"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.