"You do with mogwai what your society has done with all of nature's gifts. You do not understand."

Mortals, as you look forward to another trip around the sun, and you engage in your ritualistic feasting and giving of stuff to one another, a lot of you still find yourselves with the same old dilemma: what are you going to watch tonight?

Given that so many of you think the seasonal festivities are about family, I guess I'll go ahead and tell you about a movie you can watch with the kids, the Christmas movie that tells you there is no Santa Claus.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Gremlins.

This 1984 Joe Dante film is about what happens when inventor named Rand Peltzer (Hoyt Axton) kinda half-buys, half-steals an exotic pet from a Chinatown shop owner who doesn't want to sell it to him. The pet is called a mogwai. Rand gives the mogwai as a Christmas present to his son Billy (Zach Galligan).

There are three strict rules for raising mogwai and because Billy is the kind of guy who thinks no one will notice he brought his dog to work at the bank, he immediately breaks two of them, and that results in multiplication and metamorphosis from a single, kindly mogwai to hundreds of conniving, nasty gremlins that destroy the whole town. They run over the snow plow driver with his own snow plow, screw up traffic lights so cars crash, break everything in sight, get drunk and trash a bar.

I love this movie for two reasons:

1.) The gremlin that explodes in the microwave.

2.) The monologue in which the female lead Kate (Phoebe Cates) explains she doesn't like Christmas because her dad fell halfway down the chimney playing Santa Claus, broke his neck, and rotted there for five days before anyone found him. You simultaneously feel sympathy for Kate, and laugh at her for having such a stupid dad.

What else can I say? It's probably the best puppet movie ever. Corey Feldman is in it. You'll never get the theme song unstuck from your head. It both exemplifies and condemns Western culture's decadent obsession with novelty.

Gremlins streams on Amazon Prime.

Oh hey, and if you like strange, funny, scary, violent Christmas stories, my buddy Todd Merriman just published his story "Santa Claus Meets Frankenstein" as an e-book on Amazon Kindle. I read it. It's worth the dollar.