"I've never seen the sky this color before. It's just like flying through a sea of blood."

I watched something on the TV Tuesday night and the words really resonated with me.

"The world's in terrible shape. Trouble between nations grows worse with terrorism breaking out all over the place. Everything's gone crazy!"

     

No, it wasn't the State of the Union, but it was every bit as fucked up.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell.

Remember how last week I said the Japanese were making the hell out of samurai and giant monster movies in the 1960s? This 1968 Hajime Sato film is neither of those.

It starts on an airliner whose passengers include a corrupt politician, an arms dealer and his wife, a psychologist, and a blonde lady who speaks only English but somehow understands everyone else's Japanese perfectly well. Her husband was killed in Vietnam.

The news of the day is that the British ambassador was assassinated. While the politician and arms dealer discuss the sad, but profitable, state of the world, birds start smashing into the windows.

Then the flight crew receives word there's a bomb on the plane. In searching for the bomb, they notice a passenger in a turtleneck sweater, white suit, and wraparound sunglasses.

He doesn't have the bomb, just a sniper rifle. He's the assassin.

Then a flying saucer forces the plane to crash.

While the pilot and surviving passengers argue about the best strategy to assure their survival, the assassin takes a stewardess hostage and escapes. Wandering in the wilderness, they find the flying saucer, and the assassin is compelled to step into its light.

And here's the best part: his forehead splits open, a blob of silver slime crawls into the wound, and he becomes a vampire.

The second best part comes a little later when the aliens use the arms dealer's wife as a loudspeaker to announce their plans of Earth's destruction, then throw her mannequin stunt double over a cliff.

The humans are powerless to stop the alien menace due to their constant bickering and in-fighting. It's a statement about war or something.

A crazy story loaded up with trippy special effects, Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell is the weirdest movie I've reviewed in a week. It streams on YouTube.

"You will meet a harsh, merciless death. You will die!"

On this, the last Thursday of the first month of the new year, while I wait for any paid streaming service to offer up any must-see classic of horror I haven't already written about, it might be a good time to recap what we've looked at recently.

 As soon as I was finished talking about killer Santas, my demon hordes clamored that I must recommend to you 1963's Black Sabbath by Italian filmmaker Mario Bava. The next week, they thought you should know about a wholly yet unseen brand of fright in 1964's At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul by a guy called Coffin Joe. He was from Brazil and they hadn't done any horror movies down there yet, so no one saw that coming. Last week, my Editorial Board of the Damned slammed their fists on the table and insisted that you needed to know about a film out of England called Dr. Terror's House of Horror with Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Donald Sutherland. 

I got sick of them telling me what to do so I fired them and decided to tell you about a Japanese movie from 1966.

• By the mid 1960s, the Japanese were really cranking out two kinds of movies: samurai period dramas, and giant monster smash 'em-ups.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Daimajin. 

It shouldn't surprise anyone that a period, giant samurai smash'em-up exists. It, along with its two sequels, was inevitable. This Kimiyoshi Yasuda film takes place in an ordinary castle in the shadow of an extraordinary mountain. The mountain contains the spirit of the great god Majin, who is often angry and causes tremors. The peasants in the castle, who seem to be well treated despite their low status, throw a fire dancing ritual to keep Majin contained in that damn mountain. Some bad guys decide that the ritual is the perfect distraction to overtake the castle from its beneficient samurai lord and start treating the peasants quite poorly indeed. The lord's children escape and hide out in a cave in the mountain of Majin for ten years. The boy gets caught by the bad guys, who, fresh from hammering on the great statue of Majin, decide to crucify him. The girl prays to Majin to break free and crush the bad guys, who he's already kind of pissed at. When the girl sweetens the deal by offering to throw herself off a waterfall, he really can't refuse. The mountain trembles as he rises, turns from stone to armored, angry, blue-green flesh and proceeds to stomp the shit out of everything in a finale that's sure to horrify lovers of ancient Japanese architecture. 

On a less positive note, the movie does suffer from a problem I've always had with giant monster movies: Majin doesn't show up and start stomping until about the last 20 minutes of the movie. Luckily there's plenty of violence sprinkled throughout, even if it isn't monster-related. 

Daimajin streams on YouTube.

"Something came out of that coffin tonight, something evil and strange."

When Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee were paired as creator and creature in 1957's The Curse of Frankenstein, they re-invigorated gothic horror and stole the screen back from the space aliens and giant, radioactive bugs that dominated genre cinema of the 1950s. The fight scene at the end of 1958's Horror of Dracula cemented their place as an iconic horror duo. So who wouldn't want to see them bickering on a train?

This week's Thursday Thriller is Dr. Terror's House of Horrors.

This 1965 anthology film by Freddy Francis casts Cushing in the role of Dr. Schreck, a fortune teller who boards a train and reads tarot cards for his fellow passengers. Four cards lay out their destinies, and the fifth card tells how they can escape their fate. In each case, the answer is same -- death.

The first two fortunes include an OK werewolf story and a silly bit about a killer plant. They serve as decent warm-ups for the rest of the movie.

The third story stars Ray Castle as jazz musician Biff Bailey, who takes a trip to the West Indies to do a little cultural appropriation. Despite a voodoo priest's warning not to steal the sacred music of the local deity, Bailey does it anyway, and who can blame him? It really swings, man! It's a fun piece with some cool music and I liked it even though Bailey's comeuppance wasn't as bloody as I might have hoped for.

Lee plays haughty, skeptical art critic Franklyn Marsh who spends most of his time during the framing story flapping his newspaper and warning the other guys on the train that Dr. Schreck is an obvious fraud. He eventually acquiesces to Schreck's offer of a reading, if only to prove he isn't afraid.

In his fortune, we see Marsh heaping scorn on the work of painter Eric Landor (Michael Gough). Landor gets his revenge by tricking Marsh into praising a painting by a chimpanzee. Humiliated, his reputation in ruin, Marsh takes the first opportunity to run over Landor with his car. Landor loses his hand and can never paint again. Despondent, he commits suicide, but his severed hand lives on to haunt Marsh. It's probably the most satisfying bit of the film, but it ain't over yet.

The fifth and final story finds a young Donald Sutherland playing Dr. Bob Carroll, who just moved to a new town with his hot French wife Nicole (Jennifer Jayne) and has to come to terms with mounting evidence that she is a vampire.

It would be my favorite story of the set, except for the bat. Had technology not yet advanced enough to give filmmakers a halfway convincing rubber bat by 1965? Seems like something someone would have worked on since 1896. I can't remember ever having seen a good one, but I guess it's something I'll have to look out for from now on.

Dr. Terror's House of Horrors is not a perfect movie, more silly than scary, but I did enjoy it, stupid bats and all.

"Nothing's stronger than my disbelief! Destroy me! I have no faith!"

Not to hold it over your heads or anything, but I've been suffering hard for you mortals this week. I've been concentrating my research on the early 1960s to find you films so unusual they remain fresh to this day. I love Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Vincent Price, but it's as if they're in every movie. I've never even reviewed a movie with Barbara Steele in it, and I'm already sick of her. Every thing she's in, she goes to an old castle and there's a portrait of some 300-year-old witch that looks exactly like her.

Fuck Europe. Ever wonder what was going on in South America back then?

This week's Thursday Thriller is At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul.

Jose Mojica Marins wrote, directed and starred in this 1964 film in which he portrays Ze do Caixao, or to those who speak English, Coffin Joe. And of course Coffin Joe made this, the first Brazilian horror film. Look at the guy. He clearly did everything before it was cool!

Coffin Joe is the town mortician who looks like he probably vapes and knows how to ride a unicycle. Oh, and deep! Man, this guy can't wait to profess his atheism and how much smarter it makes him than everyone else. I mean sure, eat a leg of lamb on Holy Friday, but do you have to be such a douchebag about it?

In his top hat and bushy beard, you wouldn't be out of line if you assumed that he regularly hassles the bartender about which IPA has the most IBUs, but his behavior down at the public house is a little worse than that. 

One night after chopping off one guy's fingers with a broken wine bottle and beating another guy with a whip, Coffin Joe walks home and ponders his existential plight: essentially, that he needs a son to carry on his legacy, and life is pointless without one. His wife Lenita (Valeria Vasquez) can't bear him children, so he kills her by letting a tarantula bite her. He would like to conceive with Terezinha (Magda Mei), but she is engaged to his best friend Antonio (Nivaldo Lima), so he'll just have to die, too. Then he rapes Terezhina, who kills herself in shame. Pretty soon, you're thinking, man, this guy has made a lot of pissed off ghosts and probably collects Spoon bootlegs on vinyl. When will he get his bloody comeuppance?

You mortals know I hate to spoil movies, but I'll give you a hint. It's in the title. 

I joke about Coffin Joe, but At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul is a good movie, a welcome relief to the castle- and portrait-centric horror of the early 1960s. It streams on YouTube. 

"A body like yours can drive a man to madness. And I will kill you."

Netflix just dropped a new season of Black Mirror, and I still haven't finished the first three yet. I've seen a few episodes from each season. I like what I've seen and recommend it highly, even if my experience is limited. It's an anthology series about the potential nightmares posed by new and emerging technologies. It's good. The first one is about a guy who kidnaps a princess and demands the prime minister fuck a pig on YouTube in exchange for her safe return. There's a really smart one where people have an app and they constantly rate each other, and your rating is practically credit. If you average at least 3.6 stars and have some 3.8s to give you a good reference, you can get in to some nice apartments, but if you lash out at an ineffectual airline employee and hold up the line, the consequences can be dire.

But what about old technology?

Consider the landline telephone. For most of the 20th century, you had no idea who was calling without some significant police work, and if the caller had been inside your home, they would know exactly where you stood when you were talking to them.

So much the better to position their telephone, so they might peek in your window at you as they called.

Creepy, huh?

This week's Thursday Thriller is Black Sabbath.

This 1963 Mario Bava film stars the stunning Michele Mercier as Rosy, a gal just trying to slip into something more comfortable, when she starts receiving death threats by telephone. What I like about Italians, Bava, in particular, is the undercurrent of eroticism prevalent in their horror. Mercier leaves plenty to the imagination, but watching her take off her stockings can also leave you plenty of fuel.

This segment, entitled "The Telephone," is the earliest I can remember in which a phone is used as a tool of menace, long before Black Christmas, When a Stranger Calls, and Scream.

Black Sabbath is an anthology film in which Boris Karloff plays the emcee. He opens the film wearing a simple suit and stands on a rocky horizon against a backdrop of flashing, psychedelic colors.  I think this is how you know you're watching the Italian version. In the American version, he appears as a floating, color-changing, disembodied head. Either way, he makes some corny remarks about vampires going to the movies before introducing the Mercier segment.

Karloff returns later in the film in "The Werdulak," which is a kind of vampire. A Russian nobleman finds a dagger stuck in a headless body while he is out for a ride on his horse. He stops into a nearby house and the family insists he leave before Father (Karloff) gets home, for he went off to kill the monster who's been terrorizing  the countryside, and if he does not return by midnight he is surely a werdulak as well.

Wouldn't you know Dad ambled up the driveway just as the clock strikes 12? He wasn't in the house yet, so did he make it or didn't he? He seems all right enough. He has the werdulak's head in a bag after all, and orders it hung from a post as a warning to any others, like you do, but he seems awfully agitated by the dogs barking. How can you be sure?

Will it help when he carries off his own grandson into the forest in the dead of night? Yeah, that'll clear up any doubt you might have had.

The third bit is a decent ghost story with a cartoonishly fun-looking corpse and a stolen ring.

Black Sabbath is a classic, with sexy women and Karloff looking even creepier than he did in Frankenstein. It streams on Shudder.