"It's not the movie. It's this theater. It's this theater that kills."

By now, you've no doubt noticed that Death has been putting in a lot of overtime this year. Ordinarily, I'd be all about that, but the fact is Hell's getting overcrowded. 

Yes, Hell is generally overcrowded. It's supposed to be uncomfortable. Usually I am able to tune out the screams of tortured souls, but the constant and ever-growing funk-spacerock jam session in the grand ballroom is so loud I can barely follow the plots of my favorite movies. Plus, I lost the remote yesterday and spent three hours looking for it. It was under a half-eaten toddler. Mrs. Reagan won't get out of my chair.

I've had it. It's time to clean house. 

On Saturday, Aug. 27, at 8:29 p.m. I will personally unleash thousands of the dead to walk Bardstown Road in Louisville, KY, because that's as good a place as any. 

The very idea has put me in the mood to watch a zombie movie, so this week's Thursday Thriller is Demons.

This 1985 film was directed by Lamberto Bava, son of Mario Bava, and produced by Dario Argento.

I know you're saying, "Hey Big Red, I thought you were going to talk about a zombie movie. The title suggests this one might be about, you know, demons."

 Let's look at the synopsis on IMDb:

"A group of people are trapped in a large movie theater in West Berlin that is infected by ravenous demons who proceed to kill and posses (sic) the humans one-by-one, thereby multiplying their numbers." 

In other words, any person they kill becomes one of them, by means of infection. 

Close enough, right? Besides, their eyes glow and they have long, scary teeth, making them a lot cooler than traditional Romero zombies. With all due respect to Romero, I might suggest that the Italians used to make better zombie movies than Americans.

In the case of Demons, maybe it's the use of vibrant primary colors, reminiscent of Argento's Suspiria. It could be the heavy use of '80s metal in the soundtrack. Maybe it's the entirely irrelevant subplot about a bunch of car thieves who cruise around snorting cocaine out of a Coca-Cola can, but I got a far bigger kick out of this one than Day of the Dead.

I think it might be that it was grosser. A lot of Italian horror carries a certain factor I'd like to call profundo vomito.When a victim of a demon scratch turns, they develop a throbbing boil that explodes in a splatter of green slime. The shades of green vary, but I found especially compelling the one that most closely matches a John Deere lawnmower. 

It could also be that Italians are generally considered less inhibited than Americans. They have no shame or embarrassment in presenting dashing heroics that involve riding around on a dirt bike slashing at monsters with a samurai sword. 

 

This movie is a heap of glorious Eurotrash that adds a little spice to the typical zombie tropes. Demons streams on Hulu Plus, Shudder and YouTube. 

"Daddy can't help you now. Shhhh.... I need you, Jesse."

I hope every one is enjoying Gay Pride Month, even the straight people. It seems the parades get bigger every year. Whatever the headlines might say about how this wingnut or that feels about it, homosexuality is now more accepted than any other time in modern history. It is a sight to see how far the queer have come in a couple decades. 

When you think back, trips to the gay bar didn't always include Judy from payroll, because she's such a hoot when she gets a couple Long Island iced teas in her, and heteronormative Carlos from accounts receivable if he can be cool. Not long ago, going to the gay bar wasn't a thing to bring up in any office environment. 

In 1985 nobody had a private Idaho yet, and if a screenwriter, actor or production designer wanted to make a gay movie , they had to be sneaky about it, so sneaky even the director wouldn't notice what they were up to -- la Cage aux Folles, Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Kiss of the Spider Woman notwithstanding. Maybe that's too many exceptions to call it a rule. Whatever. 

This week's Thursday Thriller is Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge -- an odd title considering Freddy spent the first movie getting his revenge.

For those who need a refresher, Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) was a child murderer and implied paedophile who was burned to death by a mob of angry parents. In death, he has the power to turn up in teenagers' nightmares. If he kills them in the dream, they die in real life. His preferred targets are the offspring of the people who killed him. The first film, released in 1984, was directed by Wes Craven, who didn't want anything to do with the sequel. 

However, the opening scene of Freddy's Revenge could pass for Craven homage. A boy named Jesse (Mark Patton) is the last on the school bus with a couple of giggling girls. The driver passes their stop. When one of the girls points out the driver's oversight, he speeds up and takes a hard right into a desert waste that is reminiscent of The Hills Have Eyes. The bus stops and the earth around it crumbles away, leaving it to teeter atop a rocky pillar. The driver is revealed to be Freddy. He drags his razor-claw glove across the seats and ceiling of the bus, and lifts it to strike and -- cut to a suburban mom (Hope Lange) slicing a tomato in a kitchen straight out of a 1950s sitcom. The edit probably looked pretty cool in director Jack Sholder's mind, but in execution is a bit awkward coming out of one of the better dream sequences of the franchise.

What follows is about 90 minutes of homoerotic subtext. We learn that Jesse's family just moved into the same house in which Freddy antagonized Nancy in the first film, and even though he has cool, dream demon powers, Freddy has a burning desire to be made out of flammable, ole flesh again. He wants Jesse's body. He wants to possess Jesse. He wants to be in him. 

Sholder has maintained he was somehow oblivious to the nuances while working on the movie. Writer David Chaskin said he intended the subtext, but a series of happy accidents made the movie gayer than he ever dreamed. 

Freddy's Revenge doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It swings back and forth from well-crafted horror to low-budget kitsch and camp throughout. There's a cool transformation sequence, though not as cool as The Toxic Avenger, and the fate of the gym teacher (Marshall Bell) is pretty entertaining. Some of the special effects are spot on, but then there are these dogs with people faces that don't really do anything. There's an unspoken story centered on Jesse's complex feelings about his sexual awakening, and then there's a pool party where Freddy for some reason announces to the guests, "You're all my children now." It's an uneven movie, but still a fun watch. 

If you get to the end of it and have any lingering questions, like, "What the fuck did I just watch?" you should check out the documentary Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy. Take your adderall in advance, though. It covers the entire Elm Street franchise and is about four hours long.

Both Nightmare on Elm Street 2 and Never Sleep Again stream on Netflix.

"I'm running this monkey farm now, Frankenstein."

So I've been pumping my barbed, three-headed phallus into Omar Mateen's raw, shredded buttocks for almost a week now, during which time it occurred to me that one of the unique thrills of watching your mortal society decay is how different groups of people react to the same crisis.

For example, some people might find it distasteful to learn that each head of my phallus has taken its own turn whilst little baby demons have fucked Omar in the earholes. Others might think you need stricter gun laws. Some people might favor the notion that Belial had his fingers in Mateen's nostrils, holding the mass murderer's head up so he could push is own quill-frilled member down the hateful, little bastard's blistered throat. Others suggest that his rampage of violence was an act of Islamic extremism.

Friends, Americans, Mortals, whether you believe that Mateen was so deeply conflicted about his homosexuality that he felt compelled to destroy everything about it he possibly could, including himself, or you think that he's just the kind of mean-spirited fuckface that cheered all the bus ride home from school on 9-11, you can rest assured that Omar has been passed around like a hot dish of savory, creamy, heavily -buttered mashed potatoes on Thanksgiving Day, and will be for several weeks until my horde of evil souls, especially the cenobites and the razor-quimmed succubi, have had their fill and pause for a postcoital cigarette.

Omar's never been happier. I would put pictures up on Grindr to show you if they hadn't already suspended my account. 

The whole situation reminds me of a movie I like. It's about a handful of bickering people with widely disparate ideas about how any of them are going to survive.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Day of the Dead.

This 1985 film by writer-director George A. Romero is the third in his five-part Living Dead trilogy. By this point, the dead have risen, eaten everybody, and are just kind of wandering the Earth in search of table scraps, and no one has ever figured out why. 

A team of scientists has been saved the fate of being ripped apart by flesh-eating dead people and given military protection so they could find the answers to the zombie puzzle. A helicopter pilot and a radio operator round out the crew to help search for other survivors. They're never very successful. 

The army guys help gather undead specimens to facilitate the scientific research. It's dangerous work, and soon all that's left are the racist assholes. They even lose their commander, and the next smartest racist asshole takes over.

Meanwhile, one of the egghead scientists thinks it's a good idea to keep specimens chained to the wall while he figures out how to tame them. He's one of those "so smart he's stupid" types. 

As supplies run low and more brave soldiers die, everyone begins to realize that teamwork hasn't exactly worked out for them yet. No one wants to die in the bunker, but as the dead outnumber the living 400,000 to 1, where do they go?

Day of the Dead features a lot of especially cool makeup F/X work by Tom Savini. It streams on Shudder, Hulu Plus and YouTube. 

"And you can tell all your scum friends that things are gonna change in this town."

When Deadpool came out in February, you couldn't swing a baby by its ankles without clubbing some fanboy gushing in his pants about it. 

Finally, an R-rated superhero!

What about Kick-Ass? What about Blade?

What's so great about an R rating anyway? A secret committee of prudish schoolmarms paid by the movie studios counts the number of times people say "fuck" and issues a certificate that says it's OK to show the film to the people the studio wanted to show it to anyway. 

How about an unrated superhero? How about a superhero that stops an armed robbery by ripping a perpetrator's arm off and beating him with it, then deep frying another perp's hands? How about a superhero that stops a drug dealer in a gym by crushing his head with weights?

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Toxic Avenger.

The 1984 film was directed by Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman. It's about an archetypal 98-pound weakling named Melvin (Mark Torgl) who works as a janitor at the Tromaville Health Club. Some jocks with a penchant for vehicular homicide decide to play a cruel prank on Melvin and -- you know how the old saying goes: "It's all fun and games until someone falls into a vat of negligently stored toxic waste." Melvin runs home, skin a'bubbling and on fire. 

In an especially cool transformation scene, Melvin's muscles bubble and bulge until he emerges as a muscle-bound monster with a Spidey-like sense of when evil is afoot.

With his mop in hand, the monster hero (Mitch Cohen) sets out on a rampage of maiming, mauling and mutilating evil-doers wherever he finds them. He seeks to clean up Tromaville, NJ, and get his revenge on those that did him wrong. In the process he finds love. There's lots of gore and tits. 

The Toxic Avenger has spawned three sequels, a children's cartoon series called The Toxic Crusaders, and a Broadway Musical. It streams on Amazon Prime and YouTube.

"She's a real carpenter's dream -- flat as a board and needs a screw!"

I've noticed that while this blog is proving a successful tool for stealing dozens of American souls every week, I'm also grabbing a few more from all around the world in the process.

This is exciting news! I fully expected I could rely on fatass Americans to sloth it up in front of their favorite electronic devices and fill their minds with images of gratuitous sex, violence, rape, murder, human bondage, animal cruelty, ritual sacrifice, cannibalism and exploding brains, but I never guessed they would be into those sorts of things in the United Arab Emirates. I considered that I would attract a few readers from countries where English is the dominant language like Australia and the UK, but did not predict my second-highest following would be in Germany.

I got so stoked I sent half the marketing department back to the Eighth Circle. Danke schön, and to my one reader in Iceland, tell a friend about the blog, will you?

I'd like to tell my international audience about a debate that's raging in America right now, if I could. See, some people think they were born with the wrong genitals and that makes a lot of other people mad.

So you get a lot of politicians saying, "We have to keep paedophiles out of the public restrooms where our children pee and poop," and instead of telling Catholic priests, prominent congressmen and sandwich salesmen which water closets they can visit, they make a bunch of rules about the people who are already frustrated with their naughty bits, which seems to make the people who are mad at those people happy, sort of.

I blame all this confusion on that capricious megalomaniac you mortals call God. After all, if you tell all the males they have to chop the tips of their penises off for 5,000 years, you're going to have some people feeling ambivalent about their special purpose.
 

Back in 1983 they didn't have such arguments in America. That's why this week's Thursday Thriller is Sleepaway Camp.

When this Robert Hiltzik film came out, the rules and roles were still pretty clear: girls couldn't drive motorboats and men dressed like men.

Sort of.

The story centers around a girl named Angela (Felissa Rose) who watched her father die in a boating accident when she was very young and was sent to live with her weird Aunt Martha (Desiree Gould). Martha sends Angela and her protective, foul-mouthed cousin Ricky (Jonathan Tierston) to camp for the summer.

At camp, the painfully shy Angela puts everyone on edge. How come she doesn't talk? Maybe it's because she has a goofy accent, but that doesn't stop anyone else in the movie from blabbing away.

Angela becomes a target for the paedophile cook, snotty bunkmates, abusive counselors and a lot of horny guys in tight running shorts. A fair number of them die, some of them in amusing ways.

 

Sleepaway Camp streams on Shudder and YouTube.