"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.