"Moss Garcia: throws rocks at dogs; uses profane language; picks his nose; impure thoughts; negative body hygiene."

It's the last Thursday before Christmas, mortals. We've been through a lot. We've seen a lot of murdering Santas over the last month. We saw the first murdering Santa in film; we saw the murdering Santa concept stretched to outlandish, pro-wrestling style extremes; we saw murdering Santas menace a sorority house; and we're still not done with this theme -- not by a long shot.

There are plenty of murdering Santas in films that aren't so easy to find online. Some streaming services act like the genre doesn't even exist. They'd rather wallow in more traditional fare, the kind of stuff that's offensive in its harmlessness. Netflix has the whole Tim Allen/Santa Clause trilogy, but can't cough up Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out starring Bill Moseley?

Then over on Amazon Prime they have tons of latter entries in the field, but a lot of them suck pretty hard. There's one called Christmas Slay in which the police come to arrest the maniac, and he just lazily pushes them down on the ground, one-by-one. For some reason they don't all-at-once kick the shit out of him. It's so surreal, you have to wonder if it's possible someone actually made a movie this bad or if you're just dreaming. I'm sure the cast and crew thought they were being ironic or some shit. I had to turn it off.

But I'm afraid our time to explore this topic is coming to an end, and I've saved the best I could find for last.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Christmas Evil.

This 1980 film by writer/director Lewis Jackson is one of those slow breakdown of a fragile mind stories. Harry (Brandon Maggart) has had problems ever since he was a kid and saw Santa Claus kneeling in front of his mom and fondling her legs by the Christmas tree. He has a fantasy of being Santa. He has a middle-management job at a toy factory. He uses binoculars to watch the neighborhood children and writes down when they're naughty. He gets worked up when he sees the big guy make his appearance at the end of the Macy's parade. He lives alone. At work, superiors and subordinates alike treat him like a chump. His brother thinks he's a failure.

So what does he do? He makes a Santa suit and paints a sleigh on the side of his white, windowless van, and behaves in a generally creepy manner, but he doesn't act out until he learns at the factory's charity drive for the Willowy Springs State Hospital for Retarded Children isn't on the up and up. He suits up, steals a bunch of toys from the factory, and delivers them to the hospital. Harry's an all right guy after all, until he stabs a guy in the eyeball with a toy soldier's sword in front of a church.

What's fun about this movie is how it really puts you in Psycho Psanta's mind. Harry is a lonely outcast because he still wants to believe in Santa. He's a simple man, not stupid, but perhaps naive enough to think the world could be simply divided into naughty and nice. He suffers for his own innocence until he learns to stand up for it. You're never entirely on his side, but you might feel at times like he's got a point, you know?

Christmas Evil streams on YouTube with ads and on Shudder.