"I'll show you which one of us is crazy."

I'm starting to reassess my partnership with Death.

You might think it would be cool all the famous souls he's brought me over the past year, but it's starting to feel like he's trying just a little too hard. If a friend brings you a present, you might say, "Oh how thoughtful. I didn't even know how much I needed that. Thank you ever so much," but if that same friend brings you a present every couple weeks for a whole year, you start to wonder what it is they're after, like they're building up credit in the favor bank because they're about to ask for something big, uncomfortable and inconvenient.

Maybe I just think that way because I'm evil and so are most of my colleagues, but that's how I think.

Then sometimes I think, man, I haven't watched a good movie with a ton of maggots in it in a while.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Phenomena.

This 1985 Dario Argento film is about Jennifer (Jennifer Connelly), a pop star's daughter who's been shipped off to a fancy Swiss boarding school. Jennifer has a psychic connection with insects and.there's a maniac on the loose near the school who likes to kill girls who are Jennifer's age.

One night Jennifer goes sleepwalking and witnesses a murder, then falls in the middle of the street, where two guys in a convertible pick her up and drive off with her. She puts up too much of a fight for their liking, so they throw her out of the car into the woods. As luck would have it, a smiling chimpanzee was in the neighborhood and takes Jennifer by the hand to meet Professor John McGregor, an entomologist. The two become instant friends because they like bugs.

Were you aware insects can be used to fight crime?

Back at school, the headmistress is angry at Jennifer for sneaking out at night. Then she gets angry at Jennifer for summoning a swarm of insects to cover the building when the other students are taunting her. The headmistress tries to have Jennifer committed to a psych ward.

Jennifer escapes back to McGregor's lab, where he shows her a fly whose larvae only feeds on dead bodies. He sends Jennifer off with one such fly in the hope that it will lead her to where the murderer is hiding the remains of his or her victims. I'd say she succeeds, more or less, then a bunch of gross, weird stuff happens. I'd rather not spoil it for you, though.

Phenomena is like Suspiria with bugs. Its soundtrack includes music by Goblin, Iron Maiden and Motorhead. It streams on Amazon Prime.

"You do with mogwai what your society has done with all of nature's gifts. You do not understand."

Mortals, as you look forward to another trip around the sun, and you engage in your ritualistic feasting and giving of stuff to one another, a lot of you still find yourselves with the same old dilemma: what are you going to watch tonight?

Given that so many of you think the seasonal festivities are about family, I guess I'll go ahead and tell you about a movie you can watch with the kids, the Christmas movie that tells you there is no Santa Claus.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Gremlins.

This 1984 Joe Dante film is about what happens when inventor named Rand Peltzer (Hoyt Axton) kinda half-buys, half-steals an exotic pet from a Chinatown shop owner who doesn't want to sell it to him. The pet is called a mogwai. Rand gives the mogwai as a Christmas present to his son Billy (Zach Galligan).

There are three strict rules for raising mogwai and because Billy is the kind of guy who thinks no one will notice he brought his dog to work at the bank, he immediately breaks two of them, and that results in multiplication and metamorphosis from a single, kindly mogwai to hundreds of conniving, nasty gremlins that destroy the whole town. They run over the snow plow driver with his own snow plow, screw up traffic lights so cars crash, break everything in sight, get drunk and trash a bar.

I love this movie for two reasons:

1.) The gremlin that explodes in the microwave.

2.) The monologue in which the female lead Kate (Phoebe Cates) explains she doesn't like Christmas because her dad fell halfway down the chimney playing Santa Claus, broke his neck, and rotted there for five days before anyone found him. You simultaneously feel sympathy for Kate, and laugh at her for having such a stupid dad.

What else can I say? It's probably the best puppet movie ever. Corey Feldman is in it. You'll never get the theme song unstuck from your head. It both exemplifies and condemns Western culture's decadent obsession with novelty.

Gremlins streams on Amazon Prime.

Oh hey, and if you like strange, funny, scary, violent Christmas stories, my buddy Todd Merriman just published his story "Santa Claus Meets Frankenstein" as an e-book on Amazon Kindle. I read it. It's worth the dollar.

"I gave him life."

I didn't always have the prestige of a blogspot address. Way back when I still had my own personal Facebook page, I heard tell of an unfortunate mortal, so young, so innocent, she had not grown up going down to the local video store to rent horror movies. Streaming video was the only world she had ever known, and thus, she lived in slobbering ignorance of one of the greatest films of all time.

Her conundrum inspired me to report in a Facebook status that the movie was on Netflix, just sitting there, waiting to be discovered by a new generation of fans. That simple, three-sentence review I wrote has been lost to the ages, and the movie is still sitting there, which has to be some kind of record for a good movie to still be on Netflix.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Re-Animator.

This 1985 Stuart Gordon film is based on an H.P. Lovecraft story called "Herbert West: Re-Animator". Jeffrey Combs plays West, a student who studied under the famous Dr. Gruber in Munich. One day, they were doing an experiment and Dr. Gruber's eyeballs exploded all over the place, so West had to switch schools. He attends Miskatonic University and immediately confronts his instructor Dr. Hill (David Gale) with charges of plagiarism, and the two build an adversarial relationship consisting mostly of mad scientist smack talk.

West rents a room in the house of fellow medical student Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott). Cain is dating the dean's daughter, Megan Halsey (Barbara Crampton), who spends a fair amount of her screen time naked. West shows Cain the special reagent he developed with Gruber. The reagent raises the dead. If you could raise the dead you'd be the best doctor ever, right? So why not study it?

There are really only two problems:

1.) West can never seem to find a fresh enough cadaver. Mere minutes of decomposition so compromises the specimens so on returning to life, they come back as juiced-up rage zombies.

2.) Miskatonic University frowns on medical research about raising the dead, which seems pretty conservative considering its reputation in the Lovecraft mythos as a place where people are always summoning trans-dimensional demons because the library keeps loaning out the instructions. You'd think they had admitted West on the strength of his essay, entitled, "I have a syringe full of glowing green shit that makes dead people jump up off the gurney and try to kill everyone they see," but that's not the case, I guess. If West and Cain are caught, their careers are over.

What Re-Animator does so well is blend silliness and gore. The mid-1980s saw a lot of horror-comedies, and I'd put this one up there with the greats like Evil Dead II and Return of the Living Dead. It's one of my all-time favorites, and it streams on Netflix and Shudder.

"If you can't find a friend, make one."

Let's face it: people suck.

Don't get me wrong. Everyone has their good qualities.

For example, someone might have an obnoxious laugh, but maybe the way their flesh burns is interesting. As the heat sets off glowing embers in their hairs and their skin blackens just before it starts to glow red along the lines where it breaks apart, then FWOOMPH! Fat spatters and crackles. Sinew and muscle dissolve in flame as the meat falls from the bones.

What's not to like about that?

This week's Thursday Thriller is May.

This 2002 Lucky McKee film is about a veterinary assistant named May (Angela Bettis), who never had any friends because of her lazy eye because people suck. When May was a little girl her mom gave her a homemade doll to be her friend, but wouldn't allow her to take it out of the glass case because May's mom sucks. May kept the doll well into adulthood, and talked to it every day. The doll silently expresses some jealousy when May tells it that she wants to make a new friend, a man named Adam (Jeremy Sisto) who works at an auto body shop. May thinks his hands are beautiful. May and Adam try dating for a while, but ultimately, he breaks her heart because people suck.

Lonely, May runs to the arms of Polly (Anna Faris), the lesbian receptionist at work whose neck she admires. Because people suck, Polly breaks May's heart as well.

After that May tries to scratch her itch for human interaction by volunteering to work with blind children In a curious move, she takes the doll in one day to show the blind kids, and because people suck, they tear it out of her hands and the case smashes all over the floor. The real fun starts when the kids try to crawl around in the floor and find the doll and learn the hard way that broken glass is hard on the hands and knees.

So May gives up on people and decides her best solution is to make a new friend out of the parts she likes about people.

May is a good movie about a weird girl. It streams on Shudder.