"Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In" for 10/22/93
By Joe Bob Briggs
Drive-In Movie Critic of Grapevine, Texas

There's been a lot of Beavis-and-Butthead Bashing going on lately. But you can tell that none of the B-and-B Bashers know what the heck they're talking about, because they never even know the difference between Beavis and Butthead, or between a Beavis joke and a Butthead joke, or what we in the arts call the Beavis Sensibility and the Butthead Ethic.
These people are NUTS.
This cartoon is so lame that it's got WORSE animation than Hanna-Barbera. Sometimes nothing moves except the character's mouth--an effect last seen in the series "Space Angel" in the early sixties. (It was actually a technique called "Synchro-Vox"--living human lips superimposed over animated bodies. It looked so weird they stopped doing it.)
But Beavis and Butthead survive, in spite of all the mush-head censorship loonies. And they survive because of Joe Bob's First Rule of Comedy:
If you laugh at it, it's good.
I can't believe these people who say, "Well, yes, it DOES make me laugh, but I wonder if it's HEALTHY laughter."
WHAT ARE YOU IDIOTS TALKING ABOUT? Is some Evil Twin FORCING you to laugh? Is the Butthead Demon taking over your body and contorting your face so that you laugh at vile, unfunny stuff?
But what really burns my bacon is that the censors are starting to WIN. People are starting to believe this stuff. Last week MTV announced that future Beavis and Butthead shows would be "softer." And the reason they were upset is that people claim their kids are watching Beavis and Butthead and setting fire to cats. They were especially nervous because, during the same week, Disney got in trouble when kids in Jersey started lying down on the highway and playing Body Chicken after watching a scene in "The Program" where a guy does the same thing. And somebody got killed doing this. And so they concluded, naturally, that
"It must be the MOVIE's fault."
You hear this all the time now.
It's the movie's fault.
It's the TV show's fault.
It's Joe Bob's column. It's all those dirty magazines.
Doesn't anybody ever think that, if you watch one scene in a movie and decide to throw yourself in front of a car, there might have been 97,000 OTHER influences in your life that contributed A LITTLE BIT to that decision? And when I was a kid, I didn't even NEED Beavis and Butthead to tell me how to blow up cats. I KNEW kids who blew up cats.
If we keep this up, we're gonna have to ban "Romeo and Juliet," because it encourages teen suicide.
Lemme say this again:
Reality. Movie. Reality. Movie.
Two different things.
The Reality comes first. THEN the Movie. Not the other way around.
Sheesh.

Speaking of things that should never be censored, our right to look at Drew Barrymore's two enormous talents busting out of a skin-tight body stocking is still intact after "Doppelganger," the latest in her series of Psycho-Bitch-From-Hell roles. In this one she's mentally disturbed, nubile, and looking for a new apartment--a deadly combination. One by one the members of her family are dying horribly from multiple butcher-knife wounds, but her new roommate, screenwriter George Newbern, has his eyes planted firmly on the Kumquats.

What George doesn't know is that he has TWO new roomies--the nice Drew, who loves to tidy up, and the evil Drew, who loves to put on mini-skirts and dance like Madonna at Hollywood parties. George has to be careful which one he sleeps with.

Does Drew have a Doppelganger, which is some kind of ghost that hangs around and makes you do bad drugs and degrade yourself? Or is she messed up by her manipulative shrink? You won't find out till the big morph-a-rama finale of gooey Silly Putty skeleton mutants.

It takes a lot for me to say this, but ... Drew may be the new Linda Blair.

Two dead bodies.
One dead cat.
Three breasts.
Multiple aardvarking.
Bloody shower.
Hand nailing.
Knife through the palm.
Drive-In Academy Award nominations for Drew Barrymore, for saying "I can't cook but I can cut" and
"We didn't do ANYTHING, you and I--don't confuse me with HER!";
George Newbern, as the screenwriter who's doing "Breakfast at Tiffany's" as a horror movie, for saying "I don't want to be chicken anymore";
Leslie Hope, as the chattering girlfriend and writer, who says "Okay, I'm a slut, you're a slut. Who wants coffee?";
and Avi Nesher, the writer/director, for doing it the drive-in way.
Four stars.
Joe Bob says check it out.