"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.