Joe Bob Briggs is moving on from Shudder. After eight seasons, The Last Drive-In is coming to an end on the fan-favorite streaming service. Joe Bob and Darcy the Mail Girl will be doing a few more specials before all’s said and done, but that will be that. The good news? As longtime fans of Briggs are well aware, the drive-in will never die. Thus, he and Darcy are already preparing to launch a brand new show next year. While many details remain elusive, we learned a bit about what they have up their sleeves.
I recently had the good fortune of seeing Joe Bob and Darcy do their thing live in Austin, Texas for a double feature billed as Satan’s Workshop. What are they workshopping, exactly? The aforementioned new show. “Starting January 1 we’ll be doing a new show called The Last Drive-In: Final Chapter – Joe Bob in Space,” Briggs quipped.
Whether or not that winds up being the actual title (it probably won’t) is somewhat irrelevant. What fans of The Last Drive-In want to know is what the next chapter in Briggs’ history will look like. Is it just going to be the same show with a different name on a new streaming service? It doesn’t appear so, based on what Briggs told the crowd at the first in a two-night engagement that was intended to test out potential movies for this new show.
“We care about your opinions here,” Briggs said during his introduction before the movies began. “We’re both gonna study your faces, your bodies and your involuntary skeletal language in order to see whether these movies are having any impact on you.”
“We don’t care whether you’re loving the movie or hating the movie. We do care whether or not the movie is boring you,” he added.
The night’s first movie was Raphael Nussbaum's Pets, followed by Tough Guys Don’t Dance. Neither of them explicitly horror movies, but undoubtedly underseen genre offerings of differing sorts. The first, a road trip movie during the hippie era with a fair amount of nudity, sex and a wild fucking ending. The other, a bizarre crime mystery flick written and directed by the legendary Norman Mailer that was reviled in its day but, with the right crowd, is a wildly entertaining disaster. This was the right crowd.
Under most circumstances, these movies wouldn’t be fuel for mass entertainment in the here and now. However, Joe Bob Briggs has always been good at bucking cynicism and, instead, looks for the good in movies that are otherwise ignored by most. That’s absolutely going to continue in this new show, as evidenced by the movies we watched. But Briggs is going to dial it in even more, with a more specific focus this time around.
“What we’re looking for with Satan’s Workshop are films we can use on our new show that are not shop-worn,” Briggs said. “Now, what I mean by that is, Plan 9 from Outer Space is a lot of fun, but it’s shop-worn. The Baby…one of my favorite of all the films we hosted on Shudder is not shop-worn. It’s just as shocking today as it was in 1973.”
Briggs noted that the reason that they picked Austin is because the city is home to the American Genre Film Archive (AGFA). “Give them money. Give this theater money and give them money,” Briggs said with sincerity. “They preserve and restore films that nobody else cares about and it’s my goal to host all 6,000 of their genre titles, preferably with audiences like this one. People with extremely bad taste.”
The beloved horror host then noted that “the sweet spot for forgotten cult movies is 1969 to 1977.” He then offered up perhaps the biggest hint when it came to what we can expect from this new show. It’s going to be all about forgotten stuff, rather than beloved horror classics. As Briggs explained:
“The most exciting stuff we did were forgotten films, or undiscovered films, or neglected films, or films that people did see years ago but their appeal has done a 180.”
Briggs then proceeded to use Showgirls as an example. If the night’s selections were any indication of what’s to come, there are a few things we can say of this new show. For one, the movies went over very well, so they may well end up being showcased. More than that, this new show may be less horror-centric, at least explicitly. In the realm of forgotten films that aren’t “shop-worn,” there is other genre fare that doesn’t fit directly into the horror sandbox that Briggs seemingly wants to explore.
To whatever degree that is inviting or off-putting to viewers of The Last Drive-In will come down to the individual. What I can say with certainty is that the movies were fun with this crowd and Joe Bob did a great job of almost teaching us how to watch them to maximize the enjoyment. The spirit of what he has always done is still going to be intact, even if the format and programming changes a bit. The new show, whatever it’s called, is still at its heart going to be Joe Bob Briggs doing what he’s been doing, broadly speaking, for decades.
The drive-in is alive and well, it seems.
Joe Bob’s new show doesn’t yet have a release date or home that’s been announced but stay tuned as we’ll bring you those details as soon as they’re made available.
