John Bloom
John Bloom is an actor, born 1953.
Joe Bob Briggs is not a person. He is an invention of John Bloom, a Dallas newspaper writer who built a syndicated film column around a drive-in critic with no interest in prestige and total interest in what a picture actually delivers, and then kept the character running for four decades. The persona hosted Joe Bob's Drive-in Theater on The Movie Channel from 1986 to 1996, MonsterVision on TNT from 1996 to 2000, and The Last Drive-in on Shudder in the current era.
The trick of the thing is that the character lets him be both the joke and the authority. Nobody watching a horror double bill wants a lecture, and the Briggs voice smuggles a genuinely deep knowledge of exploitation film history inside a routine that appears to be taking nothing seriously. He grades a film by what it promised its audience rather than by what a critic thinks a film ought to be, which turns out to be the only useful way to write about the material he covers. Wikipedia records the Rondo Hatton awards naming him Monster Kid of the Year in 2019 and inducting him into their hall of fame in 2023.
The acting credits split neatly. Under his own name he takes small straight parts: Don Ward in Casino, a prison medical technician in Face/Off, a moviegoer in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, which is the correct film for him to be standing in. Elsewhere the credit simply reads Joe Bob Briggs, because the character is now the hireable asset, most obviously in the horror anthology Scare Package and across the In Search of Darkness documentaries.
Movies (7)
TV (5)
Where to start with John Bloom
The Last Drive-in with Joe Bob Briggs is the best version of the format and the place to start, because the Shudder era finally gave him the running time to talk properly: the film is the excuse and the digressions are the show. If you want the older, cruder original, Joe Bob's Drive-In Theater is where the character was built and MonsterVision is where it reached the largest audience, though basic-cable censorship blunted the material. Scare Package is the one horror film that casts the persona as itself and understands the joke. In Search of Darkness and In Search of Darkness: Part II use him as a talking head, and he is the sharpest voice in either. For the straight acting, Casino gives him the most memorable small part on the page.