"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.