Horror Host Makes Iowa, Wisconsin Huge Part of Hilarious Monologue

In recent months, Catherine has become obsessed with The Last Drive-in with Joe Bob Briggs, a variety show that's been running on the horror-centric streaming service Shudder since 2019. Briggs has been a mainstay in the horror genre for years, having hosted a similar program throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as well as MonsterVision on TNT. You could consider him the irreverent, southern version of Midwest cultural staple Rich "Svengoolie" Koz.

If you're unfamiliar, The Last Drive-in features Briggs and his co-host, Darcy the Mail Girl, hosting a horror movie of some kind. It could be a classic, modern, exploitation, foreign, or indie film. Punctuating the movie are bits, rants, original songs, interviews, or just general, informative commentary by Briggs and Darcy. It's a lovely presentation. A must-watch for horror fans.

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And sometimes, amidst all the insanity, you'll hear Joe Bob Briggs make passing references to our homefront, including towns in Iowa and Wisconsin (all in jest, of course).

Last night, Catherine was watching an episode where Briggs hosted Carnival of Souls (S6, E9), the cult classic horror flick shot on a shoestring budget back in the early 1960s.

During Briggs' opening monologue, he was putting a lot of common adjectives used to describe movies under scrutiny. These were terms like "rediscovered cult classic" and "hidden gems," all of which, while overused, he argued do directly apply to Carnival of Souls first and foremost.

During this monologue, Briggs begins by addressing the idea of a movie that's described as "hidden gem." He comes up with a fictitious but all-too-believable scenario that's been applied to various films over the years that were outright bombs/critical failures upon their initial release only to be reevaluated and praised in subsequent years.

It's in this monologue that Briggs hilariously name-drops Iowa and Wisconsin in a hypothetical scenario of a movie seeing the light of day after spending eons in obscurity:

People want me to tell them about the "hidden gem." The great movie that nobody knows about it. People assume that someone in 1947 made a 35mm film that played in one theater in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, but then it got tied up in litigation and the producer director died of syphilis and the only print was assumed to be lost but really all this time it's been stored in the back room of a grain storage facility in Iowa City because the syphilitic genius who created it left it in his will to the mentally impaired son of his estranged brother and the nephew used the film cans for bowling ball cases and then one entire reel was warped after being soaked in grape juice and left on the ledge of a barred window at the Iowa Lunatic Asylum in Mount Pleasant. After the nephew died in test-state, a Henry County Deputy Sheriff found the can in 1998 and gave it to the projectionist at the temple theater on Main Street and he eventually screened it for Lonnie Wilson, editor and publisher of a fan scene in western Nebraska. Lonnie then spent the next 20 years tracking down the other reels restoring them frame by frame and writing letters to Quentin Tarantino so that he could unveil his hidden gem at the Sheboygan Theater on 8th Street after a preview at the Wild Wicked Weekend Horror Convention in Eagle Pass, Texas. Does that about sum up the idea of the "hidden gem?" - Joe Bob Briggs, per the Season 6, Episode 9 of The Last Drive-in with Joe Bob Briggs

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That's about four mouthfuls of a monologue, but it's absolutely hilarious if you know the horror community and know how cinematic legends get built up. The best part about Briggs' monologue is the hyper-specificity with the locations he references.

Mount Pleasant, IA is part of Henry County. The way he creatively flings the story from Sheboygan, WI to Iowa to western Nebraska is relayed in stream-of-consciousness, even though there is no way Briggs didn't write (and probably fuss over) this script.

I got a good chuckle out of it, and I think you will too. You can stream The Last Drive-in with Joe Bob Briggs on Shudder as well as AMC+, or find clips of the show on YouTube!