"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.