MonsterVision's Joe Bob Briggs Looks At
Braddock: Missing In Action 3 (1988)
He's fighting for everyone who can't fight back
"Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In" for 2/18/88
By Joe Bob Briggs
Drive-In Movie Critic of Grapevine, Texas
Before I tell you about BRADDOCK: MISSING IN ACTION 3, where Chuck Norris goes over to Vietnam to get out all the prisoners he forgot to get out in his last three movies, I wanna talk to you for a minute about the greatest threat to human rights the world has ever known:
Vietnamese refugees who can never go home because they're getting too rich in the restaurant business.
We may never know how many there really are. No one wants to talk about it. The only official reports we have is that they've seen scattered throughout the Midwest, in places like St. Louis, Kansas City, Omaha, so that they can be hidden from sight among populations who believe the run Chinese restaurants.
Heres's just one blood-curdling example.
At the Nguyen Van Thuy "Happy Eggroll" Restaurant in Tyler, Texas, patrons are served cabbage-leaf bamboo-shoot sweet-and-sour fondue fajitas, a dish which would be recognized by any Vietnam veteran as the famous "G.I. Griddle" sold at the open-air market in Dien Bien Phu as a cure for malaria. Yet the local restaurant critic in Tyler calls it simply "scrumptious Oriental fast-food."
The question I keep asking is, "Why?"
Why this massive cover-up by the government?
Why not let these innocent people go home?
Why prolong the secret war?
"Why? I'll tell you why," says Colonel Jeffrey T. "Two-nosed" Windsor of the U.S. Marines top-secret Operation Doggie Bag. "Because the Cong never forgets. They suffered, now we're gonna suffer. Do you realize how much monosodium glutamate is packed into every single plate of black piggy goo they serve? Do you? Lemme put it this way. They said Agent Orange was a crime."
Windsor refused to comment on exactly what covert operations were underway at this time to get the Vietnamese restaurants safely out of the country where they belong, but this reporter was able to gather a few details:
(1) Sometime in 1988 the Internal Revenue Service will conduct "routine" audits of anyone living in this country without any visible vowels in his name.
(2) Shortly thereafter, this information will be used to identify targets for rescue operations in nine American cities.
(3) Crack teams of trained health inspectors, building-code experts, and killer restaurant critics will descend on approximately 100 Vietnamese restaurants and, within one day, offer them all one-way tickets on Thai Airways to Ho Chi Minh City. These brave men, our only hope at this point, are now of course the Ng Team. Let's give them all the support we can
Speaking of exposure to lethal substances, BRADDOCK: MISSING IN ACTION 3 is the latest exploding-bamboo classic from Cannon Films, but this time Chuck has to fly back over to Nam to get all the imprisoned orphans out of there. For the last 13 years Chuck thought his Vietnamese wife was dead, cause just before he got airlifted out of Saigon he saw this body that looked like a charcoal briquet with eyeballs, and he assumed it was his wife cause she was wearing an ivory bracelet.
Unfortunately, Chuck married somebody so stupid she hasn't figured out how to use the telephone for the past 13 years, and so all she does all day is sit around in her mud shack with the son that Chuck don't know he has and pray for Chuck to come back. Of course, we know what Chuck was doing all those years--he was making MISSING IN ACTION 1 & 2. Anyhow, finally a Catholic priest is making his rounds in the Nam projects, and he finds this lady named Mrs. James Braddock, and he thinks "that's funny," only he don't know how to use the telephone either and so he flies to Washington, D.C. and finds Chuck in a bar and tells the CIA so they can hassle Chuck and tell him, "Hey, man, you don't need a wife. Forget the bimbo." So that Chuck can eventually fly back over to Nam and kickbox some Commie hiney.
We all know what happens next. First he flies to Bangkok to get some ammo, hire some sleazy guys, and get chased through the bazaar so the cars can run over 20 fruit stands. Then he sneaks into Nam. Then he gets captured and tortured by the sadistic General Quoc. Then he tap-dances on the teeth of 140 machine-gun-toting Congaroos until he can get all the imprisoned orphans out of the country. These people do know how to make a sequel.
We have a new exploding bamboo record:
75 dead bodies, including five broken necks with excellent sound effects.
No breasts.
Diehard battery torture.
Tiptoe torture.
Three exploding bamboo towers.
Five exploding jeeps.
Two exploding trucks.
Exploding chopper.
Plane crash.
Three motor vehicle chases, including an Army truck full of orphans chased through the jungle by a missile-equipped assault copter.
Gratuitous belly dancing.
Kung Fu.
Pontoon bumber boat Fu.
Shoulder cannon Fu.
Saigon Fu.
Bangkok Fu.
Ho Chi Fu.
Asian-American Actors Guild Fu.
Drive-In Academy Award nominations for Ron Barker, as the sleazeball Bangkok arms merchant friend, for saying "Vietnam - I never thought I'd be coming back - I guess we never really CAN leave, can we?";
Miki Kim, as the wife that sat in a mud shack waitin on Chuck for 13 years, for saying, "Oh, it doesn't matter";
Aki Aleong, as the evil General Quoc, for saying, "You must pay for the crimes you have committed against my country!" and "Braddock! Braddock! Boogie Eye! Boogie Eye!";
Jack Rader, as Littlejohn the CIA three-piece high sheriff, for screaming "Don't step on toes, Braddock!";
and Big Chuck, for saying, "I don't step on toes, Littlejohn, I step on necks!"
and "Kids, get in the truck!"
and "Walk or crawl, we're gonna make it!"
Three stars. Joe Bob says check it out.
JOE BOB'S ADVICE TO THE HOPELESS
(from Joe Bob's original 1984 review of Missing In Action)
There's been a little confusion about just who is eligible to vote for the Drive-In Academy Awards. In past years a lot of sick and disturbed individuals have called up the paper or come by the trailer park, expecting they could cast a vote for the Hubbies, and so I had to make a list of eligibility rules. Here's how to tell whether you can vote or not.
Do any of the following statements apply to you?
1. I have been a permanent resident of a home for the feeble-minded for at least 8 of the past 10 years.
2. I am in favor of the Handguns-for-People-on-Welfare Act
3. I live in a stolen portable toilet
4. When I watch a Jerry Lewis movie, I completely identify with Jerry when he dances like a duck and hits himself in the head with a broom-handle
5. I like to hang around the Greyhound station and make new freinds
If the answer to any of the above questions was yes, you are definitely eligible to vote.
Now answer these:
1. I own a "Police" album
2. I watch Empty-TV until "Like A Virgin" comes on, then I get up and dance on my thumbs
3. I can name every cereal manufactured by Kellogg's
4. I drive a Z
5. I refer to my car as a Z
You people are Communist agents and I don't want you sending in any letters to Joe Bob's Mailbag
OK, may I have the envelope, please? (winners will be announced at gala ceremonies in El Lay this year, on the same night as the fake Academy Awards).
Send in your ballots and I might even open some of em.
Dear Mr. Briggs:
We regret to inform you that we are considering dropping your column. The language and content just isn't on par with the readership of FOCUS.
When the Mayor told us that your column was also running in the Raleigh N&O, I was ready to dump it right then and there... not wanting to be associated with the likes of THAT bunch. After much pleading and sniveling from the editorial staff that assured me that they could get the Raleigh rag to drop your column, I decided to give you another chance
If you could try to loosen up a little in the next few weeks, we might keep your column. Try not to be so high-class. If you would just be half-class like the rest of our editorial staff, your column might fit in fine
Enclosed is a copy of last weeks paper. If we're going to give you page one headlines, we expect some SERIOUS sleeze. After all, we're paying the big bucks for this stuff.
Sincerely,
John Tucker
Publisher
FOCUS
Hickory, N.C.
P.S. You tend to glorify Bimbos too much. Here in the Tar-Heel State, we tend to place women BENEATH a pedastal
Dear John:
Tar Heel?
You know, I've heard of foot fetishes, but some people are just so disgusting they oughta be crated up and shipped COD to El Salvador
I resent the remark about my "half-class." That was something that happened when I was a very small child. I got kicked in the class so many times it made my whole life "half-classed."
You keep hassling me and it's gonna cost you TWO bucks a week.
Dear Joe Bob,
I don't think I ever wrote to you and told you what a good time I had in Dallas. Hope you'll give me about five years to build up a suitably disreputable stock of drive-in schlock and then invite me again. In the meantime, I was wondering if it might not be possible to kinda bridge the gap between drive-in movies and your standard indoor bull stuff art-house flick. For instance, what would you think about Ghidra the Three-Headed Monster Meets Citizen Kane? Or what about Night of the Living Women in the Dunes? Or maybe the Ingmar Bergman Chainsaw Massacre. Could be something in it. Give me your thinking on this.
Best wishes,
Big Steve King
Bangor, Maine
Dear Big Steve:
Okay, you're invited for the 11th annual World Drive-In Movie Festival, which we'll hold in 1992 if we don't forget, but this time you got to drive YOURSELF down here. I know it's tough on your $72 million annual income, but the Toronado can't handle another trip all the way up there to the end of the world, also known as Bangor.
By the way, Big Steve, I noticed where you wimped out on the Blood Feast screening. I don't forget these things.
© 1988 Joe Bob Briggs All Rights Reserved
For more of Joe Bob's pre-MonsterVision reviews in Grapevine, Texas, go to his Drive-In Reviews Archive over yonder at www.Joe Bob Briggs.com
Trivia (courtesy the Internet Movie Database)
* The plot contradicts that of Missing in Action 2: The Beginning (1985), where Braddock is captured in 1972. Here it's near the fall of Saigon in 1975, and he's about to leave town.
* In Missing in Action 2: The Beginning (1985), Col Braddock is depicted as an Air Cavalry helicopter pilot, wearing the distinctive Cavalry cowboy hat with crossed sabers. But here, his uniform depicts him as paratrooper, with the 101st Airborne Division patch, jump wings, and Airborne tab.
* Vietnam does not share a boundary with Thailand; Thailand's eastern boundary includes Laos and Cambodia.
* The helicopter chasing Braddock and his truck full of kids, fires 20+ rockets at them, despite the fact the chopper only has two rocket pods; each with a capacity of 6 rockets per pod (as can be seen in close up).
Elvis has left the building, and he took Joe Bob with him.
