"He didn't know how to cut a woman into pieces."

I have a perfect New Year's movie picked out for you mortals, but we'll get to that in a minute, as I also have some important movie critic business to attend first.

As we reach the end of another trip around the sun, most other reviewers are publishing their top 10 films of 2017. If you've been following this blog for any stretch of time, you know staying up on what's new isn't what interests me, but I'll give it my best shot.

Here we go:

10.) Death Race 2050 -- Yes, Roger Corman's Death Race 2000 has been remade before with a full reboot of the franchise featuring Jason Statham, but that sucked. This remake by G.J. Echternkamp remembers why the original was so funny in the first place, keeps with the essentials of story and tone, but offers up an all-new cast of currently relevant, satirical racers like Tammy the Terrorist, a religious nut who worships Elvis; rapper and black supremacist Minerva Jefferson; and interactive sex toy Dr. Creamer. For my money, this is the best splatter-comedy of 2017. It's still on Netflix.

9.) The Evil Within -- As heir to an oil fortune, writer-director Andrew Getty got to live out his dreams in a way many of you mortals will never realize. Getty was able to self-finance a film about a mentally retarded boy who finds advice about love and life in an antique mirror that doesn't have his best interests at heart, and he got to do it while addicted to methamphetamine. The film took 15 years to complete and Getty died during post-production. Hate on rich kids and meth heads all you want, the film is touching, trippy, scary and something altogether spectacular. Michael Berryman plays a demon. I predict that time will be kind to this sleeper and it will be revered as a one-of-a-kind classic. The Evil Within streams on Amazon Prime.

8.) The Void -- Technically, this Lovecraftian tale of bizarre sex rituals and human sacrifice by the writer/director team of Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski was released in 2016, but it didn't make it to Netflix until 2017, which is when I watched it and reviewed it. That is to say, I reviewed it in 2017, and that's how things get on this list.

7.) The Babadook -- Thanks to some epic shit-posting on Tumblr, the titular monster of this 2014 Jennifer Kent film enjoyed the renowned status of mascot for Gay Pride 2017. Sure, it doesn't make sense, but are you gonna deny the homosexuals their claim on an allegory about grief? What's wrong with you?

6.) Dog Soldiers -- For many, 2017 was a year of tragic loss and even I am included in that bunch. My favorite werewolf took a silver bullet in June and 2002's Dog Soldiers reminds me of him. You can find it on YouTube.

5.) Invaders from Mars -- In 1974, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was released on an unsuspecting public. It was original, intense and it changed the course of horror history. It was shot over a nasty, hot Texas summer by a bunch of hippies led by director Tobe Hooper, who shuffled off his mortal coil this past August. Amazon Prime no longer hosts The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, so the number five spot goes instead Hooper's Invaders from Mars. It is a 1986 remake of the 1953 original, and is frog-gulping, slime monster fun. It streams on YouTube.

4.) Night of the Living Dead -- Night of the Living Dead is the only movie I've reviewed twice. I wrote about the 1968 classic in February 2016 as part of my Black History Month celebration, but we have nasty mailer-daemons in Hell and they gobbled up every last byte, so I reviewed it again a year later. Little did I know at the time that auteur George A. Romero would cross over in July. Night of the Living Dead streams on Amazon Prime, Shudder and YouTube.

3.) Bride of Frankenstein -- We've established that I don't stay on top of what's new. That isn't among my purposes. One of my goals is to let you know when classics come available online, like six Universal monster films did on Shudder in October. Bride of Frankenstein from 1935 is my favorite of the batch, and you better get to it quickly if you haven't watched it yet as Shudder's got it listed in the "Last Chance to Watch" collection.

2.) Night of the Demons -- I think at this point we've covered that I suck at writing best-of-the-year lists, but my favorite thing to do when writing this blog is to rediscover forgotten gems, and you'll be hard pressed to find a movie as shiny as 1988's Night of the Demons. It's about a bunch of horny teenagers who break into a reputedly haunted house one Halloween to have a party and a seance. Disgusting things happen. It's still available on YouTube.

And that brings us down to number one. The best movie of 2017 is Abby from 1974.

1.) Abby -- Louisville native William Girdler directed this blaxploitation ripoff of The Exorcist. It stars Carol Speed as Abby, and Blacula himself, William Marshall, as the priest. Abby, a faithful wife and devout church-goer becomes possessed by a sex demon. It's funky, psychedelic and appears to have cost $12 to make. Abby streams on YouTube.

So there's the list, and what better way to wrap up 2017 and set the tone for 2018 than with an old slasher flick that takes place on New Year's Eve?

This week's Thursday Thriller is Terror Train.

This 1980 film by Roger Spottiswoode is about a bunch of college kids who played a prank gone awry. The members of Sigma Phi decided to haze a pledge by telling him to go upstairs and lay Jamie Lee Curtis, but when he got to bed, he found a medical school cadaver where she was supposed to be. Three years later, the fraternity throws its New Year's party on a train, and a masked killer starts picking them off one by one. The killer changes costume throughout the movie, and starts off in what's supposed to be a Groucho Marx getup, but looks a lot more like Gene Shalit.

David Copperfield is in it. Roger Ebert called it "gruesome stupidity," but it's definitely in my top 52 of the year. Its thin plot will make it a great background movie to play at your New Year's Party.

Terror Train streams on Amazon Prime.

"Moss Garcia: throws rocks at dogs; uses profane language; picks his nose; impure thoughts; negative body hygiene."

It's the last Thursday before Christmas, mortals. We've been through a lot. We've seen a lot of murdering Santas over the last month. We saw the first murdering Santa in film; we saw the murdering Santa concept stretched to outlandish, pro-wrestling style extremes; we saw murdering Santas menace a sorority house; and we're still not done with this theme -- not by a long shot.

There are plenty of murdering Santas in films that aren't so easy to find online. Some streaming services act like the genre doesn't even exist. They'd rather wallow in more traditional fare, the kind of stuff that's offensive in its harmlessness. Netflix has the whole Tim Allen/Santa Clause trilogy, but can't cough up Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out starring Bill Moseley?

Then over on Amazon Prime they have tons of latter entries in the field, but a lot of them suck pretty hard. There's one called Christmas Slay in which the police come to arrest the maniac, and he just lazily pushes them down on the ground, one-by-one. For some reason they don't all-at-once kick the shit out of him. It's so surreal, you have to wonder if it's possible someone actually made a movie this bad or if you're just dreaming. I'm sure the cast and crew thought they were being ironic or some shit. I had to turn it off.

But I'm afraid our time to explore this topic is coming to an end, and I've saved the best I could find for last.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Christmas Evil.

This 1980 film by writer/director Lewis Jackson is one of those slow breakdown of a fragile mind stories. Harry (Brandon Maggart) has had problems ever since he was a kid and saw Santa Claus kneeling in front of his mom and fondling her legs by the Christmas tree. He has a fantasy of being Santa. He has a middle-management job at a toy factory. He uses binoculars to watch the neighborhood children and writes down when they're naughty. He gets worked up when he sees the big guy make his appearance at the end of the Macy's parade. He lives alone. At work, superiors and subordinates alike treat him like a chump. His brother thinks he's a failure.

So what does he do? He makes a Santa suit and paints a sleigh on the side of his white, windowless van, and behaves in a generally creepy manner, but he doesn't act out until he learns at the factory's charity drive for the Willowy Springs State Hospital for Retarded Children isn't on the up and up. He suits up, steals a bunch of toys from the factory, and delivers them to the hospital. Harry's an all right guy after all, until he stabs a guy in the eyeball with a toy soldier's sword in front of a church.

What's fun about this movie is how it really puts you in Psycho Psanta's mind. Harry is a lonely outcast because he still wants to believe in Santa. He's a simple man, not stupid, but perhaps naive enough to think the world could be simply divided into naughty and nice. He suffers for his own innocence until he learns to stand up for it. You're never entirely on his side, but you might feel at times like he's got a point, you know?

Christmas Evil streams on YouTube with ads and on Shudder.

"You put your hands on any of these little fillies and I'll personally change your vocal pitch!"

So mortals, are you sick of Christmas yet? Be honest. It's OK to hate it. It's too many sweets and worrying about money. It's feeling so stressed and overstimulated that you're numb to the ever-present singing of children. What's so great about the singing of children anyway? They have no idea what they're doing. And the small talk! It's the worst! The inescapable, mindless seasonal banter usually hangs on two questions:

Have you finished your shopping?

Have you put your tree up yet?

The implication of both questions is clear: If you haven't, you're clearly some kind of delinquent, a derelict, a ne'er-do-well who refuses to participate in the largest economic ritual of the year in a timely manner. That's obviously how the person who asks such questions would think if they were genuinely listening for an answer. Don't sweat it, they're not. They just want an opportunity to tell you they've already put up their tree and got their shopping done. They were finished on Labor Day and they've been telling everybody who will nod politely at them ever since.

It's enough to make you hang yourself with a rope of garland and colored lights. Don't be so drastic. I've got a movie for you that will, if not relieve the merry monotony, then at least contribute to it.

This week's Thursday Thriller is To All A Goodnight.

This 1980 David Hess film opens in a flashback to "two years ago" at Calvin Finishing School for Girls. It seems a bunch of co-eds were chasing another girl through the house that Christmas break. One of them was wearing a Santa wig and brandishing an axe. They chase their prey out onto the balcony and she takes a tumble to her death. Why she doesn't survive the fall is curious, considering she turned into a mannequin right before impact. Returning to present day (1980), we see school emptying out for Christmas break, leaving behind five girls, their house mother Mrs. Jensen (Kiva Lawrence), and their slow-witted religious nut handyman Ralph (Buck West).

Over dinner. with the chaperones out of the room, Leia (Judith Bridges) reveals the plan. Her boyfriend T.J. (William Lauer) is flying in with a bunch of his buddies for an all-night fuck party. The only one who thinks this is a bad idea is Nancy, played by Jennifer Runyon. You remember her. Bill Murray tested her for psychic powers toward the beginning of Ghostbusters.

Nancy's not wrong. You know how these things go - the fuck party gets off track because there's a maniac picking the kids off one by one with knives and axes and crossbows and the like. In this case, the maniac is disguised as Santa Claus.

It's not the best Santa slasher, but it's got weird music by Richard Tufo and some pretty good kills. Harry Reems is in it for some reason. To All A Goodnight streams on YouTube.

Remember, you've only got 11 shopping days left to buy Todd Merriman's Santa Claus meets Frankenstein for Amazon Kindle before Christmas. When those 11 days are gone, it will be after Christmas.

"Why, I'm just trying to spread a little Yuletide fear."

I started my celebration of killer Santas last week to help make this holiday a little more tolerable for all you beautiful grinches, scrooges and all-around misanthropes out there and my research has lead me to something even I find outrageous.

The movie I'm going to tell you about this week has the audacity to allege that I am the father of Santa Claus. That is absolutely ridiculous because I'm a big fan of getting that money shot. Everyone knows I always pull out, except for maybe with Rosemary or with Damien's real mom or with all those other women with whom I tried to sire the Antichrist. OK, you know what? You get me a sample of Santa Claus's DNA and we'll take the case to Maury. 

This week's Thursday Thriller is Santa's Slay.

This 2005 comedy by writer/director David Steinman would have you believe that jolly, old Saint Nick is my son. The film's standout exposition sequence, a Rankin-Bass- style claymation flashback, explains that Santa was a demon who loved to torture and kill elves, but an angel disguised as an old man challenged him to an impromptu curling match. The bet was if Santa lost he would have to spend the next thousand years giving presents to children on Christmas.

The bet expires and Santa gets back to his evil roots. He sets Fran Drescher's hair on fire, uses a tree topper as a shuriken and burns down a strip club -- it's total mayhem.

Former NFL defensive tackle and WCW wrestling champion Bill Goldberg plays Santa, Dave Thomas plays a corrupt pastor, and Lost's Emilie de Ravin is the leading lady. Other familiar faces include Robert Culp, Rebecca Gayheart, Chris Kattan and James Caan.

It's a silly movie chock full of corny jokes and wrestling fan service. You'll probably like it if you enjoyed Jack Frost.

Santa's Slay streams on YouTube with Russian subtitles. The sound quality isn't the greatest so unless you read Russian, crank it up.

And if you want to read a Christmas story, I really can't recommend enough Santa Claus Meets Frankenstein by Todd Merriman.

"A man described as a homicidal maniac has escaped from the hospital for the criminally insane."

I suppose it was inevitable. As its merchandise gradually surrounded and swallowed up your Halloween displays in the stores, you tried to ignore it. When families got up from their Thanksgiving meals and rushed out to camp in front of their favorite big box monstrosities of retail commerce, you stayed at the table and refused to shop, because you take one holiday at a time. But your candy bag is empty and the dishes have been put away. Christmas is here in all its loud, gaudy enthusiasm for glad tidings of joy, peace on earth and goodwill toward men, and shopping. Mostly shopping. 

Despair not, mortal. Just because J.C.'s birthday is coming up doesn't mean you have to live without violent, trashy cinema in your own home. Let the ignorant jackals converge on Wal-Mart and tear each other apart over flat-screen TVs. Bolt the door and hunker down on the couch with a cup of cheer to celebrate a holiday tradition I can get behind -- movies about Santa Claus murdering people.  

People always seem interested to know where their holiday traditions come from, so I'll tell you a little about this one. 

This week's Thursday Thriller is Tales from the Crypt. 

This 1972 Amicus anthology by director Freddie Francis is, to my memory, the first film to feature a killer Kringle. 

Five people get lost on their guided tour of a catacomb where a bunch of religious nuts are buried, and come face to face with Crypt Keeper. Fans of the HBO series won't find their favorite skeleton puppet in this early film adaption of EC Comics stories by William M. Gaines, Al Feldstein and Johnny Craig. Instead, the Crypt Keeper is actor Ralph Richardson in a hooded robe. He tells each of the lost souls how they will die.

 

If you're an impatient sort, don't worry. Psycho Psanta shows up in the first segment, "And All Through the House." Joan Collins plays Joanne Clayton, who has just murdered her husband for the insurance money. As she's cleaning up the mess and making sure her daughter stays in bed, a bulletin comes over the radio, interrupting the stodgy, English Christmas Carols, to warn listeners to be on the lookout for an escaped lunatic in a Santa suit. Sure enough, he's right their in her window. Joanne starts to phone the police, but remembers her husband's corpse is still lying their bleeding all over the carpet. She gets the mess arranged, then realizes her daughter is not in her room!

It's a pretty simple story. 

Of course there are four other stories that aren't bad either. In particular, Peter Cushing makes a pretty gnarly zombie. 

Tales from the Crypt streams on YouTube. 

If you're looking for other Christmas stories, maybe something to read on your Kindle, check out Santa Claus meets Frankenstein by Todd Merriman.

"Burn, witch! Burn, witch! Burn! Burn! Burn!"

Another Thanksgiving is upon us, mortals, and you've no doubt heard again, the story of the pilgrims who left England in pursuit of religious freedom in the New World. They loaded up the Mayflower with their faith and agricultural ignorance and sailed across the Atlantic, nearly starved, and got bailed out by the natives.

Of course, the buckle-hatted sociopaths' ideals of religious freedom didn't extend to people who worship me. Life in the puritan colonies could be especially hard on witches.

This week's Thursday Thrillers is City of the Dead.

This 1960 John Moxey film opens up with a good, old-fashioned, New England witch-burning, in which some angry pilgrims in Whitewood, Mass., set their torches to a lady named Elizabeth Selwyn (Patricia Jessel). Selwyn's last utterance is to call on Lucifer and put a curse on the town. Flash forward to a university classroom where Professor Alan Driscoll (Christopher Lee) tells the story to students in his History of Witchcraft class. One particularly enterprising student, Nan Barlow (Venetia Stevenson) stays after to pick the prof's brain about how she can learn more. Driscoll suggests she go to Whitewood and stay at the Raven's Inn.

Nan's boyfriend Bill (Tom Naylor) and brother Dick (Dennis Lotis) are scientists who don't cotton to Driscoll's flaky passion for the humanities. They try to talk Nan out of the trip, to no avail. Nan drives alone to the especially foggy town of Whitewood and checks in to the Raven's Inn, where we discover the proprietor looks identical to Elizabeth Selwyn, and that Nan has pretty underwear.

Nan finds Whitewood to be most intellectually stimulating to research, as it is full of mysterious strangers, vanishing hitchhikers, and hotel rooms with trap doors in the floor. After a month goes by and she doesn't return home, Bill and skeptical Dick go looking for her with the help of a Whitewood resident named Patricia (Betta St. John). I don't want to give too much away, but the whole thing ends in black-robed figures on fire.

City of the Dead is safe enough for family viewing so you don't have to wait for your holiday guests to leave to turn it on or anything. It streams on YouTube.

"What have you in your bowels?"

I cannot help but wonder, mortals, what obstacles you're willing to overcome for entertainment. I understand that some of you are willing to miss out on a gruesome Japanese flick just because you're put off by subtitles, while others will accept the sound of crying babies in the background just to watch in the comfort of your own home the latest cinematic release that someone shot on their phone in a movie theater in Beijing. I understand how little things can detract from your viewing experience while you can overlook others.

I dug deep on YouTube this past week to find a movie for you mortals. I spent hours poring over renders of dubious quality and even more questionable legality. I watched Vincent Price in Cry of the Banshee with Greek subtitles. I tried to enjoy Christopher Lee in The Devil Rides Out with dialogue overdubbed in Russian. I'm not ruling these movies out for future review, but I'm going to hold out until more palatable presentations are available.

I see no reason to hesitate in suggesting the movie I want to talk about, though, because its present format, ripped from a VHS tape with Spanish subtitles, complete with anti-piracy notice up front, is the perfect context in which to enjoy this film.

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Brotherhood of Satan. 

Strother Martin stars in this 1971 Bernard McEveety film. It's about a couple, Ben (Charles Bateman) and Nicky (Ahna Capri), who are trying to take Ben's daughter K.T. (Geri Reischl) for a birthday visit to grandma's. Grandma apparently lives on the ass end of nowhere, and en route they happen upon a horrific crash and rush into the town of Hillsboro to report it to the sheriff (L.Q. Jones) who appears to have a piece of taxidermy attached to his head. The family is then attacked by a mob and have to burn rubber out of town to escape. Once clear of the pitchfork-wielding rubes, they swerve to miss a child standing in the middle of the highway and have to hike back to town for help.

They soon find a whole family smothered to death with plastic bags on their heads and have to talk to the sheriff again. As the plot unravels, we find that a cult of old people have been abducting Hillsboro's children to raise them as devil worshippers.

I'll be honest: this movie is all over the place. A car gets crushed by a tank in the first scene. An old lady gets ripped apart by her fellow cult members. Nicky has a balls-trippy nightmare. K.T. is the guest of honor at a Satanic birthday party. It's never very clear what exactly is going on, but it is a heaping helping of "what the fuck did I just watch?" which is my favorite genre of film lately. Plus, if you're paying close attention to the subtitles, you can brush up on your Spanish.

The Brotherhood of Satan streams on YouTube, as "la hermandad de satan."

"There's only one way to remove Byron's hallucinations."

Mortals, this week I am inspired by a renewed interest in mental health in America to tell you about a movie that takes place in a psychiatric hospital. 

This week's Thursday Thriller is Asylum.

This 1972 Amicus anthology was directed by Roy Ward Baker. It's about a young psychiatrist named Dr. Martin (Robert Powell) who arrives at the titular institution for about a job. Dr. Rutherford (Patrick Magee) informs him that the Dr. Starr he's come to talk to has himself gone bonkers and left Rutherford wheelchair bound. Starr has developed a new persona, but if Martin can go upstairs, talk to four patients, and figure out which one used to be Starr, Rutherford will give him the job. 

On his tour, Martin hears the stories of four patients: Bonnie (Barbara Parkins), who believes she was attacked by the dismembered corpse of her lover's wife; Bruno (Barry Morse), a tailor who says he made a magic suit for Peter Cushing so he could bring his son back to life; Barbara (Charlotte Rampling), a pill head who swears her imaginary friend Britt Ekland went on a murder spree and not her; and Byron (Herbert Lom), a former neurosurgeon who makes little robot dolls with lifelike human faces. 

The special effects may look a little silly today, but I think they just add to the film's charm.

Asylum comprises four quick stories you don't have to think too hard about to enjoy. It streams on Amazon Prime and YouTube. 

"Listen to them. The children of the night, what music they make."

Well mortals, another Halloween has come and gone, and you're now one All Saints Day closer to the grave. I don't know about you, but my ears are still ringing with the screams of Louisville's haunted house fans after unleashing hellish fury at The Devil's Attic for the past month and a half.

My head is pounding. I need something quiet to watch.

This week's Thursday Thrillers is Dracula.

Tod Browning directed this iconic 1931 film based on the novel by Bram Stoker, but if you try to base your book report on it, you will flunk. Bela Lugosi stars in the title role, but keep your eye on Dwight Frye as Renfield, a legal apprentice enslaved by Dracula to assist in moving the vampire from Transylvania to England, where he intends to establish new hunting grounds. Seems the Transylvania locals have caught wise about the mysterious goings-on at the Borgo Pass, and they tell everyone, even Renfield, to steer clear. Renfield doesn't listen, and he spends the rest of the movie alternating between lucidity and madness.

Dracula is a good movie for your Halloween hangover. It's quiet and familiar enough that if you doze off, which is my plan, it's no big deal. Dracula streams on Shudder.

"Eat a bowl of fuck! I am here to party!"

It's the last Thursday before Halloween, and I have saved a special movie for you, mortals.

This week's Thursday Thrillers is Night of the Demons.

Kevin S. Tenney directed this 1988 horror/comedy.  It's about a bunch of teenagers who break into an abandoned house that is reputedly possessed so they can throw a Halloween party.

Angela (Amelia Kinkade), the school witch, organized the party with the intention of scaring the more popular crowd. Her friend Suzanne (Linnea Quigley) helps her prepare for the party by bending over in front of the convenience store clerks while Angela shoplifts some supplies. Suzanne wants to meet cute boys so she bends over a lot in this movie.

At the possessed house, when the batteries in the radio go dead, the kids decide to throw a past life seance. They all gather around a dusty old mirror until it goes black, but instead of seeing who Angela was in a past life, Helen (Allison Barron) sees her own dead body in the mirror, then a demon. She screams, the mirror crashes and strange noises start coming from the basement. Then you get some POV Evil Dead-style camera work as the demon runs upstairs and possesses Suzanne.

She decides she wants to take Stooge (Hal Havins) somewhere else in the house, but makes out with Angela a bit before they depart the living room. Here's a warning for you: demonic possession is communicable via saliva or by bites. It works a lot like zombieism.

Pretty soon, the teen revelers are all paired off for sex or to find an escape while the possession spreads among their ranks. Suzanne pushes a lipstick tube into her nipple and gouges out a cute boy's eyes, Italian style. Before it's over people are maimed and mangled and on fire. It's a big gory mess.

Night of the Demons is like a mix of Evil Dead and Night of the Living Dead topped liberally with freshly grated Italian cheese. There aren't many new ideas in play as tropes abound. But somehow it's simultaneously greater than and less than everything it rips off.

It's a great party movie for Halloween. Night of the Demons streams on YouTube.

With Halloween rapidly approaching, this is your last weekend to check out the Devil's Attic. Tell the guy at the ticket booth to "Eat a bowl of fuck" and get $2 off admission. The Devil's Attic is located at 647 W. Hill St., Louisville, KY.

"To a new world of gods and monsters."

Call me sentimental, but around this time of year I start to pine for the true classics -- films that set the bar for the horror genre as talkies became the norm in cinema.

In all my time reviewing the best horror movies on your favorite streaming sites I've struggled with a major gap in my chronology. I've written about a handful of silent films from the 1920s, then pretty much skipped ahead to the 1960s, because that's what was available.

And here I was about to cancel Shudder as its app for Roku has become unbearable to navigate, pushing the company's in-house productions down your throat, but it turns out they were the site to finally pull it off -- to host a half dozen Universal monster movies from the 1930s and '40s.

Despair not, mortals. The classics are alive.

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Bride of Frankenstein.

This 1935 film was directed by James Whale. Colin Clive and Boris Karloff reprise their roles as Dr. Frankenstein and his Monster, respectively.

The movie opens in the parlor of Lord Byron (Gavin Gordon), who is hosting guests Percy and Mary Shelley (Douglas Walton and Elsa Lancaster). Mary does needlepoint or some such, while Byron and percy heap backhandedly sexist praise about how such a delicate, little flower wrote such a frightening story. The commentary about how dainty and pure Mary is seems a little ironic, considering what a pair of Little Lord Fauntleroys Percy and Byron are in their high pants and fluffy cravats. Then Mary tells them that Frankenstein and his Monster both survived the fire at the windmill.

Then unencumbered by all that backstory from the first movie about Frankenstein's methods,  motivations and his family being worried about him, you get to see the monster as he kills a few more people, is hunted by angry villagers, gets captured, escapes, and is further hunted by angry villagers, all amidst a recurring backdrop of religious imagery, the meaning of which I don't have time to try to unpack.

What Karloff does well is express the loneliness and frustration of life as a walking abomination. He didn't ask to be reborn. He didn't ask not to die in that fire at the windmill, but he indeed lived, and his rage against the living has been inflamed. The viewer can easily sympathize with and root for The Monster as he chokes, slaps and stomps his victims because they won't stop screaming and give him a chance to prove he's got a kind heart underneath all that ugly.

What the movie as a whole does well is flesh out some elements of Shelley's novel that were left unexplored in the 1931 film. A blind man teaches The Monster to speak, to break bread, to drink wine and smoke stogies. Most importantly, the blind man teaches The Monster about friendship. It's not long before a pair of hunters show up at the blind man's cabin and ruin the whole affair.

More importantly, and as the title should suggest, Bride explores the idea that The Monster wants a woman, but don't pin your book report on it. There are characters that don't appear in the novel. Una O'Connor plays Minnie, a daffy old woman who works for Dr. Frankenstein and provides comic relief amidst the violence in the film's earlier scenes. Ernest Thesiger plays Dr. Pretorius, a fellow mad scientist who calls on Frankenstein to show off his homemade collection of tiny people in jars and suggest they work together to create a mate for The Monster, the goal being a whole generation of little monsters borne of sexual reproduction. I got the impression he just wants to watch dead people screw.

I've always said you can fairly judge a good Frankenstein movie by its creation sequence and Bride climaxes in a real stunner, drawing heavy influence from Metropolis.

Bride of Frankenstein isn't scary to our jaded, modern sensibilities. It is, however, a damn good movie loaded with thrills, laughs and heartbreak. It's one of those sequels that's better than the original and a true classic. If you haven't seen it, it's time, and if you have, it's time to see it again. Watch it with the kids!

With Halloween at our doorstep, Bride of Frankenstein has arisen on Shudder.

Mention Bride of Frankenstein this weekend and get $2 off admission at The Devil's Attic.

"I told the others. They didn't believe me. You're all doomed."

It's Thursday the 12th. You know what that means. 

This week's Thursday Thriller is Friday the 13th Part 2. 

Steve Miner directed this 1981 film. It came out one year after the original, but takes place five years later. 

Alice (Adrienne King), the lone survivor of the most recent bloodbath up at Camp Crystal Lake is still  having bad dreams about the day she had to cut Mrs. Voorhees's head off.

She doesn't have them for long, because Jason sticks an icepick in her brain. Then opening titles roll  and my favorite character of the whole franchise, Old Crazy Ralph (Walt Gorney) tells some teens at a phone booth that they're doomed just like the last bunch, but you know how it goes. No one listens to Old Crazy Ralph.

Jason strangles him later.  Huge mistake for the franchise in my opinion, but Wikipedia says the franchise grossed $464 million worldwide, so what do I know?

Now, just because there are kids in the woods next to the town where Old Crazy Ralph lived doesn't mean someone was stupid enough to re-open "Camp Blood". That would be ridiculous. No one would believe it. No, what happened is someone was stupid enough to open a different camp on the other side of Crystal Lake. That stupid person is Paul (John Furey) and he knows what he's doing. He tells his staff to stay away from Camp Blood. That's how you handle horny teenagers, right? You just tell them not to do something and they listen. Jason murders just about all of them in horrific ways. My favorite was when the guy in the wheelchair takes a chop to the face and rolls backward down the cabin steps. Or maybe it's when he shish kebabs two young lovebirds and you see the spear come out the bottom of the bed and blood gushes all over.

By now you should be wondering how the hell Jason (Warrington Jillette) is doing all this stabbing, strangling and skewering. Didn't he drown in the lake in the 1950s? Wasn't he just a little kid? Is he a full-grown man now? How did that happen? Mrs. Voorhees seemed pretty certain he was dead. She threw a whole murder tantrum over it.

These are all excellent questions and many idiotic theories abound. Here's mine: according to IMDb, the first one was made on a budget as thin as its plot for about $550,000. It grossed almost $40 million. Then Paramount said, "We need another one of these immediately. We don't care how stupid it is."

And neither should you. Part 2 is a good, honest slasher. It's better than the first one and the later sequels. I'd say it's the best of the bunch, but Part 3 and 4 are also pretty good, though my exact recollection is hazy. They all kind of bleed together for me.

Don't expect the hockey mask just yet. Friday the 13th Part 2 streams on Starz, which I don't usually cover, but Amazon and Hulu can never seem to keep their shit together with this series. Someone remind me next week to cancel my free trial.

Mention Friday the 13th Part 2 this weekend and get $2 off admission at The Devil's Attic.

Oh, and Jason will be there Friday night!

"Dog will hunt!"

I was making love to Stephen Paddock's self-inflicted gunshot wound last night, really reaming it out good, when the debate over gun control in America crossed my mind. Some have said you can't just make laws to regulate evil. That's what I've been saying for eons. Why even have penalties for murder or molesting children? All the laws do is drive those activities underground and thus ensure only criminals engage in them.

You have to admit it's a fair point. If killers are determined to kill, they'll find ways to do it. They could use knives, bows and arrows, swords, axes, hammers, icepicks, forks, spoons, sporks, or plain ole big, pointy rocks. Sure, to achieve any noteworthy level of success, a killer would have to be in fantastic shape, but who wants a bunch of strong, healthy murderers running around?

I'd like to talk about a movie in which a whole family of serial killers has managed to thrive in alternative weaponry.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.

Tobe Hooper directed this sequel to his 1974 classic. In the 12 years since he first introduced the world to Leatherface and family, the world had met Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger. By 1986, with films such as Return of the Living Dead and Re-Animator emerging, horror had started getting intentionally silly, and Hooper definitely took Chainsaw down a more comedic path than its predecessor.

A leggy disc jockey named Stretch (Caroline Williams) takes a call on the request line from a couple of bro-douches who won't hang up their car phone. This was a huge problem in the 1980s because it would tie up the phone line. They call back later just in time for Stretch to hear them get murdered by Leatherface. He has a dead body strapped to his own and the effect is like a great, morbid puppet.

Dennis Hopper plays Lefty, a cowboy detective sworn to track down the infamous family of cannibals who killed his brother. He convinces stretch to play her recording of the murder on-air to force Texas to face head-on the evil it has been ignoring for over a decade. The recording draws the maniacs to the station and Stretch is confronted by maniac brothers Chop-Top and Leatherface.

Bill Johnson plays Leatherface, a mentally-handicapped killing machine who wears a mask made of the flesh of his victims. Leatherface experiences a sort of sexual awakening when he rests his giant saw between Stretch's legs, and has a final chainsaw showdown with Lefty toward the end. Jim Siedow reprises his role as The Cook and he wins the Texas-Oklahoma Chili Cook-off with his top secret recipe. He hints that the most crucial component to delicious chili is good meat.

The most outstanding performance of the movie belongs easily to Bill Moseley as Chop-Top, an all-around burnout and Vietnam vet with a plate in his head.

The film catches flak sometimes for being decidedly goofier than the original, but I liked it. Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 streams on Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime.

Mention Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 this weekend and get $2 off admission at The Devil's Attic.

"They bear the cross on the soles of their feet. They tread on all that is holy."

All this hubbub in America about what to do during the Star-Spangled Banner has me cackling. Over the past week, you've no doubt heard a billion shitty arguments whether you should stand with your hand on your heart or take a knee.

I love you, America, but you fall so easily for false dichotomies. You are standing at a pivotal moment in history. Have any of you even considered how much that song sucks?

With its stiff, straight up and down pomp and pageantry, you sound like you never learned to fuck right. There's no swivel in your hips. Plus, the melody was stolen from a British drinking song. Who can blame you for sounding like a lousy lay.

I thought you were proud. Write your own tunes. Your other patriotic hit, "My Country Tis of Thee", is literally the British national anthem, for crying out loud.

In composing the musical embodiment of the spirit of your people, it might be wise to draw influence from other cultures who have built their reputation for lovemaking. Consider the Italian national anthem.

It kind of teases you at first. Those drum rolls resound in the pelvis. Sure, it's still a little stodgy, it's a national Anthem. You can still hear the Italians have their fun.

As a result, the Italians have established an international reputation. They fuck well. They wrote a good national anthem. They also used to make some great horror movies. The movie I'd like to talk about came in toward the end of their reign of cinematic weirdness.

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Church.

This 1989 Michele Soavi film was produced by Dario Argento. According to IMDb, it was initially conceived as the third installment of the Argento-produced Demons franchise, but Soavi had higher artistic aims.

The action starts with some knights on horseback thundering into a poor medieval village. A priest leads them in and tells them that every village denizen is a witch and has brought forth a great plague. One night opens his face shield so a young girl can stare into his great Nordic blue eyes and beg for mercy. He responds by crushing her pretty, innocent, little face with his gauntleted hand. On examination of her body, the priest and knight find she has a cross carved on the bottom of her foot -- the sign of the demon.

The knights kill everyone and bury them in a mass grave. To smoosh the demons down real good, they build a cathedral on top of it.

What could go wrong, right?

Cut to centuries later, the church's foundation is crumbling and the Catholics have hired a bunch of people to work on its restoration. A scholarly type named Evan (Tomas Arana) gets to poking around in the basement and pries loose a seal in the floor with his pocketknife. Instead of a big pile of dirty skeletons, he discovers a hole that drops to oblivion and casts the room in an eerie, blue glow. He finds a hole and looks inside. Demon hands grab him around the throat and take possession of his soul. He then kills the Sacristan (Roberto Corbiletto), who is then also possessed.

The Sacristan confesses his desire to do evil to a priest, then punches him through the partition, and runs downstairs to impale himself on a jackhammer.

After that it gets pretty weird. A Goonies-style boobie trap locks the church shut with a lot of visitors inside. The Sacristan impales runs a bridal model through with a hefty chunk of wrought iron. A fish demon jumps out of a holy water fountain and attacks a guy. I could go on.

The soundtrack is especially cool. It's all synthesizers and pipe organs and features Keith Emerson, Goblin, Phillip Glass and Fabio Pignatelli.

The Church streams on YouTube.

Mention The Church at The Devil's Attic this weekend and get $2 off admission.

"I want to help save your soul so you can join me in the glories of Hell."

Hurricanes. Earthquakes. Riots in the streets. Men gone mad with power, hell bent on nuclear conflict. We even got that eclipse in there. I have to say 2017 is shaping up better than I ever imagined. Now, I'm reading that The Rapture is supposed to happen on Saturday, one day after the autumnal equinox.

That's what some people are saying, anyway. I don't know for sure. Jesus doesn't even know. I plan on being at The Devils Attic. Maybe if you're among those left behind the line will be shorter. I can't promise that. The folks slated to be lifted up to Heaven aren't exactly my demographic. I think U of L football games might give me more competition than The Rapture.

It seems early for a Rapture, though, doesn't it? It feels like something is missing. Where are all the plagues? Man, I love a good plague.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Masque of the Red Death.

Now before you accuse me of turning schoolmarm on you, relax. This 1964 Roger Corman adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe short story is so different from the original work there is no way you will pass any test by watching the movie instead of reading. If you do need help with your homework, may I recommend listening to audio recordings by Gabriel Byrne, Basil Rathbone, or Christopher Lee?

Yes, the story is the same in broad strokes. A plague that leaves hideous red lesions all over its victims' corpses ravages the land and the flamboyant Prince Prospero throws a decadent lock-in at his castle until it all blows over, but Poe completely forgot to mention that Prospero is a brutal tyrant and avowed satanist.

Vinent Price plays Prospero. As often as he played evil, cold-blooded bastards who delight in inflicting misery on others, Price really did it up in this one. Masque of the Red Death takes a few stylistic turns toward the psychedelic. It has dwarves in it, and before it's over, you'll see a guy in a gorilla suit on fire. It streams on YouTube.

Mention Masque of the Red Death at the box office this weekend and you'll get $2 off admission to the Devil's Attic.

"He threw an 18-wheeled truck at me and bounced me into nowhere for five years!"

All the horror fans are talking about It this week -- whether they loved it or hated it, whether it was scary enough, funny enough, or too funny, whether it was better than the 1990 TV mini-series, whether it followed the book closely enough or whether it should have included the adolescent gang bang, and so on.

You might expect Stephen King to hand out full-size Snickers bars this Halloween, what with all the truckloads of cash being backed up to his home in Bangor, Maine, but King doesn't give out Halloween candy. He used to, but too many people showed up, wore him out, and played "hell with the law."

According to the FAQ on his web site, there are quite a few things King won't do. He won't give you writing advice and he won't read your book, which is a shame because I wanted to know what he thought about the Kindle Edition of Thursday Thrillers.

In honor of King's latest box office success, this week's Thursday Thriller is The Dead Zone.

David Cronenberg directed this 1983 adaptation of King's novel. Christopher Walken stars as Johnny Smith, a high-school English teacher who decides on an especially rainy night not to have sex with his girlfriend Sarah (Brooke Adams) and instead drive home. Visibility is hampered and the roads are slick. Smith slides into a jack-knifed tractor-trailer and awakes from the resulting coma five years later. He survived the crash but what the hell for? Sarah has married another man. 

It's not like he got nothing for his trouble, though. Smith inexplicably has supernatural insights into the lives of people he touches.  He's got psychic powers. He saves a child by telling his nurse that she's trapped in a burning house. He helps his doctor track down his long lost mother. It's not long before Sheriff Bannerman (Tom Skerritt) from Castle Rock comes asking for help catching a serial killer, because for all his devoted deputies and highly authoritative moustache, he's got doodley squat for leads. 

Smith gets shot during the killer's apprehension, and then he moves far away from Castle Rock, which is probably smart, considering nothing good ever happens there.  He takes pupils under his private tutelage for work and has  and especially Christopher Walken moment when he tries to warn a student's father not to make the boy play ice hockey. 

Martin Sheen plays Greg Stillson, a ruthless and corrupt politician riding a wave of populist anger into the U.S. Senate. Smith shakes Stillson's hand at a campaign rally and foresees him starting a nuclear war. Smith feels like he should do something about it, but what?

The Dead Zone is a cool flick. It streams on Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime. 

"These evil people have just got to be stopped."

One of the greatest misconceptions about me is that I want things done at midnight. If there's one thing I've noticed over the eons, saying midnight to mortals causes way too much confusion.  I could never guarantee you an exact count of the guitar players who've missed me by nearly 24 hours, because I didn't specify to be at the crossroads closer to 12:01 a.m. or 11:59 p.m., but I can name them. I could look a bunch of them up in my old appointment books. It would be a waste of time. You've never heard of them, because they still suck.

Halloween is still over a month away, but the cheapo hockey masks and glow-in-the-dark meat cleavers are already on the shelves at Dollar Tree, the smell of pumpkin spice is choking everyone who's not too busy getting over or preparing for a massive hurricane, and I've already started whipping my menagerie into shape for seasonal display at The Devil's Attic.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Trick or Treat.

I wanted to hold this movie until closer to Oct. 31, but I just can't wait for Halloween. I have to tell you about this now.

Skippy from Family Ties grew his hair out and flung on an army jacket for his role as a disaffected youth in this masterful adolescent fantasy from 1986. Charles Martin Smith directed it.

Ragman (Skippy aka Marc Price) has problems with bullies. His one release from the torture they make his daily life, the thing that makes him feel powerful and gives him an identity in his troubled youth, is heavy metal music. Heavy metal is everything to him and his favorite artist is Sammi Curr (Tony Fields).

Curr is the ultimate rock 'n' roll bad boy. He wears tight leather pants and bites live snakes in half on stage. Naturally, he attracts the ire of 1980s-era religious conservatives and busybody, Tipper Gore-type liberals. One night somebody torches the hotel he's staying at and Curr dies in the fire. Ragman is devastated. Anyone who lived through 2016 can relate.

Ragman drops by his local rock station for consolation from his favorite DJ and rock buddy Nuke (Gene Simmons), who tries to cheer him up by bequeathing upon him the ultimate plot device: the last record of an alleged satanist and bonafied heavy metal god handed over to the unworthy by none other than the most famous member of Kiss. Nuke plans to play his backup copy on midnight on Halloween.

After a nearly fatal encounter with his nemeses at a pool party, does Ragman get all butthurt and shoot up the school? Nope. He handles his problems like kids did in the 80s, he goes home and rocks out to his new record, and of course he plays it backwards because that's where rock singers recorded all their best advice back then.

On a personal note, I blame the decline of vinyl album sales for the apparent uptick in school shootings over the years, however a counterpoint could be made that last year, deaths caused by heavy metal demons shooting lightning out of their guitars wasn't statistically far enough from zero to be considered significant.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

Ragman gets good advice from Sammi's last record at first. They have meaningful conversations. He learns to stand his ground with the bullies, and the battles seem to escalate. Eventually, the record tells Ragman to give a taped copy of itself to his main anatagonist as a peace offering. A girl listens to it on a Walkman and the music tears her clothes off, she gets off a little, then her brain fries out. 

What else can I say? There are high-speed car stunts.  Ozzy Osbourne has a cameo as a TV preacher crusading against metal. The soundtrack is by a band called Fastway, and whatever you think of the hair metal genre, they are good at what they do.

Trick or Treat is the best two-hour music video I have ever watched. It streams on YouTube, but if you don't have two hours, you could just watch the actual music video. 

"These things! They're huge, ugly, slimy, giant Mr. Potato Heads!"

However it is you wound up on this blog, you probably already know that Tobe Hooper died on Saturday, and you should already know that he directed the groundbreaking 1974 classic, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Most of the obituaries covered his participation in Poltergeist and Salem's Lot as well, but Hooper had some strange deep cuts in his filmography.

There's one on Hulu called The Mangler that was based on a Stephen King short story and stars Robert Englund. It's about a laundry press that's possessed by a demon. Someone's posted Spontaneous Combustion on YouTube. It's basically Firestarter, but except for little Drew Barrymore, you get full-grown and sorta whiny Brad Dourif. Shudder has one called The Toolbox Murders, which was a remake. 

The best one I watched so far is also a remake. This week's Thursday Thriller is Invaders from Mars.

Hooper directed this remake of the 1953 film of the same title. It's about a boy named David Gardner (Hunter Carson) whose dad (Timothy Bottoms) works for the space program/military industrial complex and whose mom is Laraine Newman. She's studying to be an accountant or something and before the movie is over, she does the Conehead voice. 

David stays up late watching a meteor shower with his dad one night and just as he's going to bed sees out his window something strange land just over the hill. He cries out to his parents that he just saw a UFO, but they don't believe him. In the morning, Dad isn't quite himself. He stumbles around and barely says a word to anybody. He's missing a slipper and pours a whole box of Tic Tacs in his coffee before drinking it. Pretty soon, Mom starts to seem distant, too. And a few policemen. David suspects that aliens have planted mind control devices in their necks.

At school his teacher Mrs. McKeitch (Louise Fletcher) has never been fair to David, but she seems meaner than usual. David catches her eating a whole frog. 

And she catches him catching her. David runs to the school nurse Linda (Karen Black) for help. Linda helps David escape the school but McKeitch is already after him. He manages to hide in her van. It's a good thing, too, because she drives to a cave in the woods that leads to a vast system of underground tunnels to check in with her alien boss, who looks like Shredder's boss from the Ninja Turtles. 

From there David and Linda's relationship takes a bit of a strange turn? She's often in the role of damsel in distress and David is her knight in shining armor, but if they have to go anywhere she has to drive. The situation stops just shy of being like one of those teacher ladies in Florida or wherever who seduce their students and go to prison, then get out and marry since he's legal. The movie is rated PG, so it doesn't get too kinky about it. It's subtle. 

Dan O'Bannon, of Return of the Living Dead fame, co-wrote the screenplay with Don Jakoby. Stan Winston made the brain monsters. Invaders from Mars is nostalgic, comic book-style fun. It streams on YouTube. 

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