"You ungodly warlock! Because of you this hotel and this town will be cursed forever!"

It's time to get excited, mortals. The Louisville Zombie Walk is only a month away.

At 8:29 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 25, I will unleash some 45,000 staggering, slobbering, rotten teeth-gnashing zombies onto Bardstown Road. We will convene as usual in front of Mid-City Mall.

If you're planning on doing battle against my legions of the damned, take heed: no guns will be allowed at the event -- not even replica weapons. Louisville Metro Police will take your gun if they see it.

What can I say? Insurance companies take the fun out of everything.

I did check with the organizers. They said Super Soakers would be fine.

Let's get in the mood.

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Beyond.

Lucio Fulci directed this 1981 film as the middle chapter of his Gates of Hell trilogy, which started with City of the Living Dead one year previously.

Apparently there are seven gates to Hell, but he only made movies about three of them. One of the gates is in the basement of a hotel in Louisiana. A lynch mob believes an artist named Schweick (Antoine Saint-John) opened it up in the 1920s, so they chain whip him to death for it. The chains tear the flesh right off his bones and it's the best chain whipping I've ever seen in film. Then they nail him to the basement wall and plaster him in.

In the present day, a New Yorker named Liza (Catriona MacColl) buys the hotel with the intent of fixing the place up, but accidents keep happening to her contractors. Joe the plumber (Giovanni De Nava) goes to see why the basement is flooded and gets his eye ripped out.

Then Liza picks up a blind hitchhiker Emily (Cinzia Monreale) and her German shepherd Dickie. Emily comes back to the hotel and warns Liza that the warlock is still there. She should know. She was there in the '20s when she still had her eyesight.

I could go on about the story, but it's pretty thin. You've got an old hotel that's haunted as fuck with zombies because there's a gateway to Hell in the basement. You don't watch Fulci for intricate story lines. You watch for the absurdly gory vignettes and this movie delivers.

While no single Fulci film is my favorite, each seems to have a scene that I love. Zombie (aka Zombi aka Zombi 2 aka Zombie Flesh Eaters) has the underwater undead versus shark scene. City of the Living Dead (aka The Gates of Hell) has the part where the lady vomits her guts up before turning. The Beyond has a few great moments.

The scene where a bottle of acid turns over on a lady's face and it dissolves and bubbles off is pretty cool.

Then there's the part where a bunch of tarantulas eating a guy's face off, bit by bit.

And then Dickie has a great moment that I would rather not spoil.

The Beyond is absolutely gross-tastic and a perfect film to get you in the mood for zombie cosplay in the streets. It streams on Shudder.

"Curtis? Are you dead?"

Hey mortals, hope you had a great Friday the 13th despite your limited viewing options for Jason movies. I see a lot of you made the best of it and checked out The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs on Shudder. I tuned in myself, but after two hours of waiting for the signal to load, I realized I was drunk on Miskatonic Revivers and still had some damned souls to torment.

The Internet connection in Hell isn't that great to begin with because we're actually stealing bandwidth from Limbo, where every one binge watches Pawn Stars reruns until the end of time, so at first I had no idea that the problem was that Shudder was not prepared for the success of its big promo.

I caught up the next day. It was good seeing Joe Bob again. I stole everything I know about film criticism from that guy.

In fact, I'm about to tell you about a movie I watched Joe Bob host 20 years ago on Monstervision, but because I'm still salty about the technical difficulties, it's not on Shudder.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Maximum Overdrive.

Stephen King himself directed this 1986 film. He explains his reasoning in his epically coked-out trailer.

The action takes place in Wilmington, N.C. It seems a comet is passing over the earth, leaving in its wake a wave of radiation that causes all the machines to become sentient and hostile towards humanity.

First, an ATM calls King an asshole. Then a drawbridge raises while a bunch of cars are still on it and you get to see several minutes of gloriously mindless wreckage. At the Dixie Boy truck stop, the gas pumps quit working until the grease monkey looks down the tube to see what the problem is and it sprays him in the eyes. An electric knife goes crazy on a waitress. And a truck driver playing an arcade game finds new meaning to the term "game over."

Then over at the little league field a Coke machine shoots a coach in the nuts and a steamroller runs over a kid. The scene cuts before we get to see an awesome head splatter that was edited out.

Emilio Estevez plays the heroic line cook. Pat Hingle, who also played Commissioner Gordon in 1989's Batman, portrays Hendershot, the truck stop owner. Yeardley Smith, best known as the voice of Lisa Simpson, plays a none-too-bright country bride, but the real star of the movie is a tractor-trailer with a giant Green Goblin head mounted on the grill.

The Green Goblin truck appears to be the leader of all the trucks who descend on the Dixie Boy and establish a reign of terror. And what is it the trucks want? You guessed it, gas! So they enslave the people to pump the gas for them.

Luckily, there's more to the Dixie Boy than meets the eye. It turns out Hendershot is a gun runner and has a basement full of rocket launchers.

With most movies, you see one guy blow up an evil truck with a rocket launcher, it's awesome and the movie ends. A lot of directors figure if you've seen it once, you've seen it, but not King. No fewer than three trucks meet their demise via rocket-propelled grenade. It's the gift that keeps on giving. Somehow it never gets old.

This movie is deliriously goofy, but despite its flaws, it's the best movie King ever directed. I guess he figured he did it right the first time because it's also the only movie he ever directed.

Still, it's hard to hate 90 minutes of wanton destruction, and the havoc isn't completely bereft of a philosophical viewpoint. The opening titles are accompanied by AC/DC's anthemic "Who Made Who?" because, like, who did make who? Did people make the machines or did the machines make the people, man?

A lot of cocaine was involved in the making of this film.

AC/DC provided the entirety of the all-rock soundtrack, except maybe the cheesy orchestral jabs that punctuate the scary bits.

Maximum Overdrive streams on Hulu, Amazon Prime and E-pix.

"Guys, it's OK. He just wanted his machete back."

Do you mortals want to hear about some bullshit?

Every Thursday the 12th, I try to review a Friday the 13th movie. It's been a problematic run because a lot of times, two weeks before the big day, whatever streaming service has the movies drops them, because the last thing they'd want to offer their viewers is movies they want to watch when they want to watch them.

I thought Starz might be different, because it carried the bulk of the series forever, but alas I was wrong.

I wanted to tell you this week about Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter.

It's a good one. It's got Crispin Glover in it as a geek who can't get laid, and Corey Feldman as Tommy, a young boy who keeps spying on the older kids while they're skinny dipping and having sex. More like Peeping Tommy.

And of course two weeks ago Starz dropped the whole franchise...

Except for one film.

We just have to make do and skip ahead a few chapters.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Jason X.

James Isaac directed this often maligned 2001 entry in the franchise.

A lot of Jason fans think this one is dumb, which I find odd because the series was at least five films past its prime by the time Jason X came out. How many times in a row can you tell the same story?

What distinguishes this one and no doubt fuels the ire of so many fans is it couldn't take place much further from good ole Camp Blood. Jason goes to space.

As the movie opens Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder) is hanging in chains at the Crystal Lake Research Facility, waiting to be cryogenically frozen, but then David Cronenberg shows up with a bunch of green berets and says he's there to transfer him to another lab because his proven ability to regenerate damaged tissue is too important to stick in the freezer and think about later.

Rowan (Alexa Doig), who is in charge of the cryostasis, tells Cronenberg this is a bad idea and is immediately proved right because Jason has already escaped from his chains and killed a security guard. He proceeds to kill all the green berets. Rowan fights Jason into the freezer, but he stabs her through the door, triggering an automated lockdown and the two are frozen for 500 years.

In that time, the earth became uninhabitable and humans fled for another planet. Still, college students from Earth 2 come back from time to time for archaeological studies. One such class finds Jason and Rowan and decides to take them on board their ship.

Jason is so lethal he cuts one kid's arm off just falling out of the freezer.  Luckily for the dreadlocked, stoner doofus Azrael (Dov Tiefenbach) nanotechnology is advanced enough by then to regenerate him a new arm once he's back on board the ship. This technology helps Jason out later on when his head gets blown up and he regenerates looking like a knockoff Terminator.

Also on board the ship is a bevy of midriff-baring space babes, who are just as horny as the kids back at Camp Crystal Lake. Some things never change. Even the android Kay-Em 14 is looking to get some.

Essentially, this movie is just Alien with Jason in the place of the xenomorph. The ridiculous premise allows for more comedic exploration of the killer than a lot of fans might be happy about, but I'd hardly call it a total loss. It's got a couple of my favorite kills -- one involving a vat of liquid nitrogen and the other occuring in a moment of self parody aboard the ship's Star Trek-style holodeck.

Give it a try. It might be as bad as everyone says, but you'll never know unless you take a chance.

Jason X streams on Starz.

"Make sacrifice unto Him! Bring Him the blood of the outlanders!"

Time keeps slipping by, mortals. Soon it will be time for the undead to overtake the streets of Louisville again, and it has been one crazy week.

Dr. Frankenstein had an experiment go awry and now he's in the burn unit, which is difficult because he was supposed to host the all-monsters pool party later this month and no one wants to ask if his skin grafts will be healed up enough for him to keep the date.

Maybe I'll just throw the little demons in the van and take them to see a volcano instead.

Speaking of summer fun, this week's Thursday Thriller is Children of the Corn.

Fritz Kiersch directed this 1984 adaptation of a Stephen King short story.

Burt and Vicky (Peter Horton and Linda Hamilton) are a happy young couple on a cross country drive through Nebraska. They decide it might be fun to take the back roads instead of the interstate. Instead of adventure they find corn, miles of it, and angry Christian radio.

Their vacation turns to the stuff of nightmares when they get lost, and while checking the map, run over a kid who was standing in the middle of the highway. Turns out the kid had his throat slashed right before he wound up in the road, so they didn't kill him, but they're determined to find help anyway. Burt is compelled to do the right thing in the face of all common sense.

You know what they say. No good deed goes unpunished.

Instead of help, they find a town full of children who murdered all the adults one Sunday after church by poisoning the coffee at the diner, then cutting them up with knives and cleavers. One old guy gets his fingers cut off in the ham slicer.

What motivated these ghastly crimes? Were the children seeking retribution because the adults named them all after Old Testament characters? That might have been part of it, but the official reason is that they've been listening to Isaac, who brought them a message from  a new deity called He Who Walks Behind The Rows.

They also crucified a police officer and refer to his corpse as The Blue Man.

John Franklin plays Isaac, the prophet and the spiritual leader of the child cult. He steals the show because he's awfully sinister and fluidly verbose for a 12-year-old. That's because he's not 12. Franklin has Growth Hormone Deficiency. He was actually 24 years old when the film was made. Isaac's enforcer is an equally sinister ginger kid named Malachi, played by Courtney Gains.

It's a decent flick, not especially bloody. As Stephen King adaptations go, it's not exactly The Shining or Carrie, but it's as good as Cujo or The Dead Zone.

Children of the Corn streams on Netflix and Hulu.