"I burn the evil out of you."

Some of you older mortals enjoy pointing out that the world is going to Hell. Boy, do I wish. Sure, all the nation-states on the globe seem to be pushing ever closer to the brink of world war, but when's the last time that wasn't true? The youth are going crazy, you say? Eating Tide Pods and asking not to be shot? Big deal. I remember when kids used to settle their differences with switchblades. Now, that was fun.

Let's face it -- life on earth is, in general, far less brutal than it used to be. It bums me out, to be honest.

Even child abuse has been on the decline since 1990. Sometimes you hear about parents chaining their kids to their beds and deliberately starving them for decades, but such incidents appear to be statistical anomalies. You hardly ever hear of a mother burning her son's wrist over a gas stove any more, except maybe in this old movie I'm going to tell you about. 

This week's Thursday Thriller is Don't Go In The House. 

This 1979 Joseph Ellison film stars Dan Grimaldi as Donny, a guy who works at a garbage incinerator. One day one of his co-workers catches fire and Donny does nothing to help. Donny's boss reams him out but good in front of all the guys, but another co-worker Bobby (Robert Osth) thinks the boss was too hard on him and invites him out for a beer to talk it through. Donny declines, as he needs to get home and fix mother her tea. When he gets home, his mom is dead, and the voices in his head tell him he can do whatever he wants now. He can turn his music up loud. He can smoke in the house. He can start picking up women and burning them alive with a flamethrower.

Here's the fun part: He dresses the bodies and seats them in the same room. Sometimes he thinks they're laughing at him and he has to go set them straight with a stern talking-to.

Donny seems to have trouble with women because his mother was abusive. His father left when he was young. These are the things Bobby would probably like to hear about, but Donny tells his collection of dead bodies instead. 

I hesitate to call this one a slasher, but only because Donny doesn't use blades. He uses a flamethrower. It's an OK movie, not the best thing I've seen, not the worst. It has some fun effects, and Donny makes priest flambé before it's over. You could argue it is a stirring indictment about how you mortals treat your children and how that perpetuates the cycle of violence, but I think your time might be better spent throwing it on when you have friends over and chatting during the slow moments.

Don't Go In The House streams on Amazon Prime. 

"They made him into a god. They probably thought the Geiger counter was his heart."

I can sense your desperation, mortals. You're looking for your next rush, your next taste of that which is weird, horrific, forbidden. I hear you cry out in the night for something disgusting, perhaps even morally reprehensible, to watch.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Slave of the Cannibal God.

This 1978 adventure tale by Italian filmmaker Sergio Martino is probably not the first cannibal movie, but it did beat the more famous Cannibal Holocaust to the punch by about two years, and I enjoyed it just as much. It might not be as nasty as Holocaust, but it does star Ursula Andress and Stacy Keach, and it's still pretty doggone nasty.

Andress plays Susan, whose husband has gone missing on an anthropological expedition in New Guinea. She and her brother go to the consulate only to be told the extent of her husband's research was illegal -- the government of New Guinea told him to stay out of that jungle, and no, they will not help find him. Susan's only hope is to hire Professor Edward Foster (Keach) another anthropologist who has a pretty good idea where Susan's husband went, because he's the guy who told him about it.

Foster himself had gotten lost and discovered an especially savage tribe called the Puka. They're not your run-of-the-mill, naked, indigenous people. They wear masks, paint their bodies white, and eat people. Their journey will be treacherous, and they are sure to witness many animals eating other animals. They will probably lose all their native guides along the way, but sure Foster will put together a search party. It must be the way Susan says, "I must find my husband," or maybe that she says it a hundred times.

They encounter big spiders, giant bats, and man-eating crocodiles. There's always some side drama involving the local fauna in this movie, including an especially gratuitous scene in which an enormous snake constricts and swallows a monkey. It's a revolting display of nature at its most cruel, worthy of narration by Sir David Attenborough, if only some stagehand hadn't pushed the monkey into the snake's mouth with a stick.

The search party enjoys a stay with a Christian missionary, and enjoy the drumming and hallucinogenic liquor of regurgitated berries of a friendlier tribe, but get kicked out because Susan's brother is a fornicator.

It isn't long before the expedition is whittled down to just the white people, and they are captured by the Puka. I don't want to spoil it any further, suffice it to say, the subsequent orgy of death and bestiality is pretty impressive.

The music by Guido and Maurizio De Angelis is great in the way most Italian horror soundtracks of the 1970s are great. There's this throbbing sound that whoop-whoomp-whoomps across the whole movie whenever anything scary happens. It sounds like an ultrasound machine.

Slave of the Cannibal God is action-packed, ethically questionable, and gross as all get-out. Animals were most assuredly harmed during making of this film. It streams on Amazon Prime. You can also find it on Shudder under the title Mountain of the Cannibal God.  It's also on YouTube.

"She eats unmarried young girls. It is the only time she can wear her wedding gown."

Boy, have I got a crazy-ass movie to tell you about this week.  I don't even think I can do it justice in describing it.

This week's Thursday Thriller is House.

Do not confuse this 1977 Nobohiko Obayashi film with the 1985 Steve Miner film House, which starred George Wendt, or its even more outlandish sequel House II: The Second Story starring John Ratzenberger. Also, it has nothing to do with the popular American TV series that ran from 2004-2012 and starred Hugh Laurie.

This movie attains a level of weirdness only the Japanese seem capable of.

Summer vacation is coming up for seven school girls who are all named for their most obvious personality feature. Melody (Eriko Tanaka) loves to play music; Fantasy (Kumiko Ohba) is always daydreaming; Kung Fu (Miki Jinbo) kicks ass, and so on. Six of them are going to stay with their teacher Mr. Togo (Kiyohiko Ozaki) at his sister's inn, while Gorgeous (Kimiko Ikegami) has plans to go on a trip with her father, a famous composer of film scores.

Daddy Kogarishi (Saho Sasazawa) has to ruin it by getting married. Gorgeous feels like her father is just trying to replace her mother. To be fair, when he introduces her, he says, "This is your new mother."

She refuses to travel with her mother and stepfather and catches up with her friends just as Mr. Togo announces he has to cancel their highly questionable itinerary. Instead, Gorgeous invites the gang to stay with her old spinster Auntie (Yoko Minamida).

Shortly after their arrival, the hungry girl Mac (Mieko Sato) goes missing. Then a severed head appears out of the well and bites Fantasy on the ass and vomits. No one believes her because she's Fantasy. Auntie is some kind of cannibal, but also the house is an extension of her as well or something. The piano eats Melody while she's playing, but her fingers hang around to dance on the keys. There is a fluffy white cat, and every time its eyes shimmer something crazy happens.

I won't spoil the third act, mostly because I hate to spoil movies, but at least partly because I'm not sure what the fuck I just watched. Kung Fu lives up to her nickname and kicks things. Blood splatters.

Stylistically, I would have to say the movie is like a live-action anime. It's balls-trippy and has a repetitive lullaby-like score. It has flashy moments that may trigger seizures, so epileptics beware.

House streams on FilmStruck.

"What's the matter, baby? Don't you like your daddy's conk?'

I bet you mortals thought I forgot about Black History Month, didn't you?

It's not so much I forgot, as much as I postponed it. Since January, I've been taking my movies in chronological order, and there weren't many good roles for black actors until 1968, and I've already reviewed Night of the Living Dead twice.

Even after that groundbreaking film and Duane Jones's stellar performance, it's not as if they started handing out lead roles to black people in horror movies. It wasn't until the success of movies like Shaft and Superfly helped usher in the blaxploitation trend that movies started appearing with mostly African-American casts. Such films usually fell into the action-thriller genre, but movies like Abby and Scream Blacula Scream did surface to fill the horror niche.

In belated honor of Black History Month, I would like to tell you about one other such movie.

This week's Thursday Thriller is JD's Revenge.

This 1976 Arthur Marks film stars Glynn Turman as Ike, a young urbanite who drives a cab in New Orleans to pay his way through law school. He has his head on straight, a bright future, and, at the risk of condescending the centuries of accomplishments of countless African Americans, he speaks well. Ike is mostly work, and except for the occasional pick-up game of football, little play.

His girlfriend Christella (Joan Pringle) insists they go out for a night on the town with friends, so they go down to Bourbon Street, take in a fantastically gratuitous strip show, and check out a hypnotist before capping the evening off with some dancing. The hypnotist's spell opens Ike up for possession by the ghost of JD Walker (David McKnight), a gangster whose rap sheet included running a numbers racket and selling beef on the black market. Walker was gunned down by Theotis Bliss (Fred Pinkard) in 1942. Louis Gossett Jr. plays Theotis's brother Elijah, an erstwhile hustler who worked his way into the ultimate con -- religion.

Ike's possession and transformation is a gradual one. It starts with headaches and flashbacks, psychedelic smash-cuts of chopping meat. He remembers finding his sister Betty Jo (Alice Jubert) dead, her throat slashed. He remembers Elijah, his brother-in-law discovering him crouched over her lifeless body, her blood on his hands. He remembers getting shot, but none of these things happened to Ike. His friends tell him it's just the stress of working and studying too hard, but then he finds himself drawn to an old fedora in a secondhand store.

He starts gambling, drinking and slapping Christella around. Under the influence of JD's spirit, he sleeps with Elijah's daughter, which, yes, would be JD's niece, so that's kind of weird.

The ending of this movie seemed a bit too tidy and hastily conceived for my liking, but the fun here is watching Turman play the role, changing before your eyes from a casually dressed student of the law to a vulgar, zoot-suited thug. It's like watching Jekyll turn into Hyde, or Barack Obama turn into Katt Williams.

JD's Revenge streams on YouTube.