"I'm running this monkey farm now, Frankenstein."

So I've been pumping my barbed, three-headed phallus into Omar Mateen's raw, shredded buttocks for almost a week now, during which time it occurred to me that one of the unique thrills of watching your mortal society decay is how different groups of people react to the same crisis.

For example, some people might find it distasteful to learn that each head of my phallus has taken its own turn whilst little baby demons have fucked Omar in the earholes. Others might think you need stricter gun laws. Some people might favor the notion that Belial had his fingers in Mateen's nostrils, holding the mass murderer's head up so he could push is own quill-frilled member down the hateful, little bastard's blistered throat. Others suggest that his rampage of violence was an act of Islamic extremism.

Friends, Americans, Mortals, whether you believe that Mateen was so deeply conflicted about his homosexuality that he felt compelled to destroy everything about it he possibly could, including himself, or you think that he's just the kind of mean-spirited fuckface that cheered all the bus ride home from school on 9-11, you can rest assured that Omar has been passed around like a hot dish of savory, creamy, heavily -buttered mashed potatoes on Thanksgiving Day, and will be for several weeks until my horde of evil souls, especially the cenobites and the razor-quimmed succubi, have had their fill and pause for a postcoital cigarette.

Omar's never been happier. I would put pictures up on Grindr to show you if they hadn't already suspended my account. 

The whole situation reminds me of a movie I like. It's about a handful of bickering people with widely disparate ideas about how any of them are going to survive.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Day of the Dead.

This 1985 film by writer-director George A. Romero is the third in his five-part Living Dead trilogy. By this point, the dead have risen, eaten everybody, and are just kind of wandering the Earth in search of table scraps, and no one has ever figured out why. 

A team of scientists has been saved the fate of being ripped apart by flesh-eating dead people and given military protection so they could find the answers to the zombie puzzle. A helicopter pilot and a radio operator round out the crew to help search for other survivors. They're never very successful. 

The army guys help gather undead specimens to facilitate the scientific research. It's dangerous work, and soon all that's left are the racist assholes. They even lose their commander, and the next smartest racist asshole takes over.

Meanwhile, one of the egghead scientists thinks it's a good idea to keep specimens chained to the wall while he figures out how to tame them. He's one of those "so smart he's stupid" types. 

As supplies run low and more brave soldiers die, everyone begins to realize that teamwork hasn't exactly worked out for them yet. No one wants to die in the bunker, but as the dead outnumber the living 400,000 to 1, where do they go?

Day of the Dead features a lot of especially cool makeup F/X work by Tom Savini. It streams on Shudder, Hulu Plus and YouTube. 

"And you can tell all your scum friends that things are gonna change in this town."

When Deadpool came out in February, you couldn't swing a baby by its ankles without clubbing some fanboy gushing in his pants about it. 

Finally, an R-rated superhero!

What about Kick-Ass? What about Blade?

What's so great about an R rating anyway? A secret committee of prudish schoolmarms paid by the movie studios counts the number of times people say "fuck" and issues a certificate that says it's OK to show the film to the people the studio wanted to show it to anyway. 

How about an unrated superhero? How about a superhero that stops an armed robbery by ripping a perpetrator's arm off and beating him with it, then deep frying another perp's hands? How about a superhero that stops a drug dealer in a gym by crushing his head with weights?

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Toxic Avenger.

The 1984 film was directed by Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman. It's about an archetypal 98-pound weakling named Melvin (Mark Torgl) who works as a janitor at the Tromaville Health Club. Some jocks with a penchant for vehicular homicide decide to play a cruel prank on Melvin and -- you know how the old saying goes: "It's all fun and games until someone falls into a vat of negligently stored toxic waste." Melvin runs home, skin a'bubbling and on fire. 

In an especially cool transformation scene, Melvin's muscles bubble and bulge until he emerges as a muscle-bound monster with a Spidey-like sense of when evil is afoot.

With his mop in hand, the monster hero (Mitch Cohen) sets out on a rampage of maiming, mauling and mutilating evil-doers wherever he finds them. He seeks to clean up Tromaville, NJ, and get his revenge on those that did him wrong. In the process he finds love. There's lots of gore and tits. 

The Toxic Avenger has spawned three sequels, a children's cartoon series called The Toxic Crusaders, and a Broadway Musical. It streams on Amazon Prime and YouTube.

"She's a real carpenter's dream -- flat as a board and needs a screw!"

I've noticed that while this blog is proving a successful tool for stealing dozens of American souls every week, I'm also grabbing a few more from all around the world in the process.

This is exciting news! I fully expected I could rely on fatass Americans to sloth it up in front of their favorite electronic devices and fill their minds with images of gratuitous sex, violence, rape, murder, human bondage, animal cruelty, ritual sacrifice, cannibalism and exploding brains, but I never guessed they would be into those sorts of things in the United Arab Emirates. I considered that I would attract a few readers from countries where English is the dominant language like Australia and the UK, but did not predict my second-highest following would be in Germany.

I got so stoked I sent half the marketing department back to the Eighth Circle. Danke schön, and to my one reader in Iceland, tell a friend about the blog, will you?

I'd like to tell my international audience about a debate that's raging in America right now, if I could. See, some people think they were born with the wrong genitals and that makes a lot of other people mad.

So you get a lot of politicians saying, "We have to keep paedophiles out of the public restrooms where our children pee and poop," and instead of telling Catholic priests, prominent congressmen and sandwich salesmen which water closets they can visit, they make a bunch of rules about the people who are already frustrated with their naughty bits, which seems to make the people who are mad at those people happy, sort of.

I blame all this confusion on that capricious megalomaniac you mortals call God. After all, if you tell all the males they have to chop the tips of their penises off for 5,000 years, you're going to have some people feeling ambivalent about their special purpose.
 

Back in 1983 they didn't have such arguments in America. That's why this week's Thursday Thriller is Sleepaway Camp.

When this Robert Hiltzik film came out, the rules and roles were still pretty clear: girls couldn't drive motorboats and men dressed like men.

Sort of.

The story centers around a girl named Angela (Felissa Rose) who watched her father die in a boating accident when she was very young and was sent to live with her weird Aunt Martha (Desiree Gould). Martha sends Angela and her protective, foul-mouthed cousin Ricky (Jonathan Tierston) to camp for the summer.

At camp, the painfully shy Angela puts everyone on edge. How come she doesn't talk? Maybe it's because she has a goofy accent, but that doesn't stop anyone else in the movie from blabbing away.

Angela becomes a target for the paedophile cook, snotty bunkmates, abusive counselors and a lot of horny guys in tight running shorts. A fair number of them die, some of them in amusing ways.

 

Sleepaway Camp streams on Shudder and YouTube.

"It's not a monster. It's just a doggy."

Is it fair to judge a film alongside the work of literature on which it is based?

Believe me, I had to add a whole circle down here just for condescending assholes who run around telling everybody, "The book is so much better than the movie."

And trust me when I tell you that the only reason I want anyone literate is to read my blog or an incantation that would summon me to manifest myself in the flesh on Earth. Generally, the less you know about words, the more likely you are to gloss over the fine print in contracts. Think of it this way, if Robert Johnson had more fancy book-learnin', you wouldn't have rock 'n' roll today, nor would I have been able to subject you to embarrassing white blues.

On the other hand, everyone who made it to 10th grade figured out you can't pass an English final by just watching the movie, because there are major differences in what makes a film work and what makes a novel work.

So taking that quandary to heart, this week's Thursday Thriller is Cujo.

This 1983 Lewis Teague film is based on the novel by Stephen King. It's about a lady named Donna Trenton (Dee Wallace) who, through a complex series of most unfortunate of events, gets stuck with her 4-year-old son Tad (Danny Pintauro) for a couple of days in the middle of summer, out at the ass end of nowhere in a broken down Pinto, and a 200-pound, rabid St. Bernard won't let them out for water.

Donna's an adulteress, and her husband Vic (Daniel Hugh Kelly) just found out about her infidelity as he was getting ready to leave town on business, so he forgot to call Joe Camber (Ed Lauter) to see if he could fix Donna's Pinto. Even if he had called, Joe couldn't come to the phone, but Donna might not have tried to take her car out to his farm, where the only living inhabitant to be found was Cujo.

Is the movie any different than the book? Yes, the dog is too young, spry, and clean. This guy's too skinny, that guy's too muscly, that kid doesn't look nearly enough like yours, and no one is being big enough an asshole.


Does that mean the movie's bad? No, the book is over 300 pages long. Everyone has time to be an asshole. Movies have to stick around 90 minutes or else they become a nuisance. Some assholatry had to be cut for time, so you still get to watch a killer dog terrorize a child.

Is the movie scary? Yes.

Is it better than the book? We're talking about Stephen King. He writes some really hateful assholes. If you never read King, you're going to miss out on passages like:

At quarter past eight that morning, Gary Pervier staggered out of his house in his pee-stained underwear shorts and urinated into the honeysuckle. In a perverse sort of way he hoped that someday his piss would become so rancid with booze that it would blight the honeysuckle. That day hadn't come yet.

So should you read the book before you watch the movie? If you want to. Either way I think you'll have fun.

Cujo: The movie streams on Netflix and the novel is probably available at your local library or used book store.

"I'm gonna suck your brain dry!"

I might have been a little harsh on Hulu last week. Sure, they purged all the Friday the 13th movies mere weeks before the magical day was upon us. Sure, they snuck some Lucio Fulci films off their roster, but they still have the Criterion Collection.

For now.

The Criterion Collection is cool. Its mission is to gather the greatest movies from around the world an publish them in the highest technical quality available. Predictably, a lot of their movies are highbrow, art-house fare, but every once in a while, they snag up a weirdo. The movie I want to tell you about is just such a movie.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Scanners.

 

 David Cronenberg directed this 1981 film about a bum named Cameron Vale (Steven Lack) who was cruising a shopping mall for table scraps one day when he could hear in his mind from across the food court what an awful, old woman was saying about him. He stares at her and she starts to have seizures. Then these two guys in much cleaner overcoats, chase him down, shoot him with a tranquilizer dart, and drag him away.

Meanwhile, a guy in a moustache addresses a theater of people and tells them he will scan them, in other words read their minds, one by one. Michael Ironside plays Darryl Revok, the psychic's first volunteer and what happens next is one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of cinema.

Then Vale wakes up and meets Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) who explains the reason he's a bum is because he's a scanner, a kind of weaponized psychic. Ruth gives Vale his mission, which is to track down and stop Revok, because he's building his own army of scanners.

It's a lot like The X-Men, except way stranger and everyone has the same powers.  

Of course, you can't just track down and kill the world's most powerful mind-reader. He knows you're coming and sends people to get you first, which means Mr. 'Splodey-Head must not have been a very good scanner. He really should have seen that coming. 

Scanners is a lot of fun. Come for the head explosion, stay for the scrunchy-faced concentration. It streams on Hulu Plus.

 

"...that expression on her face is like pure fear, like something scared her to death."

I don't like to complain about the great movies that aren't available to stream for you law-abiding mortals. After all, across four subscription services and YouTube, there will always be some twisted tale of damnation, some lurid depiction of the depths of human cruelty, some trippy, nauseating brain-bender that challenges the mind as well as the gag reflex.

Yes mortals, I can always recommend you a unique viewing experience, but due to the frustratingly fluid, mysterious and seemingly arbitrary nature of how streaming services acquire and keep movies on tap, specific titles sometimes fall through the cracks.

For instance, here we are on Thursday the 12th, and I've been waiting for months to review Friday the 13th and tell you where to find it, but alas, Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime have both recently dropped the entire franchise from their rolls of all the movies you get to watch at no additional charge on your large-screen external device.

Here's Kevin Bacon getting killed, anyway.

 

Now that's out of the way, this week's Thursday Thriller is City of the Living Dead.

This 1980 Lovecraft-inspired Lucio Fulci barf-o-rama is about psychic Mary Woodhouse (Katriona MacColl), who, in the middle of a seance, sees a vision of a priest (Fabrizio Jovine) hanging himself in a graveyard, and the dead begin to rise. She dies immediately, but a couple days later, already buried, she rediscovers her love of breathing as she awakes in a coffin six feet under ground. It might have only been three feet, as the gravediggers seem too interested in discussing pornographic magazines to have done their job correctly. Christopher George plays Peter Bell, a reporter sniffing for a story when he hears her cries for help and rescues her from suffocation by bashing in the lid of her coffin with a pick-axe, which falls heavily within inches of her face the whole time he's chopping.

Once she's feeling better they surmise with the help of the head witch  that they must travel to Dunwich, where the priest hanged himself, for this blasphemous act has opened a gate to Hell, and if it is not closed by midnight on All Saint's Day, the dead will take over the world.

Or something.

It's not the easiest story to follow, but that's not why you watch Italian zombie movies. You want to see something that will put you off your fried calamari in tepid alfredo sauce. 

You want to see the part where the weird kid finds an inflatable doll in an abandoned house. Just as he's getting ready to fuck it, he gets distracted by what looks like an uncooked, person-shaped meat loaf covered in live, wriggling earthworms.

You want to see the part where a girl goes to park with her beau in the cemetery, then sees the priest, cries tears of blood, then literally pukes all of her guts up. 

You want to see walls that bleed and sudden gusts of maggots.

You want to spend your Friday the 13th thinking, "What in the hell did I watch last night?"

City of the Living Dead is no longer on Hulu Plus, but you can find it on Shudder.

"The more you rape their senses, the happier they are."

So after last week's post, a couple guys, I guess trying to flex how hardcore they are, pointed out to me that only a couple scenes in Faces of Death were real, which I thought I made clear in my review. Maybe they were disappointed because they only watch real snuff films. What's clear is they are nobody's fools and they don't mind picking an argument with a fictitious character to prove it.

To correct my oversight, I assure you that the movie I'm reviewing this week is 100 percent fake, except for all the butchering of live animals. Don't get too comfortable, though.  Legend has it the director had to appear in court to prove no one was actually murdered.

 

This week's Thursday Thriller is Cannibal Holocaust.

 The plot of this 1980 Ruggero Deodato film concerns Professor Harold Monroe (Robert Kerman), who is on a mission to find Alan Yates (Gabriel Yorke) and his friends, a group of young filmmakers who disappeared on a trip to make a documentary about the indigenous people of an Amazon region called the Green Inferno. Yes, Eli Roth made a cannibal movie in 2013 called The Green Inferno, and that is neither a coincidence nor especially important to know right now.

What is important to know is that Monroe only comes back to civilization with the film the kids shot, and boy did they bring back some brutal footage. There's rape, arson, impalement, turtle mutilation, and here's the twist, the natives aren't the perpetrators. It seems young Yates is into capturing the most extreme footage possible, and he'll stop at nothing to get it. In fact, the whole crew descends to committing the vilest atrocities to stage their footage of how the so-called "savages" live. Here's the even sicker part: some executives think there might be a market for such a thing.

Cannibal Holocaust is a provocative, puke-tastic experience that challenges viewers to think about how far they're willing to go for their own thrills and chills, as well as what it means to be civilized.  Moreover, it demonstrates that low-budget filmmakers were doing "found footage" roughly two decades before The Blair Witch Project came out, and it was a lot more disturbing.  

Cannibal Holocaust streams on Shudder and YouTube.