"You must not react, no matter what you see or hear."

Black History Month is winding down and I have to say it has been one of the best I can remember in a long time. Beyoncé played the Super Bowl, an old lady got to meet the president, and a lot of famous white people died.

For example, just this week I got legendary cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, who worked on more than 80 films, including the Indiana Jones series. He did a couple of horror films, but it doesn't look like any black people were in them. Maybe he couldn't get the lighting right.

So instead of going into his filmography, I'd like to wrap up my Black History Month coverage with a quick look at one of the hottest black actors working in horror films today -- he might be the only black actor in horror films today -- Tony Todd, but you may know him better as Candyman.

At a towering 6'5" height, and carrying Dr. Claw's growl in his creepy-ass voice toolkit, Todd has earned himself 196 acting credits, largely in genre films. Even though Netflix has recently dropped Candyman from its lineup, it's not too hard to find him in something on your favorite streaming service. However, it can be tricky to find a good one that he's in for more than five minutes that isn't a sequel.

It's as if low-budget filmmakers, desperate to entice an audience, hire Todd for a day so they can put his name on their posters.

So what happens when Todd is the executive producer? In that case, he's in the movie a lot, just like in this week's Thursday Thriller, Sushi Girl.

That's funny. I don't remember her wearing a kimono.

 This Taranatino-esque 2012 crime drama was directed by Kern Saxton. How Tarantino-esque is it? Sonny Chiba plays a sushi chef, just like he did in Kill Bill. Todd plays Duke, the leader of a gang of jewel thieves who have a reunion over sushi to celebrate the end of their comrade's release from prison after five years. They ask him how he's doing, what was it like in there and WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO WITH THE DIAMONDS?

The one who did everyone else's time is named Fish (Noah Hathaway, aka Atreyu from The Never-Ending Story) and Fish isn't telling them what they want to hear, so they all play a nice, long round of I-Ain't-Nobody's-Bitch that includes the use of fists, chopsticks, a sock full of broken glass, and a pouch of what could be dentistry tools. An optometrist might find the bag just as useful. Or an Electrician. I don't know. I've never seen a dentist walk around with his shit in a bag before.

While all that wonderful violence is going on, there is a nude woman lying on the table with sushi rolls and their various garnishments all over her body. She's been instructed not to move and not to make eye contact, as she is the serving tray. It's traditional or something.

What else do you need to know?

Mark Hamill (aka the creepy old guy from the end of The Force Awakens) plays a gay guy. Danny Trejo pops in for a minute. I'm sure I'm supposed to recognize those other two guys, because this is that kind of movie, but I don't recognize them. The naked girl was in Zombeavers.

I'm not the Incredible Inman. You can look these things up yourself after you watch Sushi Girl. I had a little trouble following it toward the end because the shrieks of the damned were just way out of control that day, but I'll watch it again. It's on Netflix. 

I hope you had a great Black History Month. I have enjoyed myself immensely and you'll hear from me in March when I can be lazy about picking out movies again.

"There's a maniac lives there and he's dangerous."

I went down to the River Styx this morning to sign for my weekly delivery of lost souls.

For a moment I thought the boatman handed me the wrong shipping invoice.

Lee, Harper.

No way. A Pulitzer Prize novelist who won on her first try, as if she was just breaking in a new typewriter, and the cleaning lady found the manuscript sitting out and started showing it around? That was in 1960.

Maybe she figured she peaked, because she didn't try again until 2015.

What could she have done wrong? This lady was considered a national treasure for her stirring indictment of racial inequality in the Jim Crow South, as told through the eyes of a precocious 6-year-old who just don't know no better.

I'm talking, of course, about To Kill A Mockingbird, which Hollywood made into a movie in 1962, and is loaded with the kind of stuff you mortals are still barking at each other about on Facebook to this day. The movie is available on Netflix.

I can hear you already: "But Satan, that's not a horror movie."

What are you even talking about?

The story itself has been banned in more school districts than I can be bothered to look up and count, but that hasn't stopped teachers from using it. I happen to know of a select group of adults in southern Indiana who were assigned to read it three times during their school days in the late 1980s and early 90s. On average, they all actually read it 0.75 times.

To Kill A Mockingbird is about three children who are allowed to play outside unsupervised, and the mystery man who lives in a house their dad told them to stay away from. Legend has it the mystery man stabbed his own father with a pair of scissors. One day the children find little voodoo doll versions of themselves hidden in a tree outside his house.

Not scary enough? Fine, I'll raise the stakes with rape, incest, some malevolent hillbillies and a rabid dog. Hell, this movie is practically The Hills Have Eyes.

That still doesn't explain why I have Harper Lee now. Best I can figure, there's a commandment about honoring thy mother and father. A lot of the reason the story has been banned is because of its use of the N-word, which appears a few times, but if you consider the context, it's pretty obvious only hateful dumbasses say it. For example, a drunk Bob Ewell, who has accused a black man of raping and impregnating his daughter, calls Atticus Finch, the lawyer who has sworn to defend the accused, a "nigger lover." In context, the word is used to demonstrate the hatred and contempt white society held for black people in the mid-20th century.

So I guess Harper Lee is here because you can't just go around writing instant classics that would later be used to teach kids how shitty some of their grandparents were.

I don't make the rules, i just torment the damned.

I realize, of course, that talking so much about Harper Lee goes against my Black History Month rule, which is only to review horror movies in which at least one black person played a prominent role, and that's why I hearby nominate Lee for the posthumous title of Honorary Black Person!

Of course, I'm fucking with you. To Kill A Mockingbird can't be this week's Thursday Thriller. It's not even Thursday yet. I'm not even sending this to the copy department to put the film titles in italics. Check back Thursday and I'll review a movie with Tony Todd in it, maybe something that's actually like The Hills Have Eyes.

"Evil is good and ass is good, and if you find you a piece of evil ass, woo!"

Let me just start by saying it has been crazy down here this week. I just got Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and that is a heavy crate to unpack. The sin files of actors and musicians are usually pretty thick, but they've got nothing on lawyers, judges and politicians. 

Also, Death threw in Vanity, in what felt like a bit of an afterthought. Then, just to screw up my schedule Wednesday, he tossed in George Gaynes, who, unlike the other two, was actually in a few horror movies.

Before he acheived fame as the oblivious but likable Commandant Lassard in the Police Academy movies, or as Henry Warnimont, the curmudgeonly, adoptive father of TV's Punky Brewster, Gaynes appeared in such notable films as the made-for-TV Trilogy of Terror and the not-for-TV-at-all Altered States, as well as the far less notable The Boy Who Cried Werewolf and Song of the Succubus.

But enough about him for now. It's still Black History Month and I have more pressing matters.

This week's Thursday Thriller is 1995's Vampire in Brooklyn, starring Eddie Murphy, and directed by Wes Craven.

Throughout the 1980s, Murphy starred in a string of blockbuster hits like Trading Places, Beverly Hills Cop and Coming to America. In 1989, he took the directorial reigns of a film that co-starred comic legends Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor called Harlem Nights. It flopped, as did many of his subsequent films, until 1996 when he starred in the remake of The Nutty Professor.

 

For his part, Craven played a significant hand in redefining the horror genre in the 1970s with such films as The Last House on The Left and The Hills Have Eyes, and landed a major hit with 1984's A Nightmare on Elm Street. After that his films were a little hit-or-miss, til he busted up the genre again with 1996's Scream.

So you have two famous men collaborating on a horror-comedy right before significant career upswings. Was it successful? 

Not especially. Murphy blamed the wig. 

So why am I telling you about it? Because it's unique. It's the funny Wes Craven, scary Eddie Murphy movie, and it's not nearly as terrible as you might want to think it will be.

Murphy plays a vampire named Maximillian, who comes to Brooklyn from the Caribbean to find a female half-vampire (Angela Bassett), because the rest of his tribe has all been killed off and she's the last descendant. As he explains in his opening monologue, "a vampire alone is a vampire doomed."

 

Or something. 

He doesn't have to look too hard, because as luck would have it, she's one of the detectives assigned to investigating all the wreckage and dead bodies Maximillian leaves in his wake.

True to form, Murphy also plays two other characters, a black preacher named Pauly, and an Italian street thug named Guido.

Maximillian enlists the help of street hustler Julius Jones (Kadeem Hardison), who he enslaves as a ghoul. Jones spends the rest of the movie rotting and falling apart. 

Rounding out the cast you've got Allen Payne from New Jack City, John Witherspoon, the dad from Friday, and Zakes Mokae, the bad guy from Craven's The Serpent and the Rainbow.

 .

The story itself doesn't make very much sense. Why can't a vampire just find a human woman he likes and bite her and make her a vampire? Plus, Murphy doesn't exactly exude evil. Through the wig, the fangs and the glowing eyes, you still kind of expect him to put a banana in someone's tailpipe.

The movie isn't a total loss, though.The makeup FX are good, there's a lot of really slick editing, and Hardison and Witherspoon are pretty funny.

Vampire in Brooklyn streams on Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime.

"You disgust me! Good night!"

The year 2016 is still a bad time to be famous, as I received BMX legend Dave Mirra into my custody this week. As much fun as that was, I was really excited to get Maurice White because it's Black History Month and I'm devoting all this month to writing about the accomplishments of black people in horror movies.

But alas, Maurice White was never in any scary movies. No song by Earth, Wind and Fire even turns up in the soundtrack for one, by my IMDb search. Oh well, that's the way of the world.

This week's Thursday Thriller is 1973's Scream Blacula Scream, directed by Bob Kelljan, starring William Marshall.

I skipped over Blacula and went straight to the sequel, because I thought it was a better movie. How much better? It's the difference between a B and a B+ for two reasons: Pam Grier.

...and voodoo. Sorry, my mind wanders sometimes. I'm not even sure why. Scream Blacula Scream is rated PG, so it's one of the few movies from the 1970s in which Grier kept her clothes on. More on that in a second. Let's talk about the story first.

The leader of a voodoo cult dies, and its members choose Lisa Fortier (Grier) as their new leader. The deceased's son believes he is the rightful heir, and just to show everybody what for, he procures Blacula's bones and raises him from the dead. Blacula (Marshall) immediately turns him into a vampire and enslaves him, along with some other people, but not Fortier. He needs her voodoo power to exorcise the evil from him, so that he may return to Africa and live and die in peace. 

The film only suffers two major problems, the first being the title. The early 1970s saw a wave of films we now call blaxploitation for their shameless pandering to the African-American demographic. Movie studios had a lot of success with movies like Shaft and Superfly, and realized black people would pay money to see black people in movies. Eventually, the genre collapsed under the weight of its own stereotypes.

The Blacula movies were part of this wave, and on hearing the titles, you can practically feel the distributor's elbow nudging you in the ribs. "Get it? He's like Dracula, but he's black. Black Dracula. Blacula! Get it? Come on!" As a result, instead of being revered as good vampire movies, they became the stuff of ironic pop culture references.

The second problem is the makeup. When Blacula gets all vamped out, he gets some of the weirdest face hair ever committed to celluloid. The best way I can describe it is his sideburns connect to his eyeballs.

But Marshall's performance is good. He carries himself with an air of nobility that matches Christopher Lee's characterization of Dracula in the Hammer Studios franchise that started in 1958. In fact, the raising of the vampire by means of occult ritual is reminiscent of Taste the Blood of Dracula and Dracula A.D. 1972. Scream Blacula Scream is at least as good as those, and a hell of a lot better than The Satanic Rites of Dracula, but Scream Blacula Scream remains outside of that universe. It's separate, but equal.

Scream Blacula Scream streams on Amazon Prime, Hulu Plus and YouTube, as does Blacula if you have to be a completist about it. If you want to see literally more of Pam Grier, and I suspect you might, you can find her through those same streaming sources in movies that tend to be about her escaping prison or getting revenge on the mob for messing with her man. Just look up The Big Doll House, Coffy, Foxy Brown, Friday Foster and Black Mama, White Mama. Netflix devotees, don't despair. You can catch up with William Marshall as the King of Cartoons in the Pee-Wee's Playhouse TV series.

NOTE: If you're looking for last week's review of Night of the Living Dead, it's gone. I'm not sure what happened. I think the mailer-daemons got it. It's hard to maintain a blog in Hell. Here's a quick summary: Night of the Living Dead is good. You should watch it.