Joe Bob Briggs (born John Irving Bloom January 27, 1953 in Dallas, Texas) is a syndicated film critic, writer and actor. Briggs was raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, and attended Vanderbilt University on a sports-writing scholarship. Bloom began his writing career with Texas Monthly.
Briggs specializes in humorous but appreciative reviews of b-movies and cult films, which he calls drive-in movies. His columns characteristically conclude with a brief summary of the "high points" of the movie in question, including the types of action (represented by nouns naming objects used in fight scenes suffixed with -fu), the number of breasts bared, and the exhortation "Joe Bob says check it out." Particularly gorey movies also had a "vomit meter". A typical such concluding paragraph would be, "Table-fu. Pool cue-fu. Bulldozer-fu. Four breasts. A 68 on the vomit meter. Joe Bob says check it out."
He has also appeared on television as a host of TNT's MonsterVision horror movie marathons. Bloom was president of the Trinity Foundation of Dallas, Texas, a non-denominational, non-profit public foundation that serves as a religious watchdog group and publishes The Door, a Christian satire magazine, of which Bloom was a regular columnist and investigative reporter. The most famous of products of The Door staff was a parody videotape of televangelist Robert Tilton, with flatulence dubbed in whenever Tilton grimaced. Some of the efforts of Bloom's religious watchdog reporting and satire where featured in a regular segment in the first two seasons of The Daily Show. In addition, some of his writing can be seen in Choice: The Best of Reason, a compilation of the libertarian magazine's work over the past four decades.
His movie reviews are collected in the now out-of-print books Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In and Joe Bob Goes Back to the Drive-In. His most recent book, Profoundly Disturbing: Shocking Movies that Changed History, contains all-new material. Recently, Briggs has contributed audio commentaries to DVDs released by Media Blasters and Elite Entertainment including Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter , The Double-D Avenger, Blood Sisters, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, Blood Shack, Warlock Moon, and Samurai Cop.
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