"Come on, laugh girl. It's very funny."

Of all the special days so many of  you mortals celebrate, April Fools' Day has to be in my top dozen. I just can't get enough of pranks, especially ones that get out of hand. 

For example, maybe you think it would be funny to tell your sister you shot your husband. Hilarious!

Humor is subjective, I suppose. 

In honor of the upcoming occasion, this week's Thursday Thriller is Bloody April Fools.

This 2013 Spanish slasher flick was directed by 12 different people, and I won't bore you with listing them. The movie's real title is Los Inocentes, because the Spanish don't celebrate April Fools' Day. They have something called Happy Fools' Day on Dec. 28.

The movie opens up in a youth hostel where a skinny nerdy kid getting locked in a boiler room as a Happy Fools' Day prank. The girls decide to take hot showers and the nerd burns to death. 

Fifteen years later, a bunch of kids get lost on their way to their ski weekend and decide to stay and party overnight in the abandoned hostel instead. An unseen killer starts picking them off one-by-one in a series of  gory, prank-based murders.

Plot-wise, there's not a lot more to tell, but there is one sequence in which a girl named Sandra (Diana Gomez) watches her lover Jorde (Aleix Mele) get stabbed through the eye while he's looking through a glory hole for whoever stole her bra. Sandra, still naked in her state of coitus interruptus via occidendum, runs for her life, slips on a bar of soap and bashes her skull open on the bathroom floor. When the group's own yukster Chino (Enric Auquer) finds her, he discovers she's not quite dead. Sandra goes to scratch her head, and finds a spot on her exposed brain that feels good to rub, so she starts jilling off that way until she flicks a synaptic bean the wrong way, vomits blood on Chino's face, and expires. 

As I said, it's a slasher flick, and tropes abound, but there's something different about this one. Maybe it's the fluid, quick-cut editing or the handheld camera work. It could be a matter of character development as you watch the shy Alex (Mario Marzo) stumble through his awkward attempts to woo Eva (Charlotte Vega). 

Whatever it is, I like it. Bloody April Fools streams on Netflix.

Are you still reading this? Maybe you need more to read. Todd Merriman's latest e-book Our Lord of Nefarious Intentions is available on Kindle and Nook and only costs a dollar.

"You ain't got enough to satisfy me, you impotent son of a bitch!"

When the major streaming services can't deliver the movie you're looking for, there's always YouTube. Chances are, if you're willing to pay a couple bucks, you can pretty much watch anything you like, but who wants to spend money? If you're a cheapskate movie lover, searching for free movies can be a dicey proposition. Often you'll find yourself watching 90 minutes of a static image telling you to click the dodgy-ass link in the description, or if the movie's actually there, it's cropped stupidly to evade the anti-pirates or whatever.

As a result, I usually skip the trouble of checking YouTube. With my literally thousands of viewing options, the movie would have to be very special indeed for me to search YouTube for it. Or maybe I just found it by accident.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Abby.

Like the classic Richard Pryor bit, this 1974 William Girdler film dares to ask the question: what if The Exorcist had black people in it?

Well, for starters, the guy who played Blacula would be one of those black people. William Marshall plays Bishop Garnet Williams, a man of the cloth and scholar of ancient African religions. He leads two students on a pith-helmeted expedition to a cave in Nigeria and inadvertently unleashes the spirit of Eshu, a god of sex and chaos.

The spirit travels on the winds all the way to Louisville, KY, where it possesses Williams's daughter-in-law Abby (Carol Speed).

Abby is a good Christian girl, active in the church. She leads the choir, works in the kitchen and serves as a marriage counselor. She married the pastor, Rev. Emmett Williams (Terry Carter), who is the bishop's son if you haven't pieced that together already. When Eshu gets ahold of Abby, her marriage to Emmett suffers as she tells him his dick is too small and tries to seduce practically everybody.

Emmett pleads with Garnet to come home and help. They track Abby down in a bar where Garnet dresses up like Sun Ra and performs the exorcism.

Chock full of funky music and psychedelic smash cuts, Abby streams on YouTube.

"Here is Sub-Zero, now plain zero!"

Earlier this month, Arnold Schwarzenegger announced he would be leaving The Celebrity Apprentice. President Trump tweeted he'd been fired. The two obscenely wealthy and powerful men then bickered about it for a bit, but for me the real question isn't why Arnold won't be on the show any more, it's, what the hell was he doing there in the first place?

It's not like he needed more money or accomplishments. The Richest estimates his net worth at $300 million. He sat for seven years as the chief executive of the world's sixth largest economy. That all pretty much makes him the most successful lifter of heavy objects in all of human history. A lot of things would qualify as a step down, but a reality show?

I guess he just needed to get out of the house.

Back when he was Hollywood's premier ass-kicking tough guy, Arnold was in a movie that somehow satirized reality TV before it had even been invented.

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Running Man.

I can hear you whining already. "Dark One, that's not even a horror movie. It's action/sci-fi if anything."

Look, a guy's head explodes. Another guy uses a chainsaw as a weapon. It's violent as all get out. It suits my needs just fine. Plus, you get a lot of what Arnold does best, deliver corny one-liners as he dispenses horrific death to one enemy after another. I should also point out, in his total career, Arnold has more on-screen kills than Jason Voorhees. 

This 1987 Paul Michael Glaser film is based on a story by Richard Bachman, aka Stephen King. It's set in the far-off future year of 2017. Society is such a dystopian mess, the movie has to open with crawling text to tell you exactly how hard the shit has hit the fan.

Arnold plays Ben Richards, a helicopter cop who refuses to kill unarmed civilians in a food riot in Bakersfield, CA. The other cops take control of the mission, kill the rioters, and Richards takes the fall for the massacre. He goes to prison but escapes with the help of fellow inmates. He gets caught at the airport.

Nowadays, they might put Richards back in  prison, but in 2017, they put him on America's number one television show, The Running Man, hosted by Damon Killian (Richard Dawson).

Richards and his fellow fugitives have to run through a 400-square block section of the city without being killed by whimsically themed stalkers. The guy who uses the chainsaw is called Buzz Saw. Jim Brown plays a guy who uses a flamethrower. His name is Fireball. If the prisoners survive the run, according to the rules of the game, they will be given full pardons. Not likely, though, as that's only happened three times in the show's history, and no one's ever killed one of the stalkers.

But then Arnold hasn't played yet.

You could call it a spoof of American Gladiators if it hadn't predated the show by two years. I'm not sure if it's a big-budget Death Race 2000 or a low-budget Hunger Games, but I do know that The Running Man is a lot of fun and it streams on Amazon Prime.

"Wouldn't it be marvelous if the two natures in man could be separated -- housed in different bodies!"

This Sunday is the day many of you mortals will spring your clocks forward by one hour to fully enjoy more daylight. This means your little blue marble in the cosmos is rolling back toward Halloween, and for me, it means the end of a cycle.

One year ago, I swore to go all the way back into the annals of horror cinema and review one film every week in chronological order. When it was time for your clocks to fall back, I reviewed the newest watchable film I could find online, and worked backward through the years.

This approach to film criticism has taught me one thing: it can be a frustrating way to enjoy watching movies. So it ends here. Next week I'm going to start reviewing things in whatever order I want, but this week, I'm going to tell you about the second-oldest feature-length horror film I could find.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

This 1920 John S. Robertson film is about Dr. Henry Jekyll (John Barrymore), a highly moral and hardworking doctor who is betrothed to a woman named Millicent Carewe (Martha Mansfield) who doesn't have very much to do until the end of the movie. Her father Sir George Carewe (Brandon Hurst) has Jekyll over for dinner and questions his morals and manliness. They adjourn to a London music hall, where they watch a dancing girl named Miss Gina (Nita Naldi) and Carewe sends his waiter over to the proprieter with an offer. It's uncertain what exactly he offers, but it must have been a lot because Miss Gina is immediately ordered off stage in the middle of her act and sent over to flirt with Jekyll. He denies her advances because he's engaged, but kinda wishes he hadn't because how often does your father-in-law try to buy you a prostitute? So he goes home and invents a drug that allows him to compartmentalize his lust and other base impulses into an alternate personality -- Mr. Hyde, who spends most of the movie looking weird and occasionally tramples a child and treats Miss Gina in an unkindly fashion.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came out the same year as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but was neither the first nor the last screen adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's novella. Filmmakers have been out to spoil the ending of Stevenson's story since 1912.

The Scottish author's story reads more like a mystery, and you don't find out Jekyll is Hyde until the end. My memory of 1886 is a little hazy, but the first time reading that was a lot like finding out Darth Vader is Luke's dad. Stevenson's telling is gripping and suspenseful, but doesn't really translate into movie magic without a couple revisions. The novelty of motion picture allows you to watch Jekyll change into the evil Mr. Hyde before your very eyes, so that shit's gotta go in the first half hour. With a little makeup and a few simple editing tricks, actor John Barrymore carries off one of the great transformations in film.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde streams on Amazon Prime, Shudder and YouTube.

"I swore I would have my revenge. They will never be rid of me!"

Dr. Frankenstein has met with many fates, and quite frankly, Mary Shelley's is the least satisfying. Exhaustion? Boring!

Trapped in a burning windmill with the monster was a more interesting way to go.

Todd Merriman suggests he once saved Christmas.

But if you're a fan of Peter Cushing you already know what he really did. He moved from town to town under a series of aliases and continued his research.

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

This 1958 Terence Fisher's film is the first in a string of sequels to the highly successful The Curse of Frankenstein.

Peter Cushing offers a cold, ruthless portrayal as Victor Frankenstein, who has escaped the guillotine and moved to Carlsbruck, Germany to start a medical practice under the name Dr. Victor Stein. At least he didn't change his first name to Franklin. In Carlsbruck, he incites the ire and the envy of the medical council, is pursued by a woman who wants to marry off her daughter to a man of status, and works tirelessly to provide health care to the poor while collecting their body parts on the sly.

He transfers the brain of his crippled assistant Karl (Michael Gwynn) into a new body he's preserved and assembled, but Karl sneaks out and gets in a fight before his brain can properly heal from the procedure. Murders ensue.

It's uncertain who specifically Frankenstein is taking revenge against, as he is the film's only returning character. Maybe The Persistence of Frankenstein would have been a more apt title. He does indeed persist as Peter Cushing starred in at least five Frankenstein movies for the UK's Hammer Studios. My favorite was actually the gender-bending Frankenstein Created Woman, co-starring Playboy's  Miss August 1966 Susan Denberg.

Revenge is still pretty good, though -- no bunnies in it, but there is a chimpanzee.

The Revenge of Frankenstein streams on Shudder.