"You haven't changed, I see. You've always loved violence."

It's a real bitch when you're denied your birthright. You get promised all kinds of things your whole life and you make one little slip up, like, say, starting an insurrection and leading an army of rebellious angels in a war against Yahweh to conquer Heaven and rule over all creation, and you get banished from paradise and cast into the lake of fire for all eternity. 

C'est la vie, right? It reminds me of this movie I watched on Shudder last night. 

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Whip and the Body, directed by Mario Bava.

Christopher Lee does not play Dracula in this 1963 Gothic romance. Instead, he plays a domineering prick named Kurt who wears a black cape. He returns to his family's castle to wish his little brother Christian (Tony Kendall)  well on his engagement to Kurt's own former fiancée Nevenka (Daliah Lavi), a stunning brunette who wears a lot of eye shadow.

If that sounds over your head, don't fret. I'm cramming a lot of info in a small space. The dialogue actually runs something like this:

 SERVANT:

Master! It's Kurt! He's returned!

KURT:

Yes, it is I, Kurt. I've returned.

Kurt's reception is a little chilly, though, because last time he was home he seduced a servant girl and abandoned her, so she killed herself with a special dagger that's since been enshrined in a bell jar. Since then, his dad Count Menliff (Gustavo De Nardo) cut him off from his inheritance and his presumably arranged marriage to Nevenka. So, while yes, Kurt did come home to congratulate his brother,  he also came back to try to get his money and his woman back.

Kurt and Nevenka later bump into each other on the beach, and, after a heated exchange, he throws his cape down on the white-sanded, Mediterranean shoreline, and horsewhips her until her shirt tears open. It turns out she's into that sort of thing, and they start making out with the surf splashing against the rocks in the background.

When Kurt retires for the night, his curtains attack him and he gets stabbed in the throat with the bell-jar dagger. He returns as a vengeful ghost and after that things get a little fucked up.

I ordinarily wouldn't mention where a movie was shot, but the scenery of Tor Caldara in Lazio, Italy, is noteworthy. It's so gorgeous it ranked 23rd in 1,001 Places to Debase Yourself At The Hands of A Sexual Sadist Before You Die.

The Whip and the Body isn't just a ghost story.  With its exotic location, themes of family drama and sadomasochism, and period costuming, it's more like a Harlequin romance gone horribly wrong, or Fifty Shades of Grey gone horribly right. It's fun to look at.

"This vortex of torment will whirl for all eternity."

Every year around Halloween, I hear my faithful mortals whining about Christmas stuff being on the shelves in the stores already, and how the big box stores are making their employees work on Thanksgiving. It's like JC's birthday is swallowing all the other holidays.

This is nothing new. Just look at his rebirthday. Never mind that it's never been set on a specific day, and you have to resort to some moon-based, pagan calculus just to figure out when it is. Though he insisted on that, not so he could have just a rebirthday, but rather a rebirthday weekend. Don't you hate people like that? No one calls him on it, because a lot of people get Friday off work. 

But three days isn't enough, oh no! The whole week before gets called Holy Week. So now his rebirthday takes seven days. Does he stop there? Ha! 

His rebirthday party actually starts in February on Mardi Gras, then you gotta walk around the next day all hungover with dirt on your forehead, and be good and say you're sorry for the next 40 days. Do you know anyone else who gets a 40-day rebirthday party, during most of which people aren't allowed to have fun? I don't.

Hardly surprising for a guy who says if you don't love him in exactly the way he's spelled out for you, he'll send you to Hell.

In case you were wondering what that's like, I have the perfect movie for you.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Jigoku, or, if you prefer the English title, Sinners of Hell.

This 1960 Japanese film was directed by Nobuo Nakagawa and stars Shigeru Amachi, Utako Mitsuya and Yoichi Numata.

It's not about samurais, nor does it feature a guy in a rubber monster suit smashing a scale model of a city, which were both fairly dominant tropes in Japanese cinema at the time.

Instead, Jigoku is a twisty, film noir thriller, presented in lurid color, about a college student named Shimizu who has fallen in with a bad crowd and accidentally murders a yakuza. 

This sparks off a plethora of intertwining stories about sex, revenge, blackmail, medical malpractice, geishas and rotten fish heads. Then after about an hour, everyone dies and we're treated to 40 minutes of seeing them get their eternal comeuppance at the hands of Enma, the King of Hell.

I have no complaint with this kabuki-style depiction of me, even if I do look like I'm about to start a death metal band, because the tortures are nightmarishly balls-trippy. Some of them are downright grisly. IMDb says Jigoku is the first movie to use gore FX, and if the fate of the flayed doctor isn't your new favorite thing you ever saw, my name ain't Satan Himself.

Jigoku streams on Hulu Plus, subtitles included.

"Is this your wife? What a lovely throat."

Erin go bragh and top o' the mornin' to ya! It's St. Patrick's Day, and I have a movie for you that's as Irish as Lucky Charms and green beer.

But first, the famous deaths roll call. Just one this week. I'll make it quick.

Keyboardist Keith Emerson passed this week in an apparent suicide, bringing an abrupt halt to a prolific career in trying to be as cool as a guitar player.  He nearly succeeded when he made his contribution to horror in 1980, creating the soundtrack to Dario Argento's Inferno.

Now that's out of the way, let's kiss this Blarney Stone.

I've spent a lot of time in America these past couple centuries, and I love how the Yankee Doodle Dandies have taken what was once the somber observance of the death of the man who brought Christianity to the Emerald Isle and turned it into a festival of violent self-debasement and public vomiting.

The real beauty of it is a lot of the participants aren't even Irish. They sport plastic green derbies and shamrock buttons in appropriation of a culture of which they are completely ignorant, and they get a pass, because "everyone is Irish on St. Patrick's Day."

So this week's Thursday Thriller is F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu. 

It's a German film that was released in 1922, which is also the year my favorite movie came out. 

The story is about -- well, OK, it's just Dracula, which was written by an Irishman, Bram Stoker. Murnau changed some details around, mostly names and locations, to avoid paying Stoker's widow for the copyrights.

For example, London becomes Bremen, a town made famous by an ass, a bitch, a pussy and a cock. Count Dracula becomes Count Orlok (Max Schreck). Harker becomes Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim). Mina becomes Ellen (Greta Schroder). Renfield becomes Knock (Alexander Granach) and so on.

If you look past the obvious plagiarism, Nosferatu is a pretty cool film. Schreck's performance as the Count is iconic, giving us a much creepier looking vampire than later cinematic incarnations.

Likewise, Granach gives us a sinister and manic Mr. Knock, with a wicked grin and some of the unruliest eyebrows ever committed to celluloid. 

Like a lot of silent horror films, Nosferatu relies heavily on shadow play to create an atmosphere of dread. It's interesting to see how they addressed technical limitations and solved problems at the time. Exterior shots were taken entirely in broad daylight, so night scenes were given a blue tint and day scenes were given yellow. 

Murnau and company didn't quite get away with the theft of Stoker's intellectual property. Mrs. Stoker sued and, according to IMDb, all prints of the film were to be destroyed. Lucky for us, some copies survived in foreign markets.

Nosferatu streams on Amazon Prime, Shudder and YouTube. Enjoy it in the spirit of ripping off the Irish.

Shit, I'm out of Guinness.

"You fools, this man is plotting our doom! We die at dawn! He is Caligari!"

In all my millennia at my day job, it's easy to grow jaded in my attitude toward death, but every so often, I get to see two souls reunited in such a way that even I have to admit warms my little, black heart. 

I'm talking, of course, about Nancy Reagan and Frank Sinatra. Long before she married The Gipper and later became FLOTUS, Reagan, then Nancy Davis, was an actress, mostly in westerns. She was in one horror movie, Donovan's Brain. I have a vague memory of this movie sucking, so I'm going to just say no to reviewing it. I have more important things to talk about. 

Ray Tomlinson, the inventor of email passed this week. His impact on modern society was incalculable, for without him nobody would know what that a with a circle around it was supposed to mean. 

Last but in no way the least, I received Beatles producer George Martin this week. Martin was one of my most prolific agents on Earth, as he introduced to the world the most influential rock 'n' roll four-piece of all time, and thus exposed teenagers to such lascivious concepts of twisting, shouting, loving each other do, and  holding hands. The Beatles may not have seemed overtly satanic to the layman, but the Fab Four were significant influences on the careers of the Rolling Stones, Ozzy Osbourne and Charles Manson, all of whom have been fantastic for my PR and recruiting. 

 

If you'd like to witness the pure hell Martin unleashed on the public consciousness, A Hard Day's Night is on Hulu Plus. That's not this week's Thursday Thriller, either. 

Daylight savings time is upon us again and I couldn't be happier because that means the Earth is rolling back toward Halloween. Don't forget to get to set your clocks forward on Sunday if you still depend on a clock that isn't somehow connected to satellite technology. For most of you, whatever timepiece you've come to rely on will reset itself for you. The downside is you might find last call comes early.

This auspicious occasion is just the kind of new awakening more primitive cultures would commemorate with ritual human sacrifice, but you mortals have turned into such politically correct pussies I know it's just too much to ask -- always kowtowing to the feminists, who want to know what business is it of anybody's whether she's a virgin or not, or worse, the Christians, who insist that God so loved the world he gave his only begotten son so ritual human sacrifice isn't necessary anymore. Lemme just tell ya, that ain't the Yahweh I grew up with. 

So instead I'm just going to ask that you join me on a journey through cinematic history. We're going to look all the way back to 1920 for the first feature-length horror film. Sure, Thomas Edison was just as quick to show off what his movie camera could do with an adaptation of Frankenstein as he was to use it to photograph the electrocution of an elephant as part of a smear campaign against Nikola Tesla, but those were shorts.

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

I know some of you are already saying, "Satan, what trickery is this? I've seen Portlandia and I already know this is the movie that turns you into a mailman."

To you I say, take your chances, because Caligari is a weird movie. Everything looks crazy -- the mountains, the carnival rides, the desks at the government clerk's offices. It's a silent film and even the intertitles look crazy. They're like a ransom note from a kidnapper who shows a lot of promise as an art student. The visual style of Caligari influenced not only the film movement we've come to know as German expressionism, but has been evident as recently as The Nightmare Before Christmas. 

This Robert Wiene film is about a traveling carnival showman (Werner Krauss) who keeps a somnambulist (Conrad Veidt) in a cabinet. At show time Caligari wakes the sleepwalker to answer questions from the audience, like "How long do I have to live?"

The somnambulist gives the guy til dawn. Then at night, under Caligari's spell, he goes out and murders the guy, which seems like cheating, but who am I to judge the ethics of a guy who travels the country with another guy in a box? 

The action is a little slow, but the first horror movie kill scene and overall atmosphere of visual strangeness make The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari worth checking out. It streams on Netflix, Shudder and YouTube. 

Don't forget to change your clock.

"Yeah, well, he's shark bait now."

Finally, Black History Month is over and I can get back to talking about what matters -- dead, white character actors. 

George Kennedy passed this week with little fanfare in the social media. Maybe the kids these days just don't know who he was.

No, he was not JFK's brother. 

Sure, he had more than 200 television and film appearances (lots of westerns), but who can blame them? One generation of audiences knows him as Paul Newman's sidekick in 1967's Cool Hand Luke, while the next knows him as second banana to Leslie Nielsen in the 1988 comedy classic The Naked Gun: From The Files of Police Squad, which no one has been able to enjoy since the mid-1990s because convicted thief-of-his-own-stuff O.J. Simpson is in it. Kennedy also featured prominently in 1987's Creepshow 2.

The same year The Naked Gun came out, Kennedy was in another movie, which is this week's Thursday Thriller. It's called Uninvited, not to be confused with The Uninvited from 2009 or 1944.

You know how in a lot of horror movies, they do that fakeout pop scare where the girl opens the closet, and something jumps out at her, but she's relieved to find it's just a cat? My buddies at Scary Noises had some fun with this premise.

Now imagine a movie where the cat is the worst thing that could pop out of that closet and you've got Uninvited. It's no ordinary cat, though. That would be stupid. Instead, writer/director  Greydon Clark crafted a tale of a cat that has a smaller, angrier cat living inside it. It was created accidentally in a lab of ill-defined purpose and it escapes. Whenever the fluffy kitty is threatened, the evil kitty crawls out of its mouth and attacks. The uglier cat is poisonous, and infects victims with throbbing skin bubbles that spring leaks, but never satisfactorily burst open. The leaky skin bubbles are fatal, it turns out.

Kennedy plays Mike Harvey, a white collar criminal who, along with his partner Walter Graham, is on his way to the Cayman Islands to retrieve their ill-gotten gains before they're both  caught by the Securities Exchange Commission.

Graham has been on the cover of Forbes magazine, if that helps you understand what kind of asshole he is. He invites two bikini girls  (Clare Corey and Shari Shattuck) on their Caribbean cruise, and the girls find three guys (Eric Larson, Rob Estes and Michael Holden) and the cat, and bring them along. The only reason Harvey and Graham agree is the ship's captain Rachel (Toni Hudson) has no crew to pilot the luxury yacht/getaway vessel.

Clu Gulager, the dad from Nightmare on Elm Street 2, is also in it.

Toy boats and ugly puppets figure heavily in this production, but unlike similar low-budget films in more recent years, Uninvited doesn't constantly nudge you in the ribs to let you know how clever it is being so dumb. There's a sincerity to Uninvited, as if they tried real hard to make a good movie. 

Not until the third act do you see the evil kitty crawl all the way out of fluffy's mouth, and, somehow more satisfying to watch, crawl back in. Until that point, I thought it was just a head and front paws that shot out of the fluffy cat's mouth, not unlike the second set of jaws on a moray eel.

The Naked Gun streams on Hulu Plus, but Uninvited is on Shudder. Both movies gave me some good hearty laughs. Uninvited does have some effective pop scares and it's rated PG-13 so you can make your kids watch it and no one will call CPS or anything.

"You must not react, no matter what you see or hear."

Black History Month is winding down and I have to say it has been one of the best I can remember in a long time. Beyoncé played the Super Bowl, an old lady got to meet the president, and a lot of famous white people died.

For example, just this week I got legendary cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, who worked on more than 80 films, including the Indiana Jones series. He did a couple of horror films, but it doesn't look like any black people were in them. Maybe he couldn't get the lighting right.

So instead of going into his filmography, I'd like to wrap up my Black History Month coverage with a quick look at one of the hottest black actors working in horror films today -- he might be the only black actor in horror films today -- Tony Todd, but you may know him better as Candyman.

At a towering 6'5" height, and carrying Dr. Claw's growl in his creepy-ass voice toolkit, Todd has earned himself 196 acting credits, largely in genre films. Even though Netflix has recently dropped Candyman from its lineup, it's not too hard to find him in something on your favorite streaming service. However, it can be tricky to find a good one that he's in for more than five minutes that isn't a sequel.

It's as if low-budget filmmakers, desperate to entice an audience, hire Todd for a day so they can put his name on their posters.

So what happens when Todd is the executive producer? In that case, he's in the movie a lot, just like in this week's Thursday Thriller, Sushi Girl.

That's funny. I don't remember her wearing a kimono.

 This Taranatino-esque 2012 crime drama was directed by Kern Saxton. How Tarantino-esque is it? Sonny Chiba plays a sushi chef, just like he did in Kill Bill. Todd plays Duke, the leader of a gang of jewel thieves who have a reunion over sushi to celebrate the end of their comrade's release from prison after five years. They ask him how he's doing, what was it like in there and WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO WITH THE DIAMONDS?

The one who did everyone else's time is named Fish (Noah Hathaway, aka Atreyu from The Never-Ending Story) and Fish isn't telling them what they want to hear, so they all play a nice, long round of I-Ain't-Nobody's-Bitch that includes the use of fists, chopsticks, a sock full of broken glass, and a pouch of what could be dentistry tools. An optometrist might find the bag just as useful. Or an Electrician. I don't know. I've never seen a dentist walk around with his shit in a bag before.

While all that wonderful violence is going on, there is a nude woman lying on the table with sushi rolls and their various garnishments all over her body. She's been instructed not to move and not to make eye contact, as she is the serving tray. It's traditional or something.

What else do you need to know?

Mark Hamill (aka the creepy old guy from the end of The Force Awakens) plays a gay guy. Danny Trejo pops in for a minute. I'm sure I'm supposed to recognize those other two guys, because this is that kind of movie, but I don't recognize them. The naked girl was in Zombeavers.

I'm not the Incredible Inman. You can look these things up yourself after you watch Sushi Girl. I had a little trouble following it toward the end because the shrieks of the damned were just way out of control that day, but I'll watch it again. It's on Netflix. 

I hope you had a great Black History Month. I have enjoyed myself immensely and you'll hear from me in March when I can be lazy about picking out movies again.

"There's a maniac lives there and he's dangerous."

I went down to the River Styx this morning to sign for my weekly delivery of lost souls.

For a moment I thought the boatman handed me the wrong shipping invoice.

Lee, Harper.

No way. A Pulitzer Prize novelist who won on her first try, as if she was just breaking in a new typewriter, and the cleaning lady found the manuscript sitting out and started showing it around? That was in 1960.

Maybe she figured she peaked, because she didn't try again until 2015.

What could she have done wrong? This lady was considered a national treasure for her stirring indictment of racial inequality in the Jim Crow South, as told through the eyes of a precocious 6-year-old who just don't know no better.

I'm talking, of course, about To Kill A Mockingbird, which Hollywood made into a movie in 1962, and is loaded with the kind of stuff you mortals are still barking at each other about on Facebook to this day. The movie is available on Netflix.

I can hear you already: "But Satan, that's not a horror movie."

What are you even talking about?

The story itself has been banned in more school districts than I can be bothered to look up and count, but that hasn't stopped teachers from using it. I happen to know of a select group of adults in southern Indiana who were assigned to read it three times during their school days in the late 1980s and early 90s. On average, they all actually read it 0.75 times.

To Kill A Mockingbird is about three children who are allowed to play outside unsupervised, and the mystery man who lives in a house their dad told them to stay away from. Legend has it the mystery man stabbed his own father with a pair of scissors. One day the children find little voodoo doll versions of themselves hidden in a tree outside his house.

Not scary enough? Fine, I'll raise the stakes with rape, incest, some malevolent hillbillies and a rabid dog. Hell, this movie is practically The Hills Have Eyes.

That still doesn't explain why I have Harper Lee now. Best I can figure, there's a commandment about honoring thy mother and father. A lot of the reason the story has been banned is because of its use of the N-word, which appears a few times, but if you consider the context, it's pretty obvious only hateful dumbasses say it. For example, a drunk Bob Ewell, who has accused a black man of raping and impregnating his daughter, calls Atticus Finch, the lawyer who has sworn to defend the accused, a "nigger lover." In context, the word is used to demonstrate the hatred and contempt white society held for black people in the mid-20th century.

So I guess Harper Lee is here because you can't just go around writing instant classics that would later be used to teach kids how shitty some of their grandparents were.

I don't make the rules, i just torment the damned.

I realize, of course, that talking so much about Harper Lee goes against my Black History Month rule, which is only to review horror movies in which at least one black person played a prominent role, and that's why I hearby nominate Lee for the posthumous title of Honorary Black Person!

Of course, I'm fucking with you. To Kill A Mockingbird can't be this week's Thursday Thriller. It's not even Thursday yet. I'm not even sending this to the copy department to put the film titles in italics. Check back Thursday and I'll review a movie with Tony Todd in it, maybe something that's actually like The Hills Have Eyes.