"Strange things have been going on at the hospital. Pieces of corpses have been disappearing."

I don't do it often in the summertime, but this past weekend I manifested myself in the flesh on earth to check in on a fat mortal I know.

I said to him, "Whoa, are you less fat than you used to be?"

He started telling me how he's been on the Kito diet.

I was momentarily impressed by his candor and grim determination.

I said, "You're just telling everybody about this?"

He said, "Why not? I'm proud of the results I've gotten just by switching bread for bacon."

Then I realized he meant the keto diet, not the Kito diet.

You see, they're two very different things. The Kito diet involves eating raw human hearts, entrails, and all the eyeballs you can pluck.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Zombie Holocaust.

This 1980 film was directed by Marino Girolami.

Alexandra Delli Colli plays Lori Ridgeway, who works at a university hospital assisting a surgeon in training medical students. In her free time, she helps an anthropology professor with his research. She also wears nice underwear, we learn as we watch her change clothes a couple of times.

Someone at the hospital keeps cutting parts off the training cadavers. They don't call the police because, as the surgeon explains, "a police investigation would give us a bad name."

Then, they catch an orderly trying to eat a heart out of one of the cadavers. Rather than hang around and ask questions, he throws himself out the window. They find a tattoo on his chest -- the sign of Kito. It matches a symbol on a sacrificial dagger Lori has hanging on the wall of her apartment, except when she gets home, the place has been ransacked, the dagger stolen.

Call the police now? Nah. Instead they organize an expedition to the Asiatic island of Kito to get to the bottom of things. Dr. Peter Chandler (Ian McCulloch) leads the excursion and invites Lori to tag along. Reporter Susan Kelly (Sherry Buchanan) joins them, and so do some other people who don't live long enough for me to bother learning their names.

They stop for a rest at the home of Dr. Obrero (Donald O'Brien), who lives on an island near their destination. He assists them by providing them with guides and giving them directions. While the party is having drinks and delivering exposition, Lori retires to her room, gets undressed and finds a rotten, severed head in her bed, along with the mark of Kito painted on her sheets in blood. Obrero tells Lori to calm down.

The next day, their boat has engine trouble and they decide to pull over to another island where they find cannibals, zombies, zombie cannibals and the mark of Kito everywhere. Numerous minor characters get impaled on bamboo and guts torn out and eaten by naked savages.

In my favorite scene, Chandler and Lori try to escape on a raft, but can't get the motor started. A zombie closes in on them, the motor starts, but there's no time to hop in the boat, so Chandler uses the propeller to chop the zombie's skull into little bits.

There are plenty of Italian zombie movies, and plenty of Italian cannibal movies, all of which are disgusting gore fests, but this one is special because it's got both zombies and cannibals. The outboard motor sequence is one of a kind.

The musical accompaniment to the scenes of horrific violence sometimes sounds like it would fit better in a video game, but IMDb trivia says it's actually the music to Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals. The zombie makeups aren't the best, but the flow of gore makes up for it.

Zombie Holocaust streams on Shudder.