"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.