"I command you, Prince of Evil, heed my call. Give life to the instruments of my retribution."

I'm going to go on record here and say bullying does not cause school shootings.

There may be a correlation between bullying and taking an interest in Satanism and personal computing, but no causal connection has yet been proved.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Evilspeak.

This 1981 William Asher film opens with one of the most beautiful ritual sacrifice sequences I've ever seen. It's set on a beach and the waves crash against the rocks. Then, just as the virgin's head comes off we cut to present day 1981, when young Stanley Coopersmith (Clint Howard) makes an error that loses his team the soccer game. 

Coopersmith is an orphan attending West Andover Military Academy, and his teammates, coach, teachers, the chaplain and the colonel all hate him. Even the colonel's sexy secretary seems to have it in for the guy. There aren't a lot of scenes in which Coopersmith isn't being bullied by his peers or unfairly punished by an authority figure.

One day his punishment is to clean out the chapel's basement. There, he finds some cool Satanic paraphernalia buried in the wall. He hangs on to a particular, leather-bound book written in Latin, and develops an interest in conducting a black mass. 

Later, he leaves the book in the colonel's office, and the secretary lies right to his face when he comes back to ask for it. 

Without the book, how is he to overcome his struggles and find peace and happiness in Yours Truly? No need to panic, he can look everything up on a computer.

Now, we're talking about a 1981 computer that a student might use at a prestigious Christian military academy built on the desecrated grounds of centuries-past Satanic rituals. He's working with a computer that can't really do anything, until you accept that it is also a computer in a movie in 1981, so it can do everything, especially when it's possessed.

Coopersmith's torments keep piling up and everybody just keeps pushing and pushing him and pushing him, and the cafeteria chef gives him a puppy, and everybody just keeps pushing him some more. 

Something's gotta give, right? Boy, does it ever. I usually try not to say too much about the third act because I hate to spoil anything, but it is too highly satisfying to not talk about. I'll keep it vague by reducing what I liked about it to a haiku:

   Decapitations

   Killer pigs in catacombs

   The chapel burns 

Nothing spoiled? Good! I will let slip though that the fun really starts when you see the nail fly out of the Jesus statue's hand and bury itself in the chaplain's forehead. 

It's a good movie. 

Evilspeak streams on Amazon Prime and YouTube.

"Why don't you shave me, you hot, sweet, little bitch?"

What makes a good movie? Conventional wisdom would suggest it takes a good story, a good script, good actors, good lighting, photography, and so on. It takes a lot of planning and that plan has to be executed perfectly. A lot has to go right for you to enjoy a good movie.

But to make a fucked-up movie? That takes something so much more special -- a blend of madness, ingenuity, grit and happenstance.

I prefer fucked-up movies, because they challenge the viewer to address the great existential questions like, "What the fuck am I watching?" and "Why the fuck am I still watching this?"

This isn't to suggest that good and fucked-up are mutually exclusive attributes. There are scores of good, even great, fucked-up movies. Nobuhiko Obayashi's House or David Lynch's Eraserhead come to mind. But the movie I want to tell you about doesn't quite achieve that same art-house status.

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Witch Who Came from the Sea.

This 1976 Matt Cimber film may come up short on plot but is long on weirdness. It stars Millie Perkins as Molly, a deeply troubled cocktail waitress who likes to take her nephews to the beach and spin her delusional yarns about their grandfather and how he was a sea captain, a perfect gentleman. He never returned from his last voyage.

Meanwhile, she notices some body builders and the conspicuous bulges in their swimsuits. She begins to entertain fantasies about them having violent deaths.

Molly loves to watch TV and develops obsessions with football players and actors in razor commercials. She compares them to her father, but when her sister Cathy (Vanessa Brown) reminds her that Dad wasn't a great sea captain, but rather a drunk and a child molester, Molly races to the liquor cabinet for a swig. She escapes into a fantasy of seducing two football players, smoking them out, tying them down, and slashing their legs to ribbons with a razor.

But was it a fantasy? The next morning after sleeping with her boss Long John (Lonny Chapman), the TV news reports that the football players have been murdered.


The Witch Who Came from the Sea is a trippy, bloody mess of a film with significant screen time devoted to Molly's naked body and a lot of sleepy stretches between the violent bits. It's a decent early slasher that might make for a good party movie or bedtime story. It streams on Shudder and Amazon Prime.

"Oh, why don't you go find a wall socket and stick your tongue in it? That'll give you a charge!"

Margot Kidder died a few days ago. Most of you mortals will forever remember her as Lois Lane in the Superman movies of the 1970s and 80s, but before she was typecast in that role, she was in horror films. She starred in Brian de Palma's Sisters in 1972 and in The Amityville Horror in 1979, but there was one in between I'd like to talk about.

This week's Thursday Thrillers is Black Christmas.

Bob Clark directed this 1974 holiday slasher classic about some gals staying at their sorority house over Christmas break. They regularly receive obscene phone calls and they think it's no big deal at first, but then Clare (Lynne Griffin) goes missing. Her dad comes to pick her up but she's nowhere to be found because no one checks the attic to see if there are any corpses with plastic bags wrapped around their heads. Jess (Olivia Hussey) has been arguing with her temperamental musician boyfriend Peter (Keir Dullea) because he wants to drop out of the conservatory and get married and Jess just wants to have an abortion.

The missing girl, the obscene calls, the angry boyfriend -- Lt. Ken Fuller (John Saxon) thinks it may all be connected.

There are some good performances in this film, but Kidder really shines as Barb, the quick-witted, always drunk, chain-smoking sorority sister with the dirty mind and the sardonic sense of humor.
when she talks to the heavy breather, she really lets him have it.

Second City alum Andrea Martin is in it, too, though they gave Kidder all the funny lines.

Black Christmas is a bloody suspense thriller that helped lay the groundwork for later slasher greats like Halloween. Billy the obscene caller's voice will give you goosebumps. You may not be able to guess who he is, but you probably already know where his calls are coming from.

Black Christmas streams on Shudder.

"We should never try to deny the beast -- the animal within us."

Did you ever hear a movie was really good, so you give it a try, and get bored somewhere in the first ten minutes and give up on it? Then maybe a few years later and you try it again, only to find yourself unable to stay awake beyond the same scenes that bored you the first time. Then, for some reason or other, you decide to give it one last chance and you have to ask yourself, "What the fuck was my problem?"

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Howling.

I've held a completely unfounded grudge against this 1981 Joe Dante film for 37 years because I had no patience to give a damn what TV reporter Karen White (Dee Wallace) was doing in that phone booth, which is weird because her mission wasn't boring at all. White had been receiving phone calls from a notorious serial killer named Eddie (Robert Picardo). She had agreed to meet with him in the seedier part of New York City. At the same time, she was wearing a transmitter so the viewers at home could listen live as she interviewed a murderer then handed him over to the police, but the transmitter went dead moments before Eddie called her in the telephone booth and told her to meet him at the peep shows. The police lose her trail and she is alone with a killer in a peep show booth and he likes to watch roughies, apparently. When he shows her his face, the horror is so traumatizing she can't remember a thing about the encounter to explain later on the air.

Great opener. Did I have the volume down too low or something? Why was I so mad at this movie?

Karen goes to see her psychiatrist Dr. George Waggner (Patrick Macnee) and he suggests she take a vacation at The Colony, a laid-back rustic resort where Waggner's patients can relax, socialize and be treated. Karen brings her husband Bill (Christopher Stone), who later gets bitten and seduced by a sexy lady werewolf named Marsha (Elisabeth Brooks).

The story is fine. The acting is fine. Dante keeps the action moving at an acceptable pace. Pino Donaggio did the music. The special werewolf effects by Rob Bottin were second only to Rick Baker's work on An American Werewolf in London that same year. I've said before that An American Werewolf in London has the best werewolf transformation scene of all time, and I stand by that, but The Howling has two people turning into werewolves while having sex, and that counts for a lot.

Whatever had my panties in a twist before, I'm now over. The Howling is a great werewolf movie for adults. It streams on Shudder.

"You bastards! Why are you torturing me like this? Why?"

It's been much ado in the blogosphere this week about Ash vs. Evil Dead, to be sure. Seems like Netflix only just picked up the first two seasons, then Start announced they're dropping the show at the end of season 3. Some folks fired up petitions to have Netflix produce season 4, 5, and so on until the end of time, but then Bruce Campbell announced he was retiring as Ash, then some suggested they could continue the series with its other characters, like Pablo and Kelly, but especially Kelly, then some told those people they're stupid because Evil Dead is about Ash and the remake sucked, but then some said they wouldn't toss Kelly our of bed for eating crackers, and everyone with sense and good taste was grossed out by the sexist comments, but luckily there aren't many folks with sense and good taste commenting in horror groups on Facebook.

I must say it's been a welcome change from hearing people bitch about the It remake. 

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Evil Dead. 

Do you really need me to tell you what it's about? Brah, you haven't seen Evil Dead? What do you mean, brah? It's The Evil Fucken' Dead! You're joking, right? Everybody's seen Evil Dead! Brah!

Alright, I'll let you in on it, but only because I love you, brah.

Sam Raimi directed this 1981 film about 5 young adults who trek out to the woods to spend a weekend in and abandoned cabin. In the cellar, they find a weird, old book, a reel-to-reel tape recorder and a big, scary dagger. They play the tape and listen to the notes of an anthropologist who had been translating the Necronomicon Ex Mortis, the book of the dead. It actually translates to book of the dead of the dead, if you want to split hairs, but why would you want to do that, considering that's two different languages? Sounds scary, anyway, right?

The recorded incantations awaken evil spirits in the woods and soon Cheryl (Ellen Sandweiss) gets raped by vines. Soon, she is possessed by a highly communicable demonic madness that can only be cured by total bodily dismemberment or a stab with the dagger. Campbell plays Ash, who I talked about earlier, and is Cheryl's brother.

Evil Dead is a fiercely original film, which is odd considering it wears all its influences on its sleeve. It's like a great mash-up of Night of the Living Dead, The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Friday the 13th, heavily seasoned with the Italian spice of a Fulcian vomit-fest. It stands out among other low-budget genre fare of its day with its fast-paced action, slapstick humor and ingenuity in camera work and sound effects. The sum is greater than or equal to its parts. It's a true classic. If you haven't seen it, it's time, and if you have, it's time to see it again.

The Evil Dead streams on Shudder.