"Welcome to this world. I am your master."

Greetings mortals, I trust everyone had a good time at the Louisville Zombie Walk. It certainly was nice to unleash all those zombies and free up some space down here. Now the real work can begin, whipping my most evil souls into shape to scare the hell out of you at The Devil's Attic.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Ghoulies.

This 1984 puppet show was directed by Charles Band. The mid-1980s were a special time for slimy puppets. Gremlins also came out in 1984. You had Critters in '86. When a half-alien slime puppet was born on V: The Final Battle, it was all kids could talk about in the playground the next day. Somewhere in there a toy called Boglins hit the department store shelves and mothers everywhere were all kinds of out of sorts.

But Ghoulies stood out because it made children afraid to go to the toilet.

Peter Liapis plays Jonathan, a young guy who never knew his father, but has inherited the spooky, old mansion and moves in with his girlfriend Rebecca (Lisa Pelikan). There's not much to do in the secluded estate except study dad's black magic books so Rebecca suggests they throw a party with their weird, high, horny friends from the city. As weird, high and horny as everyone is, somehow the party loses steam, Jonathan decides to liven things up by conjuring an entity.

Nothing really happens. Everybody goes home. Jonathan decides to practice until he conjures up three little slime puppet demons, but Rebecca thinks he's gotten too far involved in the black magic and leaves, so he summons some little people demons to get her back. By this point his eyes are glowing green, so they decide to have a dinner party where everyone wears novelty sunglasses, and the slime puppets and little people kill everybody.

It's an OK movie, fun if you need a fix of '80s nostalgia.

Ghoulies streams on Starz.

"If I had a box of bad things, I'd put you in it and close the lid."

Having a Hell of a week, mortals. Louisville Zombie Walk, where I will unleash around 45,000 undead onto Bardstown Road is Saturday. I will see you in front of Mid-City Mall around 8:30 p.m. Come be creepy and dead while you listen to live music and have a few drinks with dead friends. Bring the kids if you like. It's a good time.

While I was in the middle of getting that together, who should drop by, but my old buddy Plague?

Don't get me wrong. I love Plague. He means well, but there's a limit, you know. He gets to going on about how diseases can mutate until human science has no idea what to do about it, and it's hilarious for the first five minutes, but after that you're like, "I get it, man. Can you please take your hemorrhaging lesions elsewhere? You're getting pus all over everything."

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Girl With All the Gifts.

This 2016 Colm McCarthy film is built on a premise that there's a fungus that causes the zombie disease and it hast spread all over the world. There are first generation zombies, the mindless, flesh-craving automatons we all know and love, but there are a second generation, who have minds of their own and do well in school, but wear red sweatsuits and have to be strapped down when they go to class because they still have the hunger.

Now I'm going to go ahead and cut you hair-splitters off at the pass. You're going to say, "they can run and use weapons, they're not zombies. They have rage, like in 28 Days Later. This is my point about mutation. Monsters, diseases -- they mutate, okay. This is an obvious mutation on zombieism. Shut up. You're boring. Listen a minute.

First off, smart kid zombies are super creepy.

Secondly, Dr. Glenn Close, looking more like erstwhile co-star Michael Douglas than ever, hopes to use these children to extract a vaccine against zombiesm. She likes to keep them sharp by bothering them with Schrodinger's Cat puzzles right before they go to bed.

Sennie Nanua shines in her role as Melanie, the title character who tries to help guide her humans to safety after zombies crashed the gates of their home research compound. She's a thoughtful and lovable young girl, and yet also a cannibal monster.  There's a great scene when she fights off a bunch of other zombie children who aren't as bright. It's a real tearjerker.

I can't really tell you what happens beyond that. Partly because I don't want to spoil it, but mostly because Plague started coughing and sneezing and diarrheaing all over the throne room and it was very distracting. I'm going to give it another spin, though, as soon as I have a quiet minute.

The Girl With All The Gifts streams on Amazon Prime.

"It's Satan's arm. It's a long story."

I'm so excited, mortals. The Louisville Zombie Walk is just a shade over a week away, this is my 150th review, and I've got a very special zombie movie to put you in the mood, so let's get straight to it.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead.

You remember the first Dead Snow, right? It was that 2009 Norwegian homage to horrors past, especially Evil Dead, where the Nazi zombies kill a bunch of young folks on a skiing trip who found the accursed Nazi gold. The blood and guts really flew in that one, remember?

Well, Dead Snow 2 picks up right where the first one left off.

If you recall, Martin (Vegar Hoel) had to chainsaw his arm off in true Evil Dead fashion. The last survivor, he flees the Nazis in a car, but the zombie leader Herzog (Orjan Gamst) hangs on to the side and snatches and grabs at Martin, desperate to get that last gold coin. Martin uses an oncoming tractor-trailer to peel Herzog off, but the zombie's arm, torn from its body, plops into the passenger seat.  Martin discards the last coin, passes out and crashes.

He awakens in the hospital, the chief suspect in his friends' murders. It seems the medics were confused about whose arm was still in the car and a surgeon has attached Herzog's arm to Martin's body.

Martin has trouble controlling the arm at first. It helps him escape from the hospital, but it murders a child in the process. It also kills a police officer by using the hood ornament off a Mercedes as a shuriken.  Martin notifies a group of American experts called The Zombie Squad about the Nazis.

Meanwhile, the Nazis are still on a killing spree. They remember they had a mission to destroy a town that they hadn't completed. Hitler himself had given the order.

The Nazi zombies kill everyone in sight for pretty much the whole movie. They don't their guns, so they have to use knives, hammers, hatchets, everything but the kitchen sink. The bathroom sink is another story.

They raid a World War II museum, tear a bus full of tourists to pieces and use one's intestines as a siphon to fill up the old tank parked outside.

As Martin gains more control over the zombie arm, he finds he can punch so hard it makes someone's heads explode. It can also raise the dead and bind the zombie to him as his slave. The Zombie Squad leader Daniel (Martin Starr) pursuades him he has to go raise an army of dead Russian soldiers buried nearby to defeat the Nazi scourge.

Should you watch this 2014 action/comedy splatter fest by director Tommy Wirkola?

To quote Martin when the army of Russian undead rise from their graves and call him master: "Fuck yeah!"

Dead Snow 2 streams in English on Amazon Prime.

"I don't want that dog messing with her. Anybody humps her leg, it's me."

What does it mean to be a man? The question has plagued teenage boys from time immemorial. Do you have to smoke cigarettes and drink beer? Do you have to shoot guns? Do you have to bench press a lot? Do you have to be captain of the football team? Maybe you just have to get a lot of pussy on the reggie.

I bring this up because the Louisville Zombie Walk is later this month and I've been watching a ton of zombie movies. I've seen gory, gross-out zombie movies. I've seen quirky, funny zombie movies. Sometimes they're packed with action. Often they're tales of survival that some viewers take as parables about disaster preparedness.

Yes, we all know at least one person who stockpiles ammunition and canned goods for the Armageddon of the undead, but the movie I want to tell you about is more of a cautionary tale about where you stick your dick and it's the most fucked up movie I've seen in a while.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Deadgirl.

Toxic masculinity is a central theme in this 2008 film about Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez) and JT (Noah Segan) two misfit teen-age boys who, during an afternoon of quaffing some brews and vandalizing an abandoned mental institution (you know, bro stuff) find a zombie girl chained to a table. JT can't pass up the opportunity to have sex that isn't quite consensual, but who's she gonna tell, right? Because it's the manly thing to do.

What could go wrong? Only a million things that you should probably expect during intercourse with a zombie. What if she gets loose? What if she bites you? What if you're too rough and her dead tissue doesn't heal back? What if she develops pus-filled, infected lesions on her abdomen?

The script by Trent Haaga leaves few if any such questions unexplored.

If it's not weird enough that JT starts routinely fucking the dead girl, he starts pimping her out to their dumb friend Wheeler (Eric Podnar). Rickie wants no part of JT's sick nonsense. He's too busy pining after Joann (Candice Accola), a redhead he went steady with in fourth grade or something. Joann is a cheerleader now and dating Johnny (Andrew DiPalma), a big, dumb jock who likes to rough Rickie up for looking at his girl.

In Rickie's defense, she is cuter than a whole bucket of baby toes. As the competition for Joann's affection heats up and the violence escalates between Rickie and Johnny, JT's personality takes on more dominant, alpha-type traits. He's King Hustler of the necrophiliac dungeon and he wields his authority with merciless abandon.

The cast delivers believable, sometimes funny, sometimes sad performances, but Segan is outstanding as JT as he struts around spewing villain monologues. Also, it's easy to hope that Rickie and Joann wind up together, no matter how much JT and Wheeler tell him it's never going to happen.

Deadgirl is the most beautifully disturbing zombie movie I've ever seen. It was directed by Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel and it streams on Shudder.

"Let the hunt begin!"

About a week ago, a guy who says rapey things on Twitter brought it to Disney's attention that 10 years ago director James Gunn said some rapey things on Twitter. Disney summarily fired Gunn from the next installment of Guardians of the Galaxy.

I'm sitting here thinking, nevermind Gunn's tweets. Did Disney read his resume?

Gunn started his show business career as a writer for the notoriously tasteless Troma Entertainment, where he penned the notoriously tasteless films Tromeo and Juliet and Terror Firmer. He's written and directed disturbingly dark comedies such as Super, as well as a segment for the gross-out sketch film Movie 43.

And I loved every one of them. If you ask me, he made better movies when he wrote horrible tweets.

Since we're perusing his back catalog, and getting geared up for the Louisville Zombie Walk on Aug. 25, I've got the perfect movie to talk about.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Slither.

This 2006 comedy is a contemporary take on the alien invasion films of the 1950s.

A meteor carrying an alien life form crashes just outside a small town like you might expect, but with updated special effects, it looks awesome.

Michael Rooker plays Grant Grant, a shitkicker who can't help but poke the alien with a stick, because that's what shitkickers do in these movies. It's like the shitkicker's biological imperative. The alien shoots a barb into his chest, the first step of its biological imperative.

Grant begins to act strangely, compulsively. He begins to hoard meat. He hides it from his too-hot-for-him wife Starla (Elizabeth Banks). He grows tendrils out of his chest. He decides he loves Starla too much to use them on her, so he sneaks out and uses them to impregnate another woman Brenda (Brenda James). The tendrils puncture Brenda's stomach and pumps her full of something disgusting. He then secrets Brenda away in the woods and feeds her raw, shredded animals.

Nathan Fillion plays the understated wise-acre police chief Bill Pardy, who also happens to have been Starla's high school sweetheart. He is tasked with leading the investigation into Brenda's disappearance. When he and his officers catch up to Grant, Grant has started to mutate something awful. When officers find Brenda, she has swollen to a barn-sized boulder of flesh that bursts open to release millions of slug like creatures who like to crawl in people's mouths, and turn them into hive-minded zombies.

It's all quite gross, bloody fun. Practical and computer-generated effects are well-integrated in bringing out all the gory details, but the slugs look a little fake.

Slither streams on Starz.