"A terrifying, centuries-old prediction foretold the spawning of demons on Earth."

Mortals, your dumb president screwed up all the traffic in Louisville on Wednesday, and many of you who thought you could find a way around got fucked up by flaming pizza.

It got me wondering, when is it going to be my turn to fuck up traffic? Then I remembered I'm unleashing thousands of undead onto Bardstown Road this Saturday at the Louisville Zombie Walk.

It's only fair. I'm more important than the president and almost as important as pizza.

Let's get in the mood by watching something gooey, melty and drippy, shall we?

This week's Thursday Thriller is Demons 2.

This 1986 Lamberto Bava isn't substantively different from 1985's Demons, except it takes place in a high-rise apartment building instead of a movie theater. It's even got Bobby Rhodes in it, except this time he plays a personal trainer instead of a pimp.

It seems Sally (Coralina Cataldi Tassoni) is just not having a good birthday. She has an "It's My Party And I'll Cry If I Want To" moment and shuts herself in her room to watch a movie about demons on TV.  The demons are pretty much the same things as zombies, except their teeth are sharp and they have claws. Anyhow, one of the demons comes out of the TV, Videodrome-style, attacks her, and turns her into a demon.

After that, lots of disgusting things happen. One of my favorites is when a baby demon tears his way out of a little kid's body.

I could go on in my critique, but there's not a lot to think about here. Demons 2 is a high-energy festival of gore perfect for the thinking impaired. Couldn't think of a better movie for your Louisville Zombie Walk pregame. It streams on Shudder.

"Tonight smells like another bloody incident perpetrated by humanity."

Sorry I've been neglecting you mortals. I've had to let this blog fester for a bit because I've been up to my horns in The Devil's Business.

My menagerie of evil souls, The Devil's Attic, opens Sept. 13 and I've got some new scares in store for you. And to tide you over until then the Louisville Zombie Walk is next Saturday. Yes, it's time to raise a little Hell.

Because it's Zombie Month, I've been rerunning some of my favorite zombie movie reviews over on my Facebook page, but I understand how trying these times must be for you without me telling you what to watch. You know, the kind of movies where your significant other walks into the room and asks what the fuck you're watching.

"Why are you watching that?"

"Because The Devil told me too."

I have just such a movie for you, this week. Yes, it's Zombie Month, but more importantly tonight is the full moon, so we're taking a little break from ambulatory deceased persons.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope.

Kazuhiko Yamaguchi directed this 1975 action thriller that stars Sonny Chiba as Akira Inugami, a crime-fighting werewolf who curiously never transforms. He is, however, an indisputable badass who has sex with lots of ladies and can kick gangster's asses with little more than a pocket of loose change. He gets stronger as the moon gets fuller.

One night a guy in the street died in Inugami's arms. He was babbling something about tiger's claws, hallucinating about tigers, and was shredded to bits by an unseen tiger claw-like force. Turns out the guy was in a band called The Mobs who had been gang-raping a singer named Miki (Etsuko Nami) at the behest of a vengeful gangster boss. One of the musicians gave her syphilis, so she put the curse of the tiger claw on all of them and took to singing about the curse at strip clubs while keeping her clothes on and upsetting all the patrons.

Then it gets weird.

Suffice it to say, Wolf Guy is a wild ride with all the funky, fuzzy wah-wah musical score you can handle. Turn on your lava lamp, kick off your shoes and dig your toes into the shag carpet for this one. It's perfect for the full moon. It streams on Shudder, with optional commentary by Joe Bob Briggs.

I'll try not to be such a stranger from now on. See you soon.

"He may get the blood, but I'll get the glory, and that fear is my ticket home."

Christians all over the world will gather and celebrate J.C.'s re-birthday this Sunday. Big deal. You want to know who rose from the dead way more times?

Jason Voorhees, a mentally handicapped child who drowned in a lake while camp counselors were off having sex, and grew up to be an unstoppable killing machine in a hockey mask.

And what about Freddy Krueger, the child murderer who was burned to death and came back as a dream demon to slash up teenagers with his finger knives in their sleep?

In honor of Easter, the coming of spring, and the general spirit of re-birth, this week's Thursday Thriller is Freddy vs. Jason.

The movie starts with Freddy (Robert Englund) feeling blue because no one remembers him, and if they don't remember him, they don't dream about him, and if they don't dream about him, he can't kill them?

You can relate, right?

So he needs to stir up a bloody panic on Elm Street by appearing to Jason (Ken Kirzinger) in a dream as Jason's mother, and telling him to go murder the fornicating kids there. Jason's rotting organs inflate and off he goes to do Freddy's bidding.

One impressive kill in a folding bed later and the teenagers start to remember Freddy, but the memory isn't strong enough for Freddy to do any slashing of his own.  Just as he's about to grow into his power and give Katharine Isabelle the claw, Jason runs her through with his machete, and causes a huge, fiery scene in a cornfield rave. Not only did Freddy not get his kill, but Jason totally stole the show, so now Freddy's pissed.

Horror fans seem divided on this 2003 Ronny Yu film. Some downright hate it, possibly because it does not definitively answer who wins. Those who did like the movie seem to disagree about the outcome depending on which villain is their favorite. The hotly debated final scene leaves room for a sequel which we never got to see.

All horror movies do that, though. Monsters never really die. My opinion is any clear victory would have been a disservice to either character. The point is the mayhem. As the scenes flip between the dream world and reality, you get to see cool stuff like Freddy bouncing Jason around the boiler room like a pinball.

If you're more of a Jason fan and have said, "Jason would tear Freddy's arm off and shove that glove up his ass," you get to see that, too, more or less.

My real question for the haters is if you ever really loved the Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th series, why would you pick now to start splitting hairs over things like good acting or a plausible story. It's an epic battle with mayhem all around.

Freddy vs. Jason streams on Netflix.

"Put the knife away, kid, or I'll use it to cut welfare checks from your rotten skin."

This week, of all the mortals in the world, I'd like to address the Louisvillains.

Today the powers that be are closing the Second Street Bridge in preparation for Thunder Over Louisville, the biggest spectacle of fire and military might this side of Baghdad, and kickoff event for the Kentucky Derby Festival.

The Second Street Bridge, as it's known to locals to can't remember the difference between the Clark Memorial Bridge and the Lewis and Clark Bridge, may not yet be fully covered in butter-colored paint, but the city has definitely been cleaning up to make the place look nice for the 145th Run for the Roses. Namely, they destroyed a homeless camp at Jackson and Jefferson. City officials have denied it has anything to do with the Derby, but come on. We all know you can't have the place looking trashy when the Kardashians come visit. They might feel upstaged.

In that spirit of spring cleaning, this week's Thursday Thriller is Hobo with a Shotgun.

This 2011 Jason Eisener film was based on a fake trailer that played before Grindhouse.

In an almost spaghetti-western premise, Rutger Hauer plays a drifter who rides the rails into a town that's plagued by lawlessness and corruption. Our hobo arrives just in time to see the crime boss Drake (Brian Downey) have his pompadoured brother Logan decapitated. Logan is played by Trailer Park Boys's Robb Wells if that matters to anybody.

Drake has two sons Slick (Gregory Smith) and Ivan (Nick Batemen). They're sort of the Eric and Don Jr. of the operation. The hobo runs afoul of Slick by stopping his maltreatment of a prostitute named Abby (Molly Dunsworth). For his trouble Slick carves the hobo up. Abby lets the hobo stay at her apartment. They become friends.

All this time, all the hobo wanted was a little money so he could invest in a lawnmower and start his own business. He begs for loose change and ultimately eats a glass bottle for a guy who makes those bum fights videos. While the hobo is picking out his lawnmower at the pawn shop, some masked thugs try to rob the place. It is at this point that the hobo decides he's had enough, and instead gets a shotgun and starts turning bad people into big, 'splodey, gooey messes.

Of course he still has to deal with Drake and sons, who turn up their reign of violence and terror in retaliation.

Hobo with a Shotgun is a fun, gory movie with some great dialogue and over-the-top color saturation.  It delivers everything you might expect and more. I don't rank movies, but if I did, I'd put this one right above WolfCop.  It streams on Hulu, Hoopla and Shudder.

"Who is mad enough to enter that world of darkness? How about you, sir?"

What's the matter, mortal? Just not on top of your game, lately? Mired down in mediocrity? Punished so hard by the elements all winter, you're numb to the coming of spring? The appearance of sunshine and blue skies not exactly brightening your day?

You may be in a rut, but that's OK. You're OK. People might ask you how you're doing. Tell them you're OK. That's all most of them want to hear anyway. If you start going on about the warts on your feet or how you can't figure out what it is that's making your kid smell funny, you're just going to drag them down with you. They don't really care. They just want good news and the good news is that you're OK.

For most people, that is.

Some Nosy Nancies just can't leave it at that. Some of them don't believe you. Some of them feel it is their duty to be your personal cheerleader.

"How are you?"

"I'm OK."

"Just OK?"

Yeah pal, fair to fucking midland. Whatever. These people act like if you're not in a state of perpetual bliss, there must be something wrong. It's just not true.

You know what is true?

Sometimes it's OK to be just OK.

Take Tobe Hooper for example. In 1974, he shook up the world with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.  In 1982, he smashed the box office with Poltergeist. In 1987, he released a fantastic remake of Invaders from Mars. Any one of these would be considered a stellar achievement in an average lifetime, but to pull off three? Ho ho! Let's be honest, Hooper made a few movies that were just OK.

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Funhouse.

Hooper made this OK movie in 1981. It starts with a girl named Amy (Elizabeth Berridge) washing her breasts for her first date with Buzz (Cooper Huckabee). Amy's folks don't like Buzz because he works at a gas station. They also don't want Amy to go to the carnival that's in town because the place is trouble. Instead of coming to the door and knocking, Buzz honks his horn in the driveway and Amy runs to his car. Off they go to the carnival.

On the way they pick up Amy's friends, who are vaguely sufficient. Buzz tells a joke. Amy doesn't laugh. He explains the joke. They get to the carnival and meander around. Buzz explains his dumb joke again. They waste some time at a magic show that has nothing to do with the story. Then they waste some time peeking into a striptease tent. It has nothing to do with the story either, but it brings your attention back to the movie.

Finally, Richie (Miles Chapin) has an idea that will put the plot back on track. What if they spend the night in the funhouse? In this case, the funhouse is a dark ride. They get in in the little cars, a guy in a Frankenstein mask pushes them on their way, and halfway through the ride, they get out to make camp. The guy in the Frankenstein mask doesn't seem to think much of it when the cars come back empty. The carnival closes and the kids start making out. They hear voices from the cellar. Yes, the funhouse has a cellar. It's strangely huge for a funhouse in a traveling carnival.

Down below, the guy in the Frankenstein mask (Wayne Doba) wants to have sex with the old fortune teller (Sylvia Miles). He offers her $100, ejaculates prematurely, and when she won't give the money back, he kills her. Amy and friends are witnesses. They might make it out alive, if no one calls attention to their presence by, say, dropping a lighter through a gap in the floorboards.

Oops.

The Funhouse streams on Starz. It'll help you kill 95 minutes or so. It's OK, and it's OK that it's OK, because most movies are OK.

"Now all the images of horror, the demons of your mind, crowd in on you to destroy you."

I have a confession for you mortals.

I am not real.

I am a figment of your collective imagination, a shared nightmare, an occupant of the shadowy corners of your inbred psyches. You made me up, you perverts. You called me up from the darkest recesses of your minds, recesses you don't want to even acknowledge possessing, the recesses into which you pour all your madness and hope it never overflows!

And now I'd like to tell you about a cool movie I saw.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Daughter of Horror.

A lot of mystery surrounds this 1955 John Parker film. For example, not a word of dialogue is spoken throughout. I'm not clear on whether they couldn't afford microphones or the cast had terrible voices.

The only one who gets to do any speaking in the film is the throaty-voiced narrator (Richard Barron) who takes you inside the mind of a deranged woman (Adrienne Barrett). The narration is primarily in the second person, so for the remainder of the film, you are the deranged woman.

You are haunted by a newspaper headline -- "MYSTERIOUS STABBING". Literally the newspaper floats on the wind and follows you through the grimy, neon-lit streets and alleyways populated by pimps, aggressive winos and blackjack-wielding thugs. Most of the men wear fedoras and just about everyone smokes.

Why is the stabbing mysterious? During one of your hallucinations the narrator, Slenderman-looking motherfucker that he is, shows you in the graveyard that you are the perpetrator. You stabbed your abusive father after he shot your mother. Both your parents are murdered and you're still alive. Surely, the police want to talk to you.

As a matter of fact they do. There's a policeman following you around, and he has the same face as your father. Why is that? And why doesn't he just bring you in for questioning as soon as he sees you instead of waiting for you to kill a fat guy then cut off his hand with a bigass switchblade?

My guess is because MADNESS!

The rest of the soundscape is filled in with music -- part traditional film score, part jazz, and part vocals that sound like the lady who sings on the old Star Trek theme.

Daughter of Horror is a hallucinatory noir thriller, heavy on atmosphere. Every scene could be the cover of a pulp magazine. It's very cool. It's very weird. It streams on Amazon Prime and YouTube.

"You think I don't know the difference between a wolf and a man?"

It's a full moon tonight. Let's talk about werewolves.

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Wolf Man.

This 1941 George Waggner film is a cinematic landmark -- the first watchable werewolf movie. It was preceded by 1935's painfully boring Werewolf of London.

Lon Chaney Jr. plays Larry Talbot, the prodigal son of Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains), a rich guy who dabbles in astronomy. Larry comes home after his brother died in a hunting accident and starts tinkering with dad's telescope, through which he spots a pretty girl getting dressed across the street.

The movie is a major studio release from the 1940s, so the voyeuristic moment involves earrings. Gwen Conliffe (Evelyn Ankers) is dressed from neck to wrists to ankles throughout the film. Still, Larry likes what he sees and ambles over to the shop Gwen works at to make creepily knowing comments about her jewelry, purchase a walking stick with a silver wolf's head for a handle and to get turned down for a date no fewer than three times.

Still, because it's the 1940s, when a woman says no, she means, "I'll be waiting out front with a friend at 8." It's like that stupid Christmas song people have been arguing about for the past decade.

So off Larry goes to the gypsy carnival with a gal on each arm. The other girl Jenny (Fay Helm) gets attacked by a wolf and Larry beats it off.

Er, I mean, he clubs it to death with his silver-handled cane.

Larry takes a fang in the process, and becomes the proud recipient of the curse of the werewolf. Bodies start turning up and as Larry can't account for his whereabouts he deduces he has something to do with it. Problem is, Sir John and his educated society friends won't hear it because in their rational world, lycanthropy is little more than a mental illness.

Chaney gives a great performance as a man condemned to kill, to live with the guilt, and no one will believe when he tries to confess. To our jaded modern eyes the transformation sequences leave something to be desired, but the end result is an iconic monster designed by Jack Pierce. There's also a balls-trippy hallucination sequence.

The Wolf Man is an undisputed classic. If you haven't seen it it's time and if you have, it's time to see it again. It streams on Starz.

Happy Full Moon.

"So, in a tournament, I snap his arms or he taps out and we all go get burgers."

St. Patrick's Day is coming up and I'm in the mood for something green.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Green Room.

It has nothing to do with St. Patrick's Day. Instead, this 2015 Jeremy Saulnier film is about a hardcore punk band that siphoned gas all across the country to get to a gig that was canceled. The promoter lined them up a backup gig that paid them each six dollars and some change. To make things right he calls his cousin and gets them booked at a skinhead bar. Sounds like a shit gig, but it pays $350, so they take it.

They open with a pretty good cover of the Dead Kennedys' "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" and survive their set unscathed. Just as it looks like they've survived the ordeal and gotten paid, Sam (Alia Shawkat) realizes she forgot the band's phone in the green room. Pat (Anton Yelchin) goes to get it and discovers one the neo-Nazis has stabbed a woman in the head. He calls the police, but the skinheads take his phone and detain them while they go get the bar owner and spiritual leader Darcy (Patrick Stewart) to tell them how to sweep the whole thing under the rug.

There's angry music, gun play, dog attacks; arms get fucked up. It's a tense movie.

Green Room streams on Netflix.

"When it comes to blood in my underwear, I want to know how it got there."

This week's Thursday Thriller is Brain Damage.

This 1988 comedy was written and directed by Frank Henenlotter. You remember him. He also made Basket Case and Frankenhooker. He's a weird guy.

The movie is about a guy named Brian (Rick Hearst) who lives in an apartment with his brother Mike (Gordon MacDonald). They have weird, old people for neighbors. At the beginning of the movie the old people are way over-actingly upset because Aylmer is missing. It turns out Aylmer is a parasitic slug whose head is somewhat brain-shaped and who speaks in a golden baritone. Aylmer likes to attach himself to his host's spine and force them to take him out hunting for his favorite snack, human brains. In return, Aylmer injects his host with blue juice that feels so good. The host barely remembers murdering anybody.

I liked Brain Damage, but not as much as Henenlotter's other films. It definitely has its moments, but if you haven't seen Basket Case, watch it first.

Basket Case streams on Shudder.

"Don't go all the way."

February is a busy month. Between Black History Month, the Super Bowl, the Academy Awards and Valentine's Day, February almost slipped past without my mentioning Women in Horror Month, so here goes.

It's Women in Horror Month and this week's Thursday Thriller is Slumber Party Massacre II.

Deborah Brock wrote and directed this second installment in the franchise that spoofs the male power fantasies we've come to know and love as the slasher genre.

You remember how in the first Slumber Party Massacre there were two sisters, Valerie and Courtney, who survived a night of being terrorized by an old pervert with a giant power drill? In this one, which takes place years later, Valerie's in a mental hospital and Courtney (Crystal Bernard) still has fucked up dreams about the whole ordeal. Courtney has grown up a little, but is still a good girl. She's a little shy, but she plays guitar in a band with some girls from school. Sheila's parents owns a beach house, so the girls go down there for the weekend to practice for the big dance.

Of course, some boys show up, and then so does the guy with the drill, except he's inexplicably mutated into a black leather-wearing, rock 'n' roll greaser with a guitar weirder than anything Prince ever played. There's a huge drill bit coming out of the end of it. Courtney's nightmares become daydreams then turn into outright hallucinations as her food attacks her and Sally's enormous pimple explodes green slime all over the place.

Then the rockabilly guy (Atanas Ilitch) does a big musical number right before he struts around and kills damn near everybody.

Slumber Party Massacre II does not have nearly as much frontal female nudity as its predecessor. Kimberly McArthur is in it and she doesn't even get naked, which is weird, because she was in Playboy.

That said, I advise you to go ahead and watch it and enjoy the cheap, silly, gory thrills that it offers.

Slumber Party Massacre II streams on Amazon Prime.

"It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again."

The Academy Awards are this Sunday. Big deal. Mandy wasn't nominated for anything. The Academy is wrong. They're always wrong. They never give horror movies a fair shot. The Exorcist lost to The Sting.

That's fine with me. The movies I like don't need a seal of approval from a bunch of Hollywood squares. Jason Voorhees would look weird in a tuxedo. The beauty of horror movies is they're designed to repulse the delicate sensibilities of frou-frous who want to know who Lady Gaga is wearing.

Speaking of wearing meat, this week's Thursday Thriller is The Silence of the Lambs.

This 1991 Jonathan Demme film represents the only time in 91 years the Oscars got it right.

In 1992 it won Best Picture. Demme won Best Director. Screenwriter Ted Tally won Best Writing for a Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published, which was of course the novel by Thomas Harris.

Jodie Foster got an Oscar for her portrayal of Clarice Starling, an FBI academy cadet who gets sent on an errand to interview the psychopathic psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

Anthony Hopkins got an Oscar for playing Lecter, a serial killer famous for eating his victims.

The FBI is having trouble turning up clues on the identity of an at-large serial killer nicknamed Buffalo Bill because he skins his victims. He tends to go after thick girls. The agency sends Starling to talk to Lecter because though he is a psychotic cannibal, he is also brilliant psychiatrist with Sherlock Holmes-like powers of observation. The hope is he can help build a psychological profile of Buffalo Bill. It takes a killer to catch a killer -- that old saw.

In return, Lecter wants a cell with a window.

Starling is warned to be on her guard when talking to Lecter, as he has a habit of toying with people until they cry or commit suicide or both, in the case of the jizz-flinging mental patient in the next cell.

Lecter is a great villain -- cold, calculating, darkly hilarious. In the role Hopkins reminded me of Vincent Price, but he said he based his performance on Katharine Hepburn, Truman Capote and HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

For her part, Foster holds her own against Hopkins. That's what the good guys do in these situations -- hold their own.

As for Buffalo Bill, I don't want to spoil it.

The Silence of the Lambs is a classic thriller, as visceral as it is cerebral. If you haven't seen it, it's time and if you have, it's time to see it again. It streams on Netflix.

"Want a date? Looking for some action? Need some company?"

It's Valentine's Day, mortals -- the day for the beautiful people who have paired off to agonize over what to buy each other, and when they finally decide, they rub it in the faces of all the lonely people.

Could your office mate be any louder when receiving those flowers? Sure, she's not yelling, "Somebody loves me. Don't you wish you were me?" but it's implied.

The big VD can be especially painful for those who have loved and lost. Maybe it didn't work out because you and your lover were incompatible or because your fiancee was brutally dismembered in a lawnmower accident. You can't eat. You can't sleep. You sit up all night thinking about what could have been. You bury yourself in your hobbies. You lose your moral compass.

Whatever your relationship status is, I want you to know I love you.

I don't mean it in that cheesy, unsatisfying "Jesus loves you" way. What's that ever done for anybody? It solves none of your problems and you don't even get off. That's right up there with getting a box of chocolates from your mom, except at least with mom, you still have candy to show for it. That's like the participation trophy of love.

No, mortals, I mean I love you in a romantic sense. I want to make love to you. We could cuddle after and watch a movie -- a love story.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Frankenhooker.

Frank Henenlotter directed this 1990 comedy about a failed medical student and electrical wiz named Jeffrey (James Lorinz) and his fiancee Elizabeth (Patty Mullen). When one of Jeffrey's gadgets accidentally kills Elizabeth, he keeps her head in a freezer full of purple goop until he can figure out how to bring her back to life. One night after scratching his brain with a power drill, he falls upon a plan to go into the city, kill a sex worker, and put Elizabeth's head on the sex worker's body.

But Jeffrey is indecisive. He can't choose just one prostitute, so he arranges with a pimp named Zorro (Joseph Gonzalez) to have a party with several girls so he can pick out one he likes. When it comes time to decide which one he wants, he instead freezes up with pangs of conscience. He tosses his bag of money at the prostitutes, and inside they also find the highly lethal blend of crack-cocaine he brought along. It causes them to explode. Moral conundrum solved: he now has lots of parts to choose from.

Frankenhooker is exactly as silly and dirty as you probably expect. Sharp-eyed nerds will notice nods to Henenlotter's earlier film Basket Case.

Frankenhooker streams with Spanish subtitles on YouTube.

"Death -- it comes in many strange packages."

I've spent the past four Februaries tearing my horns out looking for scary movies with prominent African-American characters in them for Black History Month. It hasn't been easy, but if representation in online horror films is any mark of social progress, I'm happy to report the streaming services are finally catching on.

There's always room for improvement, of course. Both Netflix and Hulu now boast categories for Strong Black Leads, but they don't contain any horror movies. Starz has added a whole Black History Month category, but it leans toward documentaries and biopics of real people, and ignores its own sampling of Pam Grier movies like Foxy Brown.

I think we can still claim moral victory because through my tireless efforts, you can finally watch Blacula and Blackenstein on Amazon Prime. Shudder has also marked the occasion by hosting films like The People Under the Stairs, Bones, and the somewhat boring Ganja and Hess, as well as the movie I'm going to tell you about.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Tales From The Hood.

This 1995 anthology film was directed by Rusty Cundeiff, who also appears as a school teacher with hip (for the '90s) short dreads.

The four stories involve urban terrors such as corrupt police, domestic violence, a Klansman running for public office, and black-on-black crime.

In the framing story, three gangsters (Joe Torry, De'Aundre Bonds and Samuel Monroe Jr.) visit a funeral parlor to pick up some shit from the cigar-chomping, crazy-eyed mortician Mr. Simms (Clarence Williams III). Simms shows them the bodies he has and tells them their stories.

There are a lot of great moments in this one. You see a wrathful zombie with telekinesis. There's an angry hip-hop fueled montage of white supremacist violence. Corbin Bernsen gets eaten by voodoo dolls. My favorite part, though, was watching an abusive father (David Alan Grier) get folded up into a senseless pile of flesh and clothes.

Tales From The Hood streams on Shudder.

"Ripped up, wiped out, battered, shattered, creamed and reamed!"

With all the division in America of late, is there anything the country needs more now than the Super Bowl? It's time for Americans of every race, religion and economic status to come together, by which I mean stay in their homes and turn on their televisions, eat 8 million pounds of guacamole, and bask in the pomp, the pageantry, the spectacle, the halftime show and the commercials.

Apparently, there's also a football game, and this year's matchup is going to be a doozy! It's the Los Angeles Don't-Deserve-To-Be-Theres versus the New England This-Isn't-Even-Interesting-Anymores.

Here are some fun facts I found on Wikipedia so they must be true: Super Bowl Sunday annually marks the second highest food consumption in the United States, right behind Thanksgiving. The Super Bowl is often the most-watched American television broadcast of the year.

In light of this nationwide hunger for sport, I've got the perfect movie to tell you about.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Death Race 2000.

Roger Corman produced this 1975 dystopian action-comedy. It was directed by Paul Bartel.

In the far-flung future year 2000, America has become a real shithole. Every year the government distracts the people by giving them what they want -- a violent sporting event hosted by airhead celebrities.

It is not a documentary.

The Death Race is a cross-country competition in which drivers score points by running people over in their highly stylized vehicles. Each driver has a theme/costume/persona like wrestlers do. You've got Matilda the Hun (Roberta Collins), Calamity Jane (Mary Woronov), Nero the Hero (Martin Love) and so on.

David Carradine plays Frankenstein, the greatest Death Race driver of all time. In previous races, he's crashed, lost body parts, had them replaced, virtually brought back from the dead time and again. Sylvester Stallone plays his arch-rival Machine Gun Joe Viterbo.

Just as this Sunday's Big Game will have nerds on Facebook all day telling everybody how they don't care about sportsball, the Death Race has its own set of haters -- The Resistance. Led by Thomasina Paine (Harriet Medin), the Resistance intends to disrupt the Death Race and kill all the drivers, especially Frankenstein, which seems way cleverer and more interesting to me than calling any televised game "sports ball."

The Resistance has even infiltrated the race, planting Paine's niece Annie (Simone Griffeth) as Frankenstein's navigator.

Frankenstein's got every body out to kill him, but he has to win the race so that he can shake the President's hand.

On first glance, this movie might look a little cheesy. It is cheesy, but Death Race 2000 balances its chase sequences, explosions, violence, tits and ass with subversiveness and a sharp, satirical bite. Keep a sharp eye out for the recently deceased Dick Miller as a leather-jacketed hooligan whose gang likes to play chicken with the death racers. Last one down the manhole is out of luck.

Death Race 2000 streams on Hoopla and YouTube.

"Ask not what your rest home can do for you, but what you can do for your rest home."

While you mortals have been tearing at each other this week about who was the bigger asshole in front of the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday...

While you watched unblinkingly through a 2-minute, 9-minute, and nearly 2-mother fucking-hours long video of people yelling at people...

wondering the whole time, "Who's the asshole?
"Is it the Catholic kid, or the Red Indian?"
"Gotta be the Catholic kid, right?"
"Oh wait, it's the Black Hebrews!"
"What the fuck is a Black Hebrew?"
"Black Israelites."
"What?"
"They're called Black Israelites."
"Oh wait, They're called the Black Hebrew Israelites. They're the BHIs."
"They're a bunch of BHI-itches!"...

I mean, seriously, there are more cuts of this film than Blade Runner, and a major news story slid right past you.

Who cares about that anyway? Whatever awful thing supposedly crawled out of that kid's mouth only did so because it had been fucked down his throat by a priest. That's hardly even news. Check this out!

A Colorado man was sexually assaulted by Bigfoot.

Darrel Whitaker, 57, of Glenwood Springs, told police and wildlife officials he was walking to his hunting cabin when a hairy, 8-foot-tall creature laid him out with one punch and began tearing his pants off. According to worldnewsdailyreport.com, Whitaker was able to stab the beast and run away.

Why did the mainstream media miss this story?

Because it's made up. World News Daily Report describes its content as satirical., but that hasn't stopped at least three mortals this week from repeating their stories as fact. We could spend all day debating the definition of satire, but I think of it more as an online tabloid whose stories hearken back to the glory days of the Weekly World News, which kept supermarket shoppers abreast of Elvis sightings throughout the 1980s and 1990s. They're still in business, but they're not like they were in their heyday. It looks like their last Elvis story appeared in 2012.

I'd like to tell you about a movie that keeps that tradition alive.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Bubba Ho-Tep.

This 2002 character-driven comedy was directed by Don Coscarelli and based on the short story by Joe R. Lansdale. In a plot worthy of the Weekly World News, Elvis Presley and John F. Kennedy are still alive in an East Texas nursing home and they have to kill a butthole-sucking, cowboy mummy.

Bruce Campbell plays Presley, or maybe he plays Sebastian Haff. Like all the denizens of the Shady Acres Rest Home, he might be a little confused. His story is that he is Elvis, and in a plot to escape the trappings of fame, he switched places with an Elvis impersonator named Sebastian Haff. They had a contract that stipulated any time Elvis wanted to come back he could, but it was lost in a fire.

While Haff took up the overwhelming lifestyle of being Elvis, Presley enjoyed the more relaxed career path of impersonating himself, and thus finding himself, until the day he fell off a stage, broke his hip, got an infection, and slipped into a coma.

No one believes him except Jack (Ossie Davis). Jack also believes that he is President John F. Kennedy. Jack claims that after the assassination The Powers That Be preserved his brain in a jar and it now resides in The White House, where it's connected to a battery. They filled his head with sand and dyed him black.

Elvis thinks Jack is crazy. Jack thinks Elvis was in on the assassination plot, but they have to put their differences aside because a scarab beetle is scuttling around the nursing home late at night, shapeshifting into a mummy in a cowboy hat, and sucking the old folks' souls out through their buttholes. They have to stop the mummy themselves, because the authorities wouldn't believe them.

It's tricky to distinguish between truth and delusion in this twisted tale, and that's what I like about it. Is Haff really Presley? Is Jack really JFK? Is there really even a mummy? Does it matter? Does anything matter?

This last question is of thematic significance as Elvis finds himself in an existential quandary: Once he had everything anyone could want, but he gave it up for all he really needed, but he lost even that anyway. As he lies in a rest home, forgotten, alone, unvalidated in his identity, impotent, watching everyone around him die of waiting to die, he feels life is futile, but through the mystery of the mummy, Elvis finds purpose and regains the ability to get an erection.

Almost forgot to mention that this movie wallows gloriously in dick and poop jokes.

Bubba Ho-Tep streams on Hoopla,

"Uncle Red, what if it's not a guy? What if it's a monster?"

We're still crunching last year's numbers down here, mortals, but the projections look so good I'm going to go ahead with this exciting announcement.

We are expanding the Fourth Circle to make room for people who say, "And go!" on social media.

You know who I'm talking about -- the people who can't decide what to read, watch or buy; the people too lazy to look up customer reviews; the people who want you to do their research for them and don't even have the decency to tag on a "please" or a "thanks in advance."

No. Instead, you get, "What's a good movie to watch? And go!"

Hurry up, mortal! Hop to! Your inconsiderate, dumbass friend can't make a damn decision! Why are you taking so long figuring out their life for them?

It's especially galling because I started this blog with these very people in mind. Don't know what to watch? Totally understandable! The sheer volume of online viewing options is overwhelming. That's why I sift through what's out there, bring a few promising options before the Editorial Board of the Damned and let them vote on a movie to recommend.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Silver Bullet.

I know I just reviewed a werewolf movie two weeks ago, but you know how the werewolves on the board can be. They tend to vote as a pack and they were howling for me to tell you about this one.

This 1985 film was based on a novella by Stephen King and directed by Daniel Attias.

In the spring of 1976, a werewolf started attacking people in the town of Tarker's Mills. In the first four minutes of the film, the monster takes a swipe at the town drunk and the guy's head goes flying across the screen.

That is unless you think the town drunk is Milt Sturmfuller (James A. Baffico). He's the father of Tammy (Heather Simmons). Milt doesn't want Tammy hanging around with Marty Coslaw (Corey Haim) because Marty's legs don't work. Milt's obviously a big, drunk jerk, and he gets impaled on a piece of broken floor board.

Maybe the town drunk is Andy Fairton (Bill Smitrovich), who sits around the bar in his handlebar mustache badmouthing Sheriff Joe Haller (Terry O'Quinn) for not catching whoever's doing all this killing.

But then the town drunk might be Red (Gary Busey). He's Marty's cool uncle that fixed him up with special gas-powered wheelchair called the Silver Bullet. After Tammy has to leave town and Marty's probably-not-drunk friend Brady (Joe Wright) gets torn to shreds in the park, Red gives Marty a more powerful gas-powered wheelchair with the front end of a motorcycle. It's also called the Silver Bullet.

I guess my point is a lot of people are drunk in this movie.

While all the town is drunkenly looking for some kind of psychotic maniac, only Marty gets the idea that maybe a werewolf is killing people. Soon, he's the only one who sees it, and even Uncle Red believe him at first. This is a recurring theme in Stephen King's writing -- that only children in their innocence can see the omnipresent, evil magic at work, and that jaded, drunken, skeptical adults would do well to listen to them. He did the same thing in Salem's Lot.

Another of King's pet themes is that religious authorities are full of shit. That also comes into play.

I enjoyed watching Silver Bullet. How can you not like drunk Gary Busey pimping out a wheelchair into a motorcycle for a kid to do battle with a monster? My favorite part actually involved a mass transformation in a church.

It's far from a perfect movie, though. You can kinda see the line where the wolf mask meets the wolf suit.

As Stephen King adaptations go, Silver Bullet is no Carrie from 1976. I'd rank it somewhere in there between Children of the Corn and Cujo.

As a werewolf movie, it's no An American Werewolf in London. It's somewhere in the vicinity of Dog Soldiers.

Silver Bullet streams on Amazon Prime and Hulu.

"It ate him... bit off his head... like a gingerbread man."

Mortal, do you even have a library card?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not here to shame you if you don't. Shame isn't really my thing. Besides, I completely understand if you haven't stepped foot in a library in over a decade because you can't afford the fines from the time it took you six months to return Seven Days to Faster Reading by William S. Schaill, but did you know some libraries have become such lonely places they've done away with fines just to get people to come back?

I'm not going to dwell on the point that libraries perform a vital service to your democracy by helping sustain an informed electorate, either, but speaking as the guy who introduced the concept of knowledge to all humanity, I still feel I must urge you to renew your library card because of what's in it for you -- horror movies!

Two streaming services, Kanopy and Hoopla, have emerged that are completely free, and your library card is your membership, and their horror selections don't suck.

For example, Kanopy is the only commercial-fee streaming service presently hosting the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Eraserhead and Scanners. Remember Scanners?

Hoopla boasts such exclusives as Bubba Ho-Tep, Suspiria, and a movie I've been waiting a long time to tell you about.

This week's Thursday Thriller is From Beyond.

Producer Brian Yuzna and director Stuart Gordon, the creative team behind Re-Animator, reunited in 1986 for another dip into the literary works of H.P. Lovecraft. They brought actors Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton with them.

Combs plays physicist Crawford Tillinghast, whose mentor Dr. Pretorius (Ted Sorel) invented a water heater with a glass globe and some tuning forks on top. He calls it a resonator. When you turn the water heater on, the tuning forks glow purpledy-pink and the vibrations stimulate your pineal gland so you can see all the day-glo jellyfish and eels that are swimming invisibly in the air around you at all times. The tradeoff is now the jellyfish and eels can see you, too, and they might want to bite your face. Other side effects may include a BDSM fetish.

One night after playing with the machine, Pretorius's head goes missing and Tillinghast is arrested for murder because there's no such thing as habeas caput. (That joke would be funnier if you went to the library more often.)

Psychiatrist Katherine McMichaels (Crampton) is called in to determine whether Tillinghast's alibi that Pretorius was devoured by a head-sucking demon from another dimension means he's way too batshit to stand trial. Under the police escort of Sgt. Bubba Brownlee (Ken Foree), they return to Pretorius's house so Tillinghast can either destroy the machine or turn it on again so he can show McMichaels exactly what happened or something. He seems ambivalent about which is the best course. He turns it on anyway, and Pretorius appears looking like a low-budget, John Carpenter's The Thing or a high-budget Basket Case.

Once McMichaels sees how the machine works, her own pineal gland engorged, she can't get away from it and develops a taste for leather.

I may have already told you too much, but I at least have to mention Combs's excellent performance as a monster in the third act, in which he runs around in his hospital jammies with his third eye dangling out of his forehead, sucking people's brains out their eyeholes.

This is a good movie. Is it as good as Re-Animator? No, but not many movies are.

From Beyond streams on Hoopla.

"The only thing that helps is to tear living things to pieces. I can't be like this!"

I find it funny, mortals, that among you in this day and age there are still men, if they can be called that, who aren't entirely comfortable with the workings of the female body.

There are men among horror fans who will brag about how they've watched the most depraved trash imaginable and it didn't phase them one jot. They join horror fan groups on Facebook and post things like, "Movies don't scare me. Am I weird?" And yet, some of these same men wouldn't be caught dead holding their girlfriend's purse for a minute while she goes and looks at shoes, or Devil forbid, buying her tampons and ice cream while he's out, because she's home doubled over with cramps and just needs to have a good cry.

It seems like either instance would be an opportunity for the bro-dude in question to brag -- "Yes, I am doing something kind for the woman into whom I push my enormous, veiny, heterosexual penis vigorously and frequently." Instead, they show their fear of being seen as something less than manly, and in the case of picking up feminine hygiene products for their ladies fair, their abject abhorrence at the human menstrual cycle.

I'm pretty sure those guys are going to hate the movie I'm getting ready to tell you about.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Ginger Snaps.

John Fawcett directed this 2000 comedic-tragedy about the Fitzgerald sisters, Brigitte (Emily Perkins) and Ginger (Katharine Isabelle).

The teenage girls are obsessed with death. They made their first suicide pact when they were 8 years old. For a class project they turn in a slideshow of themselves bloodied up, looking like they've killed themselves. As much dismay as this behavior causes their poor mother Pamela (portrayed hilariously by Mimi Rogers), she doesn't find it nearly as upsetting as the fact that neither of them have gotten their periods yet.

As you might expect, the Fitzgerald sisters aren't exactly popular at school. When Brigitte gets caught talking shit about a popular girl named Trina (Danielle Hampton), Trina knocks her down onto a mutilated dog carcass.

There are a lot of those around town, lately. Seems there's a beast at large.

Ginger and Brigitte conspire to take pictures of Trina's dog all gored up like they did themselves in the classroom slideshow and convince her the dog was killed by the beast -- or something like that -- but then Ginger gets her period, and then gets attacked by the beast.

She heals quickly and starts to change. Her hair is different. She starts dressing sexy. Pamela, ignorant of the monster attack, bakes Ginger a cake in honor of her newfound womanhood. The sisters argue about what's suddenly come over Ginger. Ginger insists that it's normal for her to be hungry, horny, moody and violent, but Brigitte swears that it's all lycanthropy-related, especially the tail, and insists on finding a cure. When Ginger starts feeling compelled to mutilate dogs in the neighborhood, she concedes the point, but like becoming a woman, eventually learns to like being a werewolf.

So you've got a menstruation allegory wrapped up in a werewolf story. Get it? Because once a month Ginger turns into a raging bitch. Corny, but fun.

Isabelle and Perkins play well together, and there are decent creature and gore effects throughout. As werewolf comedies go, I'd place it up there with WolfCop and An American Werewolf in London. As feminist horror goes, it pairs well with 2007's Teeth.

Ginger Snaps streams on Amazon Prime.