weak, and one day he gets a little high and decides to try the suicide thing.

Really bad for the relationship.
Not to mention the roving gangs of killer zombies who decide it's taking everybody too long to die on the honor system, so they'll just speed things up a little bit. It's shaky, it's grainy and it's got some of the worst acting since Tiny Tim made Blood Harvest.

But that's OK.
The goo is good.
Twelve dead bodies. Seventeen breasts.
Face-flaying. Flaming, one-armed zombie. Zombie surgery.
Multiple bullets to the brain. Wrist-slitting. Zombie aardvarking.
Hand rolls. Excellent gratuitous shower scene. Gratuitous nekkid angel.
Kung fu. Zombie fu.
Drive-In Academy Award nominations for:

*Robert Wells, as the Preacher Man, for saying, "I claim this vehicle for our people in the name of the Lord!"

*Flora Fauna, as the sexy, organ-playing zombie roommate who says, "What's wrong with the choice I've made?" and: "See? Now we're both naked as jaybirds and you've got the gun."

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