"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.