"Guys, 911 isn't supposed to have an answering machine."

Rejoice, mortals, for I bring glad tidings. Christmas is finally over. I hope each and every one of you found the holiday was worth the torture you put yourselves through. You're almost out of the woods with this holiday garbage and the last one just involves getting hammered and waking up in a new year.

So let's ring in 2019 with a movie you're not going to remember anyway.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Antisocial.

Cody Calahan directed this highly forgettable film from 2013. It's one of a handful of horror films set on New Year's Eve. Five friends gather in a house for a party while subliminal messages designed to make social media more addictive mutate into a virus that infects people all over the world and gives them black, worm-like tumors in their brains. The tumors turn people into raging, homicidal maniacs. The only treatment is to drill into the skull and extract the tumor, which the last surviving characters learn how to do, obviously, by means of a DIY video on the internet.

Sounds great, but this one just didn't grab me. I can't put my finger on why. Maybe it's because you don't actually see very many raging, homicidal maniacs. Maybe it takes too long to get to the drilling. Maybe it's because there's something dodgy going on with the sound mix so you have to crank the volume to make the cast barely audible.

Who's in it? Who cares? I was busy checking my social media.

Antisocial streams on Amazon Prime.

"He was a pervert and a drug addict and somebody killed him. Isn't that the spirit of Christmas?"

Don't despair, mortals. You've almost made it. It's the last Thursday before Christmas. By this time next week, you'll be planning on getting drunk with your friends for New Year's. Now that's a real holiday.

You've still got some hurtles to overcome before you can declare Yuletide over, however. For example, you've got to check out this movie. 

This week's Thursday Thriller is Elves.

This 1989 film was directed by Jeffrey Mendel. Dan "Grizzly Adams" Haggerty stars as Mike McGavin, an alcoholic ex-detective who takes a job as a department store Santa after the first Santa was stabbed in the dick to death by the title characters.

See, this girl Kirsten (Julie Austin), who also works at the department store, accidentally raised the elves while trying to cast a spell with her friends in the woods where she's not supposed to go, using one of her grandfather's books, which she's not supposed to look at.

The elves follow Kirsten around because they're supposed to impregnate her at midnight on Christmas Eve so she'll give birth to the Master Race.

Or something.

Speaking of things Kirsten isn't supposed to do, she also lets her friends into the department store after hours so they can camp out with some boys and have an all-night fuck party. It turns out Mike is also sleeping at the department store because he's homeless and there are Nazis trying to track Kirsten down since the elves surfaced.

After a shootout with the Nazis and elves in the department store the police chief tells Mike he's implicated in the deaths of Kirsten's friends. He gives Mike the old 24 hours to clear his good name. He has to solve the mystery of the elves.

Is it a good movie?

Mortals, I'll be honest. It's a mess, but a fun mess. I've tried to watch it five times and haven't yet made it all the way through. It's got some great moments, funny bits of dialogue and a couple big surprises, though. I recommend it as a bedtime story or perhaps a party movie.

Elves streams on YouTube. 

"I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass... and I'm all out of bubble gum."

Boy oh boy, did Death ever bring me a huge present just before my deadline last week! It was a truly thoughtful gift, exactly what I wanted.

I am of course speaking of George Herbert Walker Bush.

It shouldn't have been a surprise. He was old and in poor health, and I get to keep just about all the politicians, but it's always a special day when I receive a warmongering U.S. president.

Just looking at him, watching his flesh bubble and dissolve in the flickering light of a blue, sulfur flame makes me nostalgic for the 1980s. They were simpler times.

Corporate downsizing, the widening gap between rich and poor, and climate change were just becoming a part of the national conversation, but in 1988 the elder Bush rode a wave of mud-slinging, race-baiting, negative ads to the White House.

And it's no coincidence that same year John Carpenter released one of my favorite movies.

This week's Thursday Thriller is They Live.

On its surface, They Live might look like another sci-fi/action flick about a mullet-headed tough guy whipping alien ass, but if you pay attention it's a chilling satire about Reaganomics. Carpenter has said as recently as October that the film is a documentary.

Infamous wrestling heel Roddy Piper stars as John Nada, an honest, hardworking but down-on-his-luck fellow looking for a break. He gets a job on a construction crew where he meets Frank (Keith David) who shows him the way to the nearby homeless camp. The two men are friendly, but they have their differences. Nada believes in America, that he's just hit a rough patch, and with hard work, he'll overcome it; whereas Frank thinks the system is rigged against the poor.

They later have a grueling, bare-knuckle, 5 1/2-minute difference over trying on sunglasses. See, Nada found a box of them in the church near the homeless camp after the church was raided by police. He puts the sunglasses on and notices there are subliminal messages on every billboard, magazine and TV program. The messages say things like, "OBEY," "CONSUME," and my favorite, "MARRY AND REPRODUCE." Money says, "THIS IS YOUR GOD" on it. Then Nada notices with the sunglasses some people look different, too -- like their skin's been peeled off and they have big, buggy eyes. He calls a lady "formaldehyde face" in a convenience store, then the police show up and he whips their asses with his pro-wrestling moves.

You know how these things go. Once you've beaten up four or five cops and you've got their shotgun, it's time to go shoot up a bank and escape by taking Holly Thompson (Meg Foster) hostage. After that, it's tough to go back to work, because your face has been all over the news.

Nada wants Frank to see the truth, and Frank would rather not because he doesn't want even more trouble than being homeless and estranged from his family back in Detroit. So when Nada urges Frank to try on the sunglasses (and thus confirm Frank's suspicions were a gross underestimation), they have one of the longest, most glorious, one-on-one street brawls in modern cinema.

As for the rest of the movie? You know how I hate to spoil things. Suffice it to say, lots of shit blows up.

They Live is social commentary so cleverly disguised as ass-kicking fun you won't even care. It streams on Starz.

"There were bikers and gnarly psychos, and... crazy evil."

I understand most of you mortals are feeling the pinch this time of year. It feels like you just don't have enough time or money to make everybody happy. Some of you are trying to cram for finals. A lot of you still haven't put up your tree, much less bought any presents because you're still waiting on your Christmas bonus. You can't convince your dad and your grandma that if they could just get over themselves and sit in the same room for two hours you wouldn't have to drive all over creation on the 25th, and there's no escaping that damn Mariah Carey song.

It's enough to make any sensible person hate the holidays.

In times like this, I like to remind mortals of the reason for the season. You're celebrating the birth of the savior Jesus Christ.

That's right. It's all his fucking fault.

I'm right there with you, mortals. In a couple weeks all the movie critics are going to roll out their Best of 2018 lists and I haven't reviewed a single movie from 2018. Let's fix that right now.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Mandy.

This bad acid trip by director Panos Cosmatos stars Nicolas Cage as Red Miller, a logger who lives with his old lady Mandy Bloom (Andrea Riseborough) in a damn nice house in the deep woods of the Pacific Northwest.

You can tell they're in love because they lie around in each other's arms and talk about their favorite planets and the time Mandy's dad encouraged the neighborhood kids to kill baby birds with a crowbar.

One day while walking along the lonesome road to nowhere, Mandy catches the eye of hippie cult leader Jeremiah Sand. He decides he must have her, so he dispatches his followers summon a gang of cenobite berzerker bikers to kidnap the lovebirds.

The cultists prepare Mandy for her audience with Sand by dosing her with LSD and having a giant bug sting her. While Mandy basis in the mystic's purpledy-pink, tracer-laden presence, Sand tells her about his former career as a rock star and shows her his dick. She laughs at Sand's stupid music and ridiculous penis, so he burns her to death right in front of Red, who is tied up outside. Sand then stabs red and leaves him for dead. Red wriggle free, crawls home, and that's when he gets mad.

How mad?

He gets so mad he goes to his buddy's camper to get his crossbow back, and they don't even discuss why his buddy has Red's crossbow in the first place.

He gets so mad he goes down to the foundry and forges by hand a battle axe.

He gets buggy-eyed, teeth-gnashing, Nicolas Cage mad.

And when the bikers catch him and rip his favorite shirt, he remembers just how damn mad that is, wriggles free from getting tied up again, takes a heaping helping of berzerker dope and is unstoppable.

I feel like I've already said too much in summary and don't want to spoil the third act. Suffice it to say it is a glorious display of violence and what-the-fuckery.

Mandy is batshit Nicolas Cage in a balls-trippy revenge thriller that takes a while to start swinging, but when it does it really swings for the fences. It is the best movie of 2018 that I'm going to review this year. It streams on Shudder and Hoopla.