"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.