Thursday Thrillers: "...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.