"We eat plenty of things that are alive that are still good for us... They kill the bad things inside of us."

Here I thought we were ready to move on from celebrity death and maybe explore lighter subject matter, like snow. What a great time we had in the snow, huh? Closed schools, ransacked grocery aisles, canceled flights, car crashes, fistfights over freshly shoveled parking spaces, and the good, old-fashioned boredom of being stuck indoors.

It reminded me of The Shining, which is on Netflix.

But then Death, in his wisdom, decided to deliver me Ritchie Havens and Abe Vigoda, and at least one of those people deserves the same respect I paid Angus Scrimm and Dan Haggerty in my last two posts. Besides, what am I going to say about The Shining that hasn't been covered in more than 30 years of film criticism, or in a compilation of whack-job theories about it, as seen in Room 237?  And now there's something called The Chickening.

After seeing that, what is there to say? Everyone liked it but Stephen King. If you haven't seen it already, why are you still reading this? Go watch it now.

To those of you still reading, let's talk about Abe Vigoda.

He was best known for his roles in The Godfather movies and TV's Barney Miller, but Vigoda had a long and varied career as a character actor and made contributions to the horror genre with appearances in TV shows such as Suspense, Dark Shadows, Tales from the Darkside, Monsters and Weird Science. He also played a member of a Satanic cult in the 1973 TV movie The Devil's Daughter, which starred Shelley Winters.

How old was Abe, exactly? Let's put it this way. He played a bed-ridden old man in the 1979 TV movie Death Car on the Freeway.

And respective of nothing I've said so far, but worth mentioning all the same, he starred in a 1997 comedy called Farticus, which IMDb says is about an old man who gets uncontrollable gas whenever a beautiful lady is present, but I could find no actual evidence of this movie on YouTube. 

In 2008, he was in a film called The Unknown Trilogy.

About the most entertaining thing I could find that he was in was Larry Cohen's 1985 horror/satire The Stuff.

Vigoda appears briefly as a "special guest star" alongside Clara Peller, who was once famous for yelling, "Where's the beef?" They both appear in a television ad for a delicious, trendy dessert called "The Stuff". Be very attentive a little over halfway through the film. If you blink, you might miss them.

Here's what happens: a miner discovers a mysterious, white glop bubbling up out of the ground, so naturally he sticks his hand in it and tastes it. He finds it sweet and delicious, and before you know it, with little government oversight, The Stuff is outselling all the other sweets on the market. As one suburban mother (Colette Blonigan) points out, it's low calorie, tastes good and doesn't leave a spot.

The old guard of Big Sugar want to know what it's made of so they hire industrial spy David "Mo" Rutherford (Michael Moriarty) to steal the recipe. It turns out The Stuff is actually a sentient, alien organism that controls the minds and possesses the bodies of all who eat it. It's highly addictive and it slithers around and attacks people's faces.

So it's part Invasion of the Body Snatchers, part The Blob, and entirely a send-up of 1980s consumer culture. The horror holds up surprisingly well. Danny Aiello and Garrett Morris are also in it.

The Stuff streams on Shudder.

My next review will appear in February. Let's hope white actors stop dying because I have a full slate of movies already set up for Black History Month.

"So he just got that axe and sliced up every damn one of them lumberjacks."

Man, my buddy Death has been busy this year. No sooner than I can gloss over the deaths of David Bowie and Angus Scrimm on this movie blog, and he's already taken the voice of Robin Hood and Celine Dion's husband. Don't worry folks, I'm sure her heart will go on.

Natalie Cole died somewhere in there. Then there was Alan Rickman, who was just too good to have been in any of the movies I would write about.

Then there was Dan Haggerty, then Blowfly, the drummer for Mott the Hoople, the drummer for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, that one wrestler, and Glenn Frey.

Let's talk about Haggerty.

Dan Haggerty rose to fame on network television in the late 1970s as Grizzly Adams, a pioneer fugitive from justice who lived in the wild and communed with the animals. If you don't remember The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, you can get the general idea here.

Before TV stardom, Haggerty was in a lot of biker movies. His later career highlights include a couple horror films, such as 1989's Elves, and 2013's Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan. 

I'm not sure how much I can exactly recommend this Gary Jones film, because if you took the 365 days in a year,and compressed them down to this movie's running time of 90 minutes, Haggerty makes it about as far into this movie as he did into 2016. Maybe he'll turn up in an expository flashback narrated by Joe "The Least Famous" Estevez around September.

The movie is more focused on a group of young adults who've been sentenced to a scared straight-style boot camp and wind up getting chased and killed by Paul Bunyan. It's a fun flick with a cool-looking Paul Bunyan creature and lots of hastily-made CGI. Be warned, Estevez is the best actor in it.

Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan streams on Hulu Plus and YouTube. I think it demonstrates just how difficult it is to eulogize a man who taught us that the right side of justice and the right side of the law aren't always the same thing, and that deep down, bears are decent people, too.

"You can't diagnose yourself with the same organ that has the disease..."

A lot of you mortals are sad this week. I understand.  To lose Angus Scrimm and David Bowie within days of each other must feel awful, but take heart. They're with me now. Everything's cool, I promise.

Plus, you can always enjoy their cinematic works over and over again. That's the beauty of movies -- they make people immortal, in sort of a cheesy ripoff way.

Bowie was in a horror film called The Hunger, which I couldn't find streaming within this movie blog's budget, though it is on Amazon Prime for a couple of bucks.  Let's just focus on Scrimm, shall we?

Lawrence Rory Guy was in a few movies, but it wasn't until he took the stage name Angus Scrimm and starred as 'The Tall Man' in Don Coscarelli's 1979 film Phantasm that he became a horror icon.

Phantasm is a great movie. Scrimm plays a shape-shifting alien who steals corpses from the cemetery to ship back to his home dimension. He has the assistance of some satanic jawas and a couple of silver balls that fly around and suck people's blood out of them. The good guys drive around in a cherry-ass Barracuda. Weird things happen. Stuff blows up. I'd love to review it for you, but I couldn't find it online.

So what's the next best thing? Scrimm appears in a handful of movies that stream on Amazon Prime for free, but none of them quite as good as John Dies At The End, which is on Netflix and Shudder.

And the best part? This 2012 film was also directed by Don Coscarelli, who wrote the screenplay adaption of the novel by David Wong.

I know there are those of you who are going to say the book was better, but was Angus Scrimm in the book? Only if your brain put him there!

Scrimm plays Father Shellnut, who, to be fair, is just an ancillary character.  Paul Giamatti is also in the movie as journalist Arnie Blondestone, who is also just an ancillary character.

The real stars of the story are Dave (Chase Williamson) and John (Rob Mayes), two slackers who are burdened with the job of fighting extra-dimensional monsters after taking a drug called "soy sauce" that causes them to slip in and out of time and space. I don't want to say too much more and give it away, but I will let slip that John actually dies in the middle. 

John Dies At The End rides the line of scary and trippy and funny in a most entertaining way. How funny is it? The only reason I can think of that it wasn't hailed as the Ghostbusters of its generation is it was just too damn weird to transcend its cult status. A werewolf once told me it's "a real mind-fuckler", so give it a look while you're still thinking about Angus. 

"I saw the witches kiss the evil one on his behind."

Those of you who have been following this blog for a while already know what a sucker I am for the classics, so this week's Thursday Thriller is an old movie.

It's so old your grandparents won't remember it. Even if they were alive in 1922 when it came out, they still wouldn't remember it because it was banned in the U.S. for being too awesome. 

No, I'm not talking about Nosferatu, I'm talking about Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages. 

You might not read much about Häxan in the annals of horror history, because technically, it's a documentary. Danish filmmaker Benjamin Christensen put together this silent collection of dramatized scenes from the Inquisition and boy, do I look cool in it!

The first 15 minutes run a little slow as it sets up historical context, explains some outdated cosmologies, and shows a bunch of medieval artwork. But after the initial slideshow, the movie comes to life. You see a witch at work in her witchery as a lady stops in for a love potion to win the heart of a monk. It works somewhat, but she comes back for a second potion, and then you get the slapstick of seeing a fat, horny monk chasing an old woman around.

It gets really good when the religious elders arrest a crazy old woman named Maria the Weaver and under pain of torture, force her to confess her participation in a black mass. Maria, of course, rats out the women who turned her in, but also confesses to giving birth to my child.

The black mass might be the most fun sequence of the whole movie, as demons cook a baby, women spit and stomp on a crucifix, everyone dances in the woods and all the witches line up to kiss my ass.

A little after that, you get a nifty show-and-tell of the torture devices used to extract confessions, and a discussion about how the whole affair was probably the result of primitive medical practices and folks' inability to diagnose or treat mental illness.

But more about me!

I get to do so much cool stuff, like beckon naked women from their beds, and give holy people a hard way to go. 

And when I get real excited, I churn my own butter.

Häxan streams on Hulu Plus, but if you don't subscribe to that service, you can watch it for free here  or here. Throw it on when you're ready to learn something, or maybe watch it as a bedtime story and give yourself weird dreams.