"It's not a monster. It's just a doggy."

Is it fair to judge a film alongside the work of literature on which it is based?

Believe me, I had to add a whole circle down here just for condescending assholes who run around telling everybody, "The book is so much better than the movie."

And trust me when I tell you that the only reason I want anyone literate is to read my blog or an incantation that would summon me to manifest myself in the flesh on Earth. Generally, the less you know about words, the more likely you are to gloss over the fine print in contracts. Think of it this way, if Robert Johnson had more fancy book-learnin', you wouldn't have rock 'n' roll today, nor would I have been able to subject you to embarrassing white blues.

On the other hand, everyone who made it to 10th grade figured out you can't pass an English final by just watching the movie, because there are major differences in what makes a film work and what makes a novel work.

So taking that quandary to heart, this week's Thursday Thriller is Cujo.

This 1983 Lewis Teague film is based on the novel by Stephen King. It's about a lady named Donna Trenton (Dee Wallace) who, through a complex series of most unfortunate of events, gets stuck with her 4-year-old son Tad (Danny Pintauro) for a couple of days in the middle of summer, out at the ass end of nowhere in a broken down Pinto, and a 200-pound, rabid St. Bernard won't let them out for water.

Donna's an adulteress, and her husband Vic (Daniel Hugh Kelly) just found out about her infidelity as he was getting ready to leave town on business, so he forgot to call Joe Camber (Ed Lauter) to see if he could fix Donna's Pinto. Even if he had called, Joe couldn't come to the phone, but Donna might not have tried to take her car out to his farm, where the only living inhabitant to be found was Cujo.

Is the movie any different than the book? Yes, the dog is too young, spry, and clean. This guy's too skinny, that guy's too muscly, that kid doesn't look nearly enough like yours, and no one is being big enough an asshole.


Does that mean the movie's bad? No, the book is over 300 pages long. Everyone has time to be an asshole. Movies have to stick around 90 minutes or else they become a nuisance. Some assholatry had to be cut for time, so you still get to watch a killer dog terrorize a child.

Is the movie scary? Yes.

Is it better than the book? We're talking about Stephen King. He writes some really hateful assholes. If you never read King, you're going to miss out on passages like:

At quarter past eight that morning, Gary Pervier staggered out of his house in his pee-stained underwear shorts and urinated into the honeysuckle. In a perverse sort of way he hoped that someday his piss would become so rancid with booze that it would blight the honeysuckle. That day hadn't come yet.

So should you read the book before you watch the movie? If you want to. Either way I think you'll have fun.

Cujo: The movie streams on Netflix and the novel is probably available at your local library or used book store.

"I'm gonna suck your brain dry!"

I might have been a little harsh on Hulu last week. Sure, they purged all the Friday the 13th movies mere weeks before the magical day was upon us. Sure, they snuck some Lucio Fulci films off their roster, but they still have the Criterion Collection.

For now.

The Criterion Collection is cool. Its mission is to gather the greatest movies from around the world an publish them in the highest technical quality available. Predictably, a lot of their movies are highbrow, art-house fare, but every once in a while, they snag up a weirdo. The movie I want to tell you about is just such a movie.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Scanners.

 

 David Cronenberg directed this 1981 film about a bum named Cameron Vale (Steven Lack) who was cruising a shopping mall for table scraps one day when he could hear in his mind from across the food court what an awful, old woman was saying about him. He stares at her and she starts to have seizures. Then these two guys in much cleaner overcoats, chase him down, shoot him with a tranquilizer dart, and drag him away.

Meanwhile, a guy in a moustache addresses a theater of people and tells them he will scan them, in other words read their minds, one by one. Michael Ironside plays Darryl Revok, the psychic's first volunteer and what happens next is one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of cinema.

Then Vale wakes up and meets Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) who explains the reason he's a bum is because he's a scanner, a kind of weaponized psychic. Ruth gives Vale his mission, which is to track down and stop Revok, because he's building his own army of scanners.

It's a lot like The X-Men, except way stranger and everyone has the same powers.  

Of course, you can't just track down and kill the world's most powerful mind-reader. He knows you're coming and sends people to get you first, which means Mr. 'Splodey-Head must not have been a very good scanner. He really should have seen that coming. 

Scanners is a lot of fun. Come for the head explosion, stay for the scrunchy-faced concentration. It streams on Hulu Plus.

 

"...that expression on her face is like pure fear, like something scared her to death."

I don't like to complain about the great movies that aren't available to stream for you law-abiding mortals. After all, across four subscription services and YouTube, there will always be some twisted tale of damnation, some lurid depiction of the depths of human cruelty, some trippy, nauseating brain-bender that challenges the mind as well as the gag reflex.

Yes mortals, I can always recommend you a unique viewing experience, but due to the frustratingly fluid, mysterious and seemingly arbitrary nature of how streaming services acquire and keep movies on tap, specific titles sometimes fall through the cracks.

For instance, here we are on Thursday the 12th, and I've been waiting for months to review Friday the 13th and tell you where to find it, but alas, Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime have both recently dropped the entire franchise from their rolls of all the movies you get to watch at no additional charge on your large-screen external device.

Here's Kevin Bacon getting killed, anyway.

 

Now that's out of the way, this week's Thursday Thriller is City of the Living Dead.

This 1980 Lovecraft-inspired Lucio Fulci barf-o-rama is about psychic Mary Woodhouse (Katriona MacColl), who, in the middle of a seance, sees a vision of a priest (Fabrizio Jovine) hanging himself in a graveyard, and the dead begin to rise. She dies immediately, but a couple days later, already buried, she rediscovers her love of breathing as she awakes in a coffin six feet under ground. It might have only been three feet, as the gravediggers seem too interested in discussing pornographic magazines to have done their job correctly. Christopher George plays Peter Bell, a reporter sniffing for a story when he hears her cries for help and rescues her from suffocation by bashing in the lid of her coffin with a pick-axe, which falls heavily within inches of her face the whole time he's chopping.

Once she's feeling better they surmise with the help of the head witch  that they must travel to Dunwich, where the priest hanged himself, for this blasphemous act has opened a gate to Hell, and if it is not closed by midnight on All Saint's Day, the dead will take over the world.

Or something.

It's not the easiest story to follow, but that's not why you watch Italian zombie movies. You want to see something that will put you off your fried calamari in tepid alfredo sauce. 

You want to see the part where the weird kid finds an inflatable doll in an abandoned house. Just as he's getting ready to fuck it, he gets distracted by what looks like an uncooked, person-shaped meat loaf covered in live, wriggling earthworms.

You want to see the part where a girl goes to park with her beau in the cemetery, then sees the priest, cries tears of blood, then literally pukes all of her guts up. 

You want to see walls that bleed and sudden gusts of maggots.

You want to spend your Friday the 13th thinking, "What in the hell did I watch last night?"

City of the Living Dead is no longer on Hulu Plus, but you can find it on Shudder.

"The more you rape their senses, the happier they are."

So after last week's post, a couple guys, I guess trying to flex how hardcore they are, pointed out to me that only a couple scenes in Faces of Death were real, which I thought I made clear in my review. Maybe they were disappointed because they only watch real snuff films. What's clear is they are nobody's fools and they don't mind picking an argument with a fictitious character to prove it.

To correct my oversight, I assure you that the movie I'm reviewing this week is 100 percent fake, except for all the butchering of live animals. Don't get too comfortable, though.  Legend has it the director had to appear in court to prove no one was actually murdered.

 

This week's Thursday Thriller is Cannibal Holocaust.

 The plot of this 1980 Ruggero Deodato film concerns Professor Harold Monroe (Robert Kerman), who is on a mission to find Alan Yates (Gabriel Yorke) and his friends, a group of young filmmakers who disappeared on a trip to make a documentary about the indigenous people of an Amazon region called the Green Inferno. Yes, Eli Roth made a cannibal movie in 2013 called The Green Inferno, and that is neither a coincidence nor especially important to know right now.

What is important to know is that Monroe only comes back to civilization with the film the kids shot, and boy did they bring back some brutal footage. There's rape, arson, impalement, turtle mutilation, and here's the twist, the natives aren't the perpetrators. It seems young Yates is into capturing the most extreme footage possible, and he'll stop at nothing to get it. In fact, the whole crew descends to committing the vilest atrocities to stage their footage of how the so-called "savages" live. Here's the even sicker part: some executives think there might be a market for such a thing.

Cannibal Holocaust is a provocative, puke-tastic experience that challenges viewers to think about how far they're willing to go for their own thrills and chills, as well as what it means to be civilized.  Moreover, it demonstrates that low-budget filmmakers were doing "found footage" roughly two decades before The Blair Witch Project came out, and it was a lot more disturbing.  

Cannibal Holocaust streams on Shudder and YouTube.