"Long live the new flesh!"

If you've read this blog before you already know how it works: every week I seek out the weirdest, grossest and most perverted movie that streams online and tell you about it so you can enjoy it in the comfort and convenience of your own home. It's become more of an obsession than a pastime for me, but I've got nothing on the main character in the movie I've got for you this week.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Videodrome.

David Cronenberg directed this gory, balls-trippy, psychosexual suspense-thriller in 1983, the same year he directed The Dead Zone. James Woods plays Max Renn, the executive of a small, independent cable channel that specializes in sex and violence. He's looking for the next big, sleazy thing. He employs a video pirate named Harlan (Peter Dvorsky), who finds him a show called Videodrome, which is a single, unedited, hour-long shot of someone being tortured to death. He wants to track down the people who make the show so he can play it on his station.

The best part? The show gives you a brain tumor that causes hallucinations.  One night in an especially paranoid state, Renn sits up late watching videos with his gun, and a big vertical slit opens up in his belly. If you said it reminds you of a vagina, no one would say you're terribly off-base. Renn sticks his pistol in there.

Debbie Harry from Blondie plays Nicki Brand, a radio host who helps troubled callers. She's also a masochist. After meeting Max on a local TV talk show, they go out, they go back to his place. They watch Videodrome. She's into it. She wants to go audition. He tells her to stay away.

After that it gets really twisty, a little tough to follow, and even tougher to summarize. It is one weird flick -- weirder than The Dead Zone, weirder even than Scanners.  It's never clear if the action is really happening or all part of Max's hallucinations. The line between what's real and what's TV and what's in Max's head gets a lot fuzzy and that's deliberate -- part of some grander statement about our relationship with television or pornography or something. I'll let you write your own dissertation and tell you that Videodrome streams on Starz.

"It takes a lot of love for a person to do this. You know you want it. You'll like it."

Let's not beat around the bush this week.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Slumber Party Massacre.

I'm getting straight to the point because that's exactly what this film from 1982 does. It was produced by Roger Corman, and it features a lot of boobs and murder. It's about a girl named Trish (Michele Michaels) whose parents go out of town for the weekend, so she has a few friends over to drink beer and smoke dope. As luck would have it a homicidal pervert named Russ Thorn (Michael Villela) just escaped and he kills off most of the barely dressed, nubile beauties with a power drill. The bit is about two feet long. The symbolism isn't exactly subtle.

The whole affair might sound a bit sexist until you consider a woman named Rita Mae Brown wrote it, initially as a parody of slasher films, and a woman named Amy Holden Jones directed it, steering it    back toward the serious. The result is a satisfying slasher flick with a lot of funny moments. And boobs. Did I mention the boobs?

What I like about it is the action keeps moving. You know how slasher films sometimes get bogged down in building a psychological profile of the killer, often dealing with some childhood trauma and a lot of tedious flashbacks? Not the case here. All you need to know about Russ Thorn is that he's an escaped killer. There's not even an explanation where his drill is plugged in, because that would be boring. It clocks out at a lean 77 minutes.

The focus is instead on the killer's intended victims, who receive a fair amount of character development, especially the new girl in school Valerie (Robin Stille), who, instead of attending the party, stays home across the street with her Playgirl-reading little sister Courtney (Jennifer Meyers).

Slumber Party Massacre is full of misdirections, pop scares, funny moments, scary moments, gory moments, and girls showering. It delivers exactly what the title promises and doesn't try to be anything else. It streams on YouTube.

"Strange things have been going on at the hospital. Pieces of corpses have been disappearing."

I don't do it often in the summertime, but this past weekend I manifested myself in the flesh on earth to check in on a fat mortal I know.

I said to him, "Whoa, are you less fat than you used to be?"

He started telling me how he's been on the Kito diet.

I was momentarily impressed by his candor and grim determination.

I said, "You're just telling everybody about this?"

He said, "Why not? I'm proud of the results I've gotten just by switching bread for bacon."

Then I realized he meant the keto diet, not the Kito diet.

You see, they're two very different things. The Kito diet involves eating raw human hearts, entrails, and all the eyeballs you can pluck.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Zombie Holocaust.

This 1980 film was directed by Marino Girolami.

Alexandra Delli Colli plays Lori Ridgeway, who works at a university hospital assisting a surgeon in training medical students. In her free time, she helps an anthropology professor with his research. She also wears nice underwear, we learn as we watch her change clothes a couple of times.

Someone at the hospital keeps cutting parts off the training cadavers. They don't call the police because, as the surgeon explains, "a police investigation would give us a bad name."

Then, they catch an orderly trying to eat a heart out of one of the cadavers. Rather than hang around and ask questions, he throws himself out the window. They find a tattoo on his chest -- the sign of Kito. It matches a symbol on a sacrificial dagger Lori has hanging on the wall of her apartment, except when she gets home, the place has been ransacked, the dagger stolen.

Call the police now? Nah. Instead they organize an expedition to the Asiatic island of Kito to get to the bottom of things. Dr. Peter Chandler (Ian McCulloch) leads the excursion and invites Lori to tag along. Reporter Susan Kelly (Sherry Buchanan) joins them, and so do some other people who don't live long enough for me to bother learning their names.

They stop for a rest at the home of Dr. Obrero (Donald O'Brien), who lives on an island near their destination. He assists them by providing them with guides and giving them directions. While the party is having drinks and delivering exposition, Lori retires to her room, gets undressed and finds a rotten, severed head in her bed, along with the mark of Kito painted on her sheets in blood. Obrero tells Lori to calm down.

The next day, their boat has engine trouble and they decide to pull over to another island where they find cannibals, zombies, zombie cannibals and the mark of Kito everywhere. Numerous minor characters get impaled on bamboo and guts torn out and eaten by naked savages.

In my favorite scene, Chandler and Lori try to escape on a raft, but can't get the motor started. A zombie closes in on them, the motor starts, but there's no time to hop in the boat, so Chandler uses the propeller to chop the zombie's skull into little bits.

There are plenty of Italian zombie movies, and plenty of Italian cannibal movies, all of which are disgusting gore fests, but this one is special because it's got both zombies and cannibals. The outboard motor sequence is one of a kind.

The musical accompaniment to the scenes of horrific violence sometimes sounds like it would fit better in a video game, but IMDb trivia says it's actually the music to Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals. The zombie makeups aren't the best, but the flow of gore makes up for it.

Zombie Holocaust streams on Shudder.

"You're supposed to be reputable scientists! Not two dorm kids freaking on Mexican mushrooms!"

If there's one signifying feature of mortal human consciousness, it's nagging questions. What is the nature of God? The self? What is memory if not energy? What do you do when you've drunk some madness tea with some shirtless natives and a monitor lizard turns into your wife?

This week's Thursday Thrillers is Altered States.

This modern, balls-trippy take on Jekyll and Hyde feels like it should have been directed by David Cronenberg. It would fit right in there with Scanners, The Fly and Rabid, but this 1980 film was, in fact, directed by Ken Russell, who, according to IMDb trivia, was drunk throughout its troubled production.

William Hurt plays Eddie Jessup, a research scientist who's gotten a little too hung up on New Age ideas about the self, and goes looking for the spark of human consciousness or something. He spends a lot of time in a sensory deprivation tank. He gets out long enough to visit with some indigenous people and Carlos Castenada-style, samples the local hallucinogenic brew, artisan ally fortified with a dash of Jessup's own blood.

Jessup brings the tea back to the university, where he explains to his boss he'd like to intensify the effects of the tank and the tea by using them together. His boss justifiably flips shit. Imagine telling your boss you'd get better results if you were tripping.

His wife Emily (Blair Brown) isn't too happy with him either. She worries that his newfound hobby of getting high, turning into the missing link, breaking into the zoo and killing sheep might be doing irreversible damage to his chromosomes.

I liked this one a lot. It's one for the art house.

Altered States streams on FilmStruck.