Extras:

• Audio commentary by Joe Bob Briggs
  
• Theatrical trailer
  

Joe Bob's reviewing rules to live by:

For his debut disc in the Joe Bob Presents series, Briggs has taken on a terrible, set-challenged, genre-blending tale of the old west meeting the bastard children of the Universal horror films of the '30s. Jesse James (John Lupton), in this film's conception, is a guy on the bum who wanders from town to town with his pal, a muscle bound moron (Cal Bolder). Through a convoluted and exhausting set of narrative devices, James and his buddy end up in the clutches of Frankenstein's granddaughter (the title gets it wrong), who has relocated to the Southwest, presumably because the lightning bolts are better for raising the dead. She finds herself hot for moron, but not because of his body. Or, well, yes, because of his body, but not because he is a hunk but because he has one that she can insert the head she has been hoarding into it. Eventually there is a shoot out in the lab.

It's terrible stuff, presented in a probably unavoidably poor source print with bad sound. But the movie does offer Joe Bob plenty of occasions to do what he does best, which is a kind of loving MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER take on the film as it unspools, lacing his discourse with a wealth of knowledge. In fact, listening to Brigg's audio track provides an object lesson in how to review movies, indirectly enunciating a set of reviewer's principles.

1) Research the credits You find out the strangest, most interesting things by looking at a film's credits. Joe Bob seems to pour over filmographies the way other people read box scores. The consequence is that he has tons of interesting things to say about the people who made the movie, which contextualizes it in both the careers of the makers and the times in which the film came out. Here he notes the grimly curious pattern that JESSE JAMES was the very last film of most of its makers.

2) Add up the numbers Most films these days tend to be set in Vagueland, where they hope to evade having to actually do research and know what they are talking about. It pays, so to speak, to really challenge a movie's specifics: what's the name of the city, where is it, what do people do for a living, how does the machinery work, what day is it, when's the next game, and so on. Joe Bob does this. For JESSE JAMES, he looks carefully at the figures bandied about concerning the stagecoach robber that Jesse James gets involved in and realizes that they don't add up. It makes for a very amusing moment in his commentary.

3) Make connections Because Briggs has seemingly seen everything, he can dance lightly through the whole history of cinema and link of the film at hand with any number of previous and future films. Here, he places Beaudine's film in the history of Frankenstein movies, cowboy movies, and mad scientist films, enriching your experience in a way that the movie itself can't.

4) State the obvious You know, sometimes it's the most apparent things, — facts, figures, and inconsistencies — that go unmentioned because everyone assumes that all others have seen or heard them. Joe Bob states these kinds of observations, with his characteristic amused drawl.

In connection with the publication of PROFOUNDLY DISTURBING, MoviePoopShoot.com was able to track down Joe Bob Briggs, who took time from his busy writing career to answer a few questions via e-mail.

Your new book, PROFOUNDLY DISTURBING, comes out at an interesting time. Notions of what makes a good film have shifted in the last 30 years, thanks to writers such as Robin Wood and, of course, yourself. For example, many of Michael Medved's Golden Turkey awards are now deemed good or at least worthwhile films. Many of the BOMBs in Maltin's books are now cult films. This is an unwieldy question, but what are some of the cultural changes would you point to as causing this shift?

Most people don't realize that the term "popular culture" wasn't even coined until the 1970s. The first group of academics who studied popular culture were at Bowling Green Stat University in the '70s. Of course, they were lagging behind the popular press. There were several guys like me who all started writing about movies, music, architecture and other aspects of American culture from a lowbrow point of view — or, to put it another way, from an anti-high-culture point of view. Michael Medved and Leonard Maltin are from a high culture school of criticism. I don't think they saw what was happening when John Waters made his early movies. In fact, many of those movies weren't reviewed by the mainstream press. But Waters was the first self-referential pop-culture filmmaker.

Okay, I'm gonna bore you to tears here and go even further. The pop culture criticism of the late seventies, early eighties, is a direct result of the New Criticism of the 1930s. The idea that we shouldn't judge an artistic work by whether it's "good" or not, but we should study how it works, was first put forth by English professors, including Robert Penn Warren, at Vanderbilt University and Louisiana State University in the early part of the century. I'm sure they had no idea we would take them so seriously. I do want to make a distinction here, though. Writing about pop culture is different than writing about fan culture. There's a difference between a guy who can describe why Betty Page is perceived as hot by the public, and a person who just goes on and on about the minutiae of Betty Page's life. One is real social criticism and the other is just puffery.

In a typical book that surveys important films an author might write about GONE WITH THE WIND, THE WIZARD OF OZ, CITIZEN KANE, THE GODFATHER, THE DEFIANT ONES, BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID and other Oscar fodder. But one could make a case that CITIZEN KANE actually never really had all that much of an influence on cinema. It may have inspired some kids in the '50s to want to be directors, but it's hard to pinpoint films that show a direct visual or narrative influence from KANE, while KANE itself shows the influence of several films, including movies by Preston Sturges and Ford. The movies in PROFOUNDLY DISTURBING, on the other hand, really did influenced people. Most of the films you discuss either inspired sequels or were quickly raided for camera tricks or other techniques in immediate successors, and people have talked about SHAFT, say, a lot more than THE DEFIANT ONES. The films you have selected permeate the culture in subtle ways. Are we getting more sophisticated about films, or less?

I'm certainly glad to see you "get" this book. Even though it's been portrayed as anti-intellectual, it's more properly described as anti-received wisdom. Let me give you an example. D.W. Griffith is always held up as our most important innovator, because he invented the close-up and many other techniques that have been used ever since. I think we're exaggerating his importance. If he had not invented the close-up, someone else would have. You can't use a camera competently and not psychologically desire to make close-ups. For some reason film criticism has been focused on the technology. The technology is important — it's our most technological art form — but I've focused on the content, or controlling idea, of the film. I've even included technically incompetent films that nevertheless have such a strong controlling idea that the film has been admired ever since. In some cases, like THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, I've described films that were highly competent in a technical sense but were dismissed by the mainstream because the controlling idea was considered either frivolous or off-putting. In other ways, I'm examining the idea that films are a part of the social fabric of their times, and they reflect those times and in some cases they change those times. Other people have written about this — I'm not the first — but most of them have focused on explicitly political films.

I seem to recall you writing somewhere (I can't find the quote in the book now) that a whole other volume could be made out of different titles. I assume (in fact hope) that there will be another PROFOUNDLY DISTURBING. What films might you cover in a sequel? I'd love to read a book of essays by you on movies such as BLACKBOARD JUNGLE, BILLY JACK, THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, CARNIVAL OF SOULS, DEATH WISH, DRESSED TO KILL, ENTER THE DRAGON, HALLOWEEN, A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, JAWS, MAD MAX, PEEPING TOM, THE TERMINATOR, THE TINGLER, and THUNDER ROAD.

That's certainly a good list, and many of those were considered for this volume. But one of the premises of the book was that the movie had to have a continuing influence. (That would rule out THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE and BILLY JACK). What I might do in the future is a book of total outlaw films, films so far beyond the pale that they were one-shot wonders. Like I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE.

In a PROFOUNDLY DISTURBING 2 or 3, would you be inclined to write about the new wave of auteurs from Japan (specifically Miike) who make films that appear to be a bit too much for American audiences such as BATTLE ROYALE or VISITOR Q?

Oh yes, definitely. I've already written about several of the Tokyo shock movies, and I think it's one of the most interesting things to happen to horror in 20 years. There's also a lot going on in Korea, but for the most part you can't see these films in theaters outside of New York.

The consensus among my coterie of five or six geeky Joe Bob worshipers is that the essays on SHAFT, ILSA, and DEEP THROAT are among the truly great reads in the history of film criticism. They are excellent examples of popular film history at its best. One of my geeks loves the fact that in the DEEP THROAT essay you didn't mention Watergate. He admires the fact that you never take the obvious path. Was skipping the whole Watergate thing a conscious decision? Or was it just ultimately irrelevant to the film?

I looked into that, but it turns out that Watergate was a very slow-developing story. Even though the Watergate break-in was first reported in the summer of 1972, it took several months for it to become major news. Meanwhile, the DEEP THROAT phenomenon happened. But it was really independent of that. I'm glad you like the ILSA chapter. It's one of the more arcane ones.

In regard to the DEEP THROAT essay what do you think of BOOGIE NIGHTS? Anderson was charged by some reviewers, by writers such as adult movie specialist Dark Lady, with not really understanding the history of adult movies in the film's time period.

I didn't review BOOGIE NIGHTS. I like the movie but agree it's not very accurate.

PROFOUNDLY DISTURBING is not written in what we have come to know as the "Joe Bob" voice. How much thought did you give to deciding what "voice" to write the book in?

Actually the first chapter I wrote was THE EXORCIST, and you'll notice that it's the only one close to the usual Joe Bob voice. I had to abandon it when the book became more ambitious. There are some things that require a little more sophisticated language and treatment. Even Joe Bob has his limitations.

How the heck do you find time to even write a book, anyway? What is your writing procedure for such a big project? Do you plow through a chapter at a time, or do you sit down and write whatever parts interest you that day? How long did it take to write it?

Well, since I'm always writing 10 other things at the same time, I have to break a project down into small units. Yes, I work on one movie at a time, and the first thing I do is I very carefully watch the movie scene-by-scene at least twice, so that I'm familiar with its structure. Then I gather everything that's been written about the actual making of the movie, including things that I may have written myself some time ago. I don't really trust the Internet, especially fan sites, so I stay away from that and use traditional sources. Then I take notes on what aspects of the movie I want to emphasize. Then I write the chapter. It took about a year and a half to write, but if I weren't doing anything else, I probably could have done it in two months.

The essay on DEEP THROAT is a version of the obit you wrote about Linda Lovelace. Did the obit inspire the essay, or were you already writing the book when Lovelace died?

I had already written the DEEP THROAT chapter when Linda Lovelace died. I adapted some of the material from the chapter for the obituary. The book chapter is much longer.

Each chapter ends with a filmography section called "For Further Disturbance." But some of the material in there is redundant from the preceding essay itself. I assume this was a conscious choice on your part or the publishers.

Well, the publisher wanted the book to be user-friendly in the sense that you could go to the video store and try to find the titles referred to in that chapter. So the "For Further Disturbance" sections repeat titles mentioned in the chapter so that you can find them all in one place.

Which would you rather do: write another book, or act in another movie?

Well, they're not mutually exclusive, but right now I'm concentrating on books.

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