"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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"When there's no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the earth."

In this long summer of protests and counter-protests, I'm reminded of a guy who came to the Louisville Zombie Walk last year. He had a big banner with an exhaustive list of people going to Hell.

Here's the thing: he wasn't entirely wrong. Yes, Hell is full of idolaters, witches and atheists. Too full, in fact. That's the detail he missed. To alleviate Hell's overcrowding, I'm turning loose all the people listed on his sign -- the porno freaks, the ankle biters, the yoga pants, and so on. I'm releasing 40,000 undead onto Bardstown Road this Saturday night.

Don't worry. I'm only letting out the non-violent offenders and the non-public masturbators. This will be a safe event to which you can bring your family. We'll start at Mid-City Mall at 8:29 p.m.

Speaking of malls, did you ever wonder how long you could live at a mall?

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

I know it's barely been a month since I wrote a piece in tribute to the late George A. Romero, but fully unpacking his legacy might take a while.

Romero wrote and directed this 1978 film about two TV station personnel and two police officers, who steal a traffic helicopter to escape the rising tide of undead cannibals in the inner cities. Because their escape plan isn't very detailed, they set down on a shopping mall that is still crawling with zombies.

Zombies love the mall! And who can blame them? A lot of people shop online now and malls are in decline; but in 1978, they were the coolest places to buy all the stuff. Such disparate commercial entities as pharmacies, banks, car dealers, sporting good stores and restaurants all commonly did business under one roof. These places had everything as they destroyed communities by sucking money away from downtown shopping districts.

So our crew's first chore is to empty the place of zombies and seal it off so more don't come in. Once that's accomplished, why would you leave? Even when their barrier is breached by a gang of vicious bikers, bringing in more zombies with them, our protagonists choose to stay.

As the sequel to 1968's Night of the Living Dead, I found a few things worth noting:

First off, the white people are a lot less useless in the sequel. Stephen (David Emge) can't shoot a gun worth a damn, but at least he can fly a helicopter. Francine (Gaylen Ross) is a far cry from the first film's Barbara, who could fall down and twist her ankle standing still on a basketball court. Francine asserts herself and helps the team make competent decisions. Roger (Scott H. Reiniger) is a good shot and can hotwire trucks.

But the black guy is still the coolest. Ken Foree plays Peter, the group's natural leader. He's on the SWAT team, his grandfather was into voodoo, and he knows how to perform abortions. At least he says so, but I see no reason to question him.

What else can I say? Tom Savini did the makeup F/X and played a biker. Dario Argento and Goblin did a lot of the music. Dawn of the Dead is a blistering indictment of consumerism, a big gory mess, and a highly worthy follow up to Romero's original zombie effort. It streams on YouTube.

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"I kick ass for the lord!"

Greetings faithless mortals,

Thank you for taking a minute from accusing each other of being violent and counter-violent, and clicking over here to read about horror movies.  It means a lot to me, and whether your schedule for marching in the streets is all booked up with defending or condemning statues of dead racists, I've got a reason for you to take to the streets that has nothing to do with any of that.

I am, of course, talking about the Louisville Zombie Walk, which is just over a week away. On Aug. 26 at 8:29 p.m., I will sound the alarm and unleash some 40,000 living dead on Bardstown Road. Come join us. Bring the kids.

To put you in the mood, this week's Thursday Thriller is Dead Alive.

This 1992 splatter comedy was directed by Peter Jackson, who later gained international notoriety for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I prefer Dead Alive. In fact, it's one of my all-time favorites.

It's about a love-hungry girl named Paquita (Diana Penalver).  Her grandmother (Davina Whitehouse) reads her fortune in tarot cards one day and tells her that she will find true love with a Norman Batesy type named Lionel (Timothy Balme) who has an overbearing mother (Elizabeth Moody).

Mum is so bad she follows Paquita and Lionel to the zoo on their first date and gets herself bitten by a Sumatran rat monkey and seizes the opportunity to turn Lionel's attention back on her.

The monkey bite makes her very ill. Her ear falls off into her custard while she's eating. She finally dies and gets up and kills her nurse, so Lionel locks his two zombies in the basement while he steps out to buy some tranquillizers from a Nazi scientist to keep them quiet.


Add to this mix a greedy uncle who wants a cut of Lionel's inheritance, and you wind up with the bloodiest third act I've seen outside of Japan.

Eventually, Mum gets buried and Lionel meets some rockabilly hooligans one night in the cemetery. Mum escapes her grave and kills them, and Lionel is at the mercy of the zombie greasers. Luckily, Father McGruder (Stuart Devenie) hears the ruckus and leaps into the fray.

If the priest-on-zombie kung fu sequence that follows does not make you smile, you may feel free to stop the movie and never read this blog again because you clearly don't understand the nature of basic joy and you're way beyond my help.

Maybe you should consider church or opiate addiction.

Before you know it, Lionel has a cellar full of rowdy zombies, and they start to multiply. Yes, zombie priest and zombie nurse get it on and make a baby zombie who runs amok during a casual stroll in the park.

Dead Alive is as disgusting as it is hilarious, a zombie comedy that gets it right. It streams on YouTube.

"Out there! They're coming back to life! They're everywhere!"

Death brought me Glen Campbell this week. He's been jamming with Merle Haggard non-stop for the past couple days. I can't handle this. See, I thought country singers, though their lives be fraught with as much adultery and addiction as any other kind of musicians, were supposed to go to Heaven, on account of all those schmaltzy gospel records they were always making. Turns out, no, I have to listen to this crap.

Hell is too full again. The time is nigh for me to make room by unleashing some 40,000 undead onto Bardstown Road in Louisville, KY. I'll be doing that on Aug. 26. I can't wait to not hear "Rhinestone Cowboy" ever again.

And boy am I in the mood for a zombie movie!

This week's Thursday Thriller is Zombie.

This 1979 Lucio Fulci film opens with a sailboat adrift on New York Harbor. After the Staten Island Ferry nearly plows through it, police board the vessel to talk to the captain, but no one is on board... except for a fat, undead cannibal who chews an officer's throat right out.

The police call in a lady named Anne Bowles (Tisa Farrow) for questioning because it was her father's boat, but she hasn't seen her father. She later sneaks onto the boat to look for clues to his whereabouts and meets and English reporter named Peter West (Ian McCulloch) who was also looking for Anne's dad due to his connection to some kind of strange research on some voodoo-infested island. They hitch a ride on a boat with Brian Hull (Al Cliver) and Susan Barrett (Auretta Gay) to find the island and whatever became of Dr. Bowles.

Not long after that, the second greatest thing to ever happen in movies happens. The athletically-built Susan strips down to go skin diving and is immediately menaced by a shark. Naturally, as everyone in 1979 had seen Jaws, she's terrified. She swims to the surface to tell her travelling companions she's being attacked by a shark, then swims back to the ocean floor where a rotten hand grabs her shoulder and she finds she's also being attacked by an underwater zombie. She fights herself free of his grasp, leaving the zombie and the shark to fight each other.

After that? You know, it's an Italian zombie movie from the 1970s. The soundtrack is trippy. The zombies are extra rotten. Eyeballs get punctured. There are maggots. The effects seem a little fake, but are still absolutely disgusting. It's a classic!

Zombie streams on Shudder and YouTube.

"He keeps talking about a centipede with 12 people. What does that mean?"

Let's assume that if you're reading this, you're a horror fan. What does that mean to you, though? Do you buy tickets to conventions and pay extra to meet your heroes in person and have them sign a piece of memorabilia? Do you get a job in a haunted house so you can feel what it's like to be a monster, if only for a few short weekends in the early fall? How far will you go to prove your devotion to your favorite film?

I'd like to tell you about a movie that shows what it means to be a true horror fan.

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Human Centipede II: (Full Sequence).

This 2011 Tom Six film is about a guy named Martin (Laurence R. Harvey) who adores Six's other film The Human Centipede: First Sequence. Who can blame him? It's a groundbreaking feature in the field of sewing people's mouths to other people's buttholes.

Martin has a job as a security guard in a parking garage, which allows him a lot of lonely hours to study his favorite film, but other than that he hasn't got a whole lot going for him. He's short, fat and mentally handicapped. His father sexually abused him when he was a baby, and his screaming bitch of a mom blames him for his father's imprisonment. Martin's life is pretty bleak, but he finds comfort in a homemade scrapbook he's made about The Human Centipede and some special pictures he has of one of the film's stars Ashlynn Yennie. Martin likes the movie so much, he decides to make his own human centipede.

As a horror fan, Martin embodies a DIY spirit that far surpasses that of anyone who ever made their own Freddy glove. He proves you don't need a surgeon's expertise or fine instruments to build your own 'pede. You just need a can-do attitude and a staple gun.

Imagine what the world would be like if you could all try and be a little more like Martin.

'Pede II is grittier, gorier and more intense than the first one, with a higher body count and a longer centipede. In places it plays more like a traditional slasher movie.  It streams on Hulu Plus.