"Turkeyologists all over the world know it as... Thankskilling!"

 Are you really looking at a horror movie blog on Thanksgiving? What gives? Don't you have better things to do? Shouldn't you be cooking or eating or washing dishes? Isn't there some cousin or uncle you hardly ever see and have nothing in common with you're supposed to be smiling and nodding politely at? Isn't it time for a carb-induced coma? The stores are gonna be open in a couple hours.  Have you clipped all your coupons and charged your stun gun?

Seriously, it's Thanksgiving.  Why are you reading this? What do you want from me? Aren't you thankful for all the other movies I've told you about?  For the art and culture I've brought into your life? The Red Guy deserves a holiday, too, you know. Do you have any idea how busy I'm going to be tomorrow on the busiest, most violent shopping day of the year?

Fine. This week's Thursday Thriller is called Thankskilling. It's the kind of movie that promises boobs in the first second on the poster, so maybe you should wait until Grandma leaves.  Then again, if Grandma won't leave, maybe you can throw on this 2009 horror/comedy to motivate her old ass out the door.

This is a rare case in which I will just let the IMDB plot summary explain what goes on: "A homicidal turkey axes off college kids during Thanksgiving break."

The turkey puppet has a potty mouth. One might even say there's a lot of fowl language in this film by writer/director Jordan Downey. 

If you think that joke was bad,  wait til you watch the movie.  The gags range from intolerable to OK. The funniest part is where the turkey, disguised as a person, sits down for coffee and awkward conversation with the sheriff, disguised as a turkey. 

I'm not saying Thankskilling is totally worthless. The turkey puppet looks cool, and there's a piece of the score that sounds John Carpenter-ish. So click open Hulu Plus and watch it. It'll serve you right for bothering me today.

The best part of the movie.

"This truck runs on zombies."

If there's one thing I'm sick of seeing, it's horror movies that are blue.  Do you know what I'm talking about? It's like the trend these days if you're making a horror film is to color correct it so the whole movie has a bluish tinge to it. I suppose the thinking is to create cold, bleak atmosphere, but I always just assume the director has some residual Smurf-related anxiety left over from the 1980s.

Don't get me wrong. Blue is one of my seven favorite colors. It's right up there with orange and purple. It just feels like Hollywood has forgotten it's got a whole rainbow at its disposal for scaring people.

That's why Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead caught my eye. Australian director Kiah Roache-Turner has delivered a zombie epic that is saturated in blood reds, slime greens, and hazmat-suit yellows.

I know you're already rolling your eyes and saying, "Another zombie movie? That's been done to undeath. What's left to see?" but this 2014 film, available on Netflix, is a lot of fun to look at.  Its fast-paced, highly visual storytelling will get your heart pumping,  so you'll get your couch cardio in.

The plot revolves around a mechanic named Barry (Jay Gallagher), who goes through the usual heart-wrenching ordeal of dispatching his wife and daughter with a nail gun. His sister Brooke (Bianca Bradley) has been captured by the army and is subject to bizarre experiments by a disco-listening, mad doctor (Berynn Schwerdt).

Barry goes looking for Brooke and meets up with some other handy gents who discover that the zombies exhale a highly flammable gas that can be used as fuel. So they armor up their bodies and their truck all Mad Max-style and hit the road. The trip hits a snag when they discover the zombies only give off the gas in the daytime, but at night they use it to run fast.

Or something.

Yeah, this movie works best when the action is telling the story. That's not to say there isn't some good acting. With minimal dialogue Roache-Turner delivers strong characters you can care about, and it doesn't take a lot of jibber jabber.

It may tax your suspension of disbelief in moments, but with lurid colors, bad-ass action, quirky humor and high-octane halitosis, Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead is a refreshing reminder that zombies can still be funny, tragic and scary all in one film.

"This is just wrong."

So there I was, resolved in my purpose to dig a little deeper into horror's past, to offer consideration on films long forgotten, to rehash some classics, when Netflix had to go and drop The Human Centipede III (Final Sequence).

As a longtime fan of sewing people's lips to other people's buttholes, I had to put my plans aside and watch this 2015 film by writer/director Tom Six immediately. I was not disappointed.  

Dieter Laser, who you might recognize as the bad guy from the first Human Centipede movie, plays psychotic prison warden Bill Boss. Laurence R. Harvey, who you might recognize as the bad guy from the second Human Centipede movie, plays weaselly prison accountant Dwight Butler. Bree Olson, who you might recognize from a ton of Internet videos you wouldn't admit watching in polite company, plays Boss's ditzy secretary Daisy.

Boss is in charge of the rowdiest, most violent, prison in America, and he's tried everything to keep the inmates under control. He's tried breaking arms, he's tried peeling skins off faces, he's tried random castration,  and still the inmates give him no respect. The nightmares of being raped to death by them won't go away, and Governor Hughes (Eric Roberts) is breathing down his neck to get a handle in the place or he's fired. 

Boss finds a little solace in the simple pleasures of eating dried clitorises and having sex with his secretary, but he needs an idea, and Butler's got one for him -- how about stitching all the prisoners together, mouth-to-anus, just like in the Human Centipede films. 

They schedule a meeting with Six, who plays himself, to verify the medical accuracy of the experiments his films portray. Six shows up in a light brown suit and straw fedora, tours the facility, and throws up.

In case you haven't figured it out by now, this film is disgusting. It's true. I know you can't go anywhere and say anything is disgusting without some fanboy saying, "Pfft! That's nothing. What about Martyrs or A Serbian Film?" To those folks, I say, aren't you late for your court appointed therapy?  I'm talking about good, old-fashioned, gross-out fun, not deep, psychological scarring.

This installment in the trilogy is a lot goofier than the others, with exchanges in Boss's office reminiscent of John Waters's earlier works. Laser's characterization of Boss was especially fun, as he spouts obscenities in his thick German accent,  and struts around showing off his creation in the film's final sequence. He's comically creepy, not unlike Dennis Hopper's Frank Booth in Blue Velvet, or Christopher Walken in general.

In summary, I acknowledge Human Centipede III ( Final Sequence) is not everyone's cup of diarrhea, but it made me chuckle.

"It's true! Vagina dentata! Vagina dentata! Vagina dentata!"

Wow! What a Halloween that was! I can't even begin. Just.... just wow!

Hope yours was just as exciting and you've still got plenty of fun - size Snickers to eat for breakfast. I also hope you're finding a lot of good deals on scary stuff off the clearance racks.

I've decided to go ahead and keep this blog active even though I've closed up my menagerie of evil souls for the year. After all, now that Halloween is over, the pressure is off. I don't have to pander to those looking exclusively for the best of the newest horror movies on the most popular streaming service. I can dig a little deeper and talk about movies people haven't thought about for a while. I can even review stuff on Hulu.

Just not this week.

This week's movie streams on Netflix and it's called Teeth.

This 2007 film by writer/director Mitchell Lichtenstein tells the story of a teen girl named Dawn (Jess Weixler) who discovers in a most traumatic way that her pet cooter bites.

Dawn's one of those confused but well-meaning youth group kids that believes in sexual abstinence before marriage. She volunteers her time talking to younger kids about saving their precious gifts until their wedding nights. She even wears a red, rubber ring on her left hand to remind herself that she's married to Jesus until someone replaces it with a gold band.

Disgusting,  right? But who can blame her? The lack of useful information available about her lady bits borders on criminally negligent. Her health textbook even has a giant sticker covering up a diagram of the vagina, per school board regulations. 

That's not to say she doesn't think about sex, though. After all, she is becoming a woman, and she has the hots for Tobey (Hale Appleman), the new boy in her youth group. As they talk constantly about not having sex, they find they have a lot in common, like virginity,  except not Tobey. 

Tobey has trouble with what words mean in general. Take the word "no", for instance. Dawn tells him no when a date in the woods gets too heated for her liking, but he continues, and that's when they both discover that Dawn has a rare mutation known as vagina dentata, which means exactly what you think it does. Tobey is righteously dismembered, and Dawn finds she has some soul searching to do.

Losing your virginity is tough enough, but to be raped, and learn your lady business is armed with flesh-mangling incisors is a lot to handle in one afternoon. Dawn's crisis of faith that follows is only natural, as is the trail of severed heads she leaves in her wake, even if they're not the kind of heads you're used to seeing roll in a horror film.

Some eggheads might say Teeth is an exploitative pile of cheap gags and gross-outs. I prefer to think of it as a coming - of - age tale, an empowering allegory about the struggles a young woman typically endures when coming to terms with her burgeoning sexuality, but I'll put the Oprah - speak aside and let you decide for yourself.