"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.

"...by eating the brains of this sacred animal a new source of wisdom would be inherited, bringing those who ate this delicacy closer to God."

A while back one of my readers sent me a message that said, "Oh Master of Things Dark and Unholy, I am jaded and numb to the efforts of contemporary Hollywood hacks trying to be scary. Tell me about a movie that will make me beg, 'Please don't let this be real.'"

I'm paraphrasing a bit, but dear reader, I assure you the violence in the movie I'm about to review is every bit as real as I am.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Faces of Death.

This 1978 documentary by John Alan Schwartz comprises a series of vignettes, some true, some staged, about death, narrated by Dr. Francis B. Gröss, and trust me, he be gross with a capital umlaut! The character is actually played by Michael Carr, so there's your first clue the film plays a little fast and loose with the truth.

Sure, the animal sequences at the beginning are pretty much the stuff of really violent nature documentaries and PETA recruiting videos, so by the time you get to the part where two guys kill a monkey in a restaurant by driving a nail into its skull, then scooping out its brain and passing it around the table as an hors d'oeuvre, you might not be entirely sure it's a fake or not. If you're not too busy wondering how much more you can take, you'll have a good time trying to spot the bogus footage from the real, as Dr. Guh-RO-O-OSS delivers moral insights on such varied topics as vegetarianism, capital punishment and safe spelunking practices.

In addition to the monkey scene, highlights include the electrocution, a cannibalistic ritual blood-orgy, and a sheriff getting eaten by an alligator while a TV reporter bearing some serious moose knuckle takes you there live. You'll definitely have to ask yourself: Is it real?

Faces of Death streams on Shudder and YouTube.

"You come out here and stick your life in my face! PTHOO! Stick your fingers in my pie!... I'll eat the heart of your stinkin' memory. I'll eat the brains of your kids' kids!""

I've learned a few things from my time hanging around America these past few years: Americans treasure their freedom, and if nothing else, they are a proud people -- so proud that you can't tell them a damn thing. If you try to offer helpful suggestions, like, "Vaccinate your children," or, "It will take some getting used to, but the metric system really is easier," or even, "If you drive down that road your whole family will be raped and murdered by radioactive cannibal hillbillies," they'll tell you where you can stick your suggestions and wave a "Don't Tread On Me" flag at you.

It reminds me of this movie, where a family on vacation gets stuck in the Arizona desert, in a mostly uninhabited stretch of apocalyptic waste where the Air Force has been trying out new bombs, because Dad refused to follow the directions the man at the gas station gave him to get back on the Interstate.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes, not to be confused with the 2006 remake.

I'm not here to kick sand on the remake, but the original feels so much more visceral. It came out a few years after Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and a year before John Carpenter's Halloween. Craven, along with producer Sean Cunningham had already left a mark on the horror genre with The Last House on the Left, but had not yet made himself a household name with A Nightmare on Elm Street,  so the horror tropes we view as cliches today were still fresh. The grain of the film itself bestows it with a literal, visual grittiness rarely seen since, and while the remake reaped the benefits of the massive leaps in makeup F/X over almost three decades, no prosthetic makeup appliance in the world can make someone as convincingly ugly as Michael Berryman naturally is with his weird, pointy, shaved head.

Berryman plays Pluto, one of four brothers in a family of outcasts who've been surviving in the wasteland on whatever they could find, steal or kill. Their patriarch is Papa Jupiter (James Whitworth), who'd been left for dead in the desert by his own father (John Steadman) when he was a boy. The family's food supply is running out when a station wagon full of fresh suburbanites breaks down in the middle of their turf. The mutant people terrorize the city folk in an extravaganza of pillage, rape, canicide, and flaming cactus crucifixion. They even kidnap the baby so they can eat it.

Russ Grieve delivers a convincing performance as Big Bob Carter, the archetype asshole dad. Virginia Vincent also stands out in her portrayal of Ethel Carter, the sweet, clueless mom who wishes everyone would watch their language. Don Peake's excellent score keeps the tension bubbling throughout.

The Hills Have Eyes is a classic and it streams on Shudder and YouTube.

"Don't you dare ruin my dinner!"

In these socially aware days, with all its spoiler alerts and trigger warnings, with the kids and their campus safe zones, with feminists and their cries of rape culture, with meninists and their cries of, of.... look, a man can cry, too, OK? Back off before he starts swinging. Trust me, bro, you do not want to call this dude out on his latent homosexuality. Just because a guy rants on the Internet about how badly he doesn't want to look at Charlize Theron for 90 minutes, doesn't mean he can't lay you out... in a man's way.... with violence, I mean.... Good, old-fashioned, heterosexual violence... properly done by a man....

We good, bro?

Good, because I'm trying to say the words "torture porn" get clumsily tossed around by today's kids to describe gore-infused suspense-thrillers like Saw 2. Come on, have you never been to a Times-Square grindhouse, or a drive-in, or even seen the inside of a store that rented out VCRs?

Torture porn, indeed. This week's Thursday Thriller is Bloodsucking Freaks.

Here's your trigger warning: This 1976 Joel M. Reed film is specifically designed to shock and offend you.

If you object to nude women being tortured and degraded while a jaded audience looks on and laughs, this movie will offend you.

If you've been raised to believe it's not okay to paint a target on a woman's backside and use her, down on all fours, as a dartboard, this movie will offend you.

If you appreciate good acting, this movie will offend you.

However, if you can overcome these minor moral obstacles, you're in for a hell of a show because they don't make 'em like this anymore.

The story is about Sardu (Seamus O'Brien), a human trafficker who runs an off-Broadway "Theater of the Macabre" in his spare time. His audience watches him narrate as his dwarf sidekick Ralphus (Louie De Jesus) cuts off a nude woman's fingers and crushes her skull in a vice. Sardu assures them what they are watching is real, while the audience generally assumes it is not and has a good, hearty laugh at the poor woman's expense. One person who isn't laughing, though, is art critic Creasy Silo (Alan Dellay), who says the whole thing is not only fake, but badly done at that.  He refuses to give Sardu the dignity of any review, even a negative one.

So Sardu sends Ralphus to kidnap Silo, as well as prima ballerina Natasha Di Natalie (Viju Krem). His plan is to break both of their wills, so he may force Di Natalie to dance in his show, and thus force Silo to review it. Meanwhile Di Natalie's boyfriend, football star Tom Maverick (Niles McMaster) and Police Sgt. John Tucci (Dan Fauci) search for the missing dancer.

Alas, all S and no M make Sardu a dull boy, so in the evenings he likes to unwind by letting his slaves torture him.

 

Bloodsucking Freaks streams on Amazon Prime and in various alternate language formats across YouTube. The special effects should keep you from taking it too seriously.

"This centennial is a centennial of blood vengeance!"

Something a lot of people don't realize about me is that I'm into flags.

I love flags. I love to see them flapping in the wind. I love them at full-mast, half-mast, upside down. I even love them when they're on fire.

As an enthusiast of flags, and frankly, anything anyone feels compelled to say a little prayer to that isn't God, I've come to understand that not everyone likes every flag. Sure, most people have a flag they prefer over all the others, but some flags even cause anger and hurt feelings. Then the people who like those flags get angry and have hurt feelings at the people who don't like their flag. People die for flags. More importantly, people kill for flags.

When a piece of fabric is imbued with so much power, I'm a big fan. That's why this week's Thursday Thriller is Two Thousand Maniacs.

This 1964 film by auteur Herschell Gordon Lewis is not his goriest film, but IMDb says it's his personal favorite. Plus, it's got the Confederate Stars and Bars everywhere. 

The story is about two carloads of tourists who get misdirected from the highway to Florida and find themselves in a backwater Georgia town called Pleasant Valley. The year is 1965 and Pleasant Valley is celebrating its centennial, at which the lost northerners are to be the guests of honor, by which I mean ritual murder victims.

See, the yokels of Pleasant Valley are still sour about losing the Civil War, so every 100 years they convene and kill off a few yankees in the most festive of ways. 

The acting is stiff, the gore effects corny and the pacing slow, but there's something about this movie I like, and it's not just the flags. For all its flaws there's something clever about it, like when the bluegrass pickers are singing Flatt and Scruggs's "Roll In My Sweet Baby's Arms" as a severed arm turns on a spit over an open fire. It's a pun, and a bad one, and I smiled.

Two Thousand Maniacs stars Playboy's Miss June 1963 Connie Mason and streams on Shudder and YouTube.

PS -- Have you ever wanted to terrorize people for money? Do you live in the Louisville area? Do you have some free time come this fall? I'm looking for a few good monsters to help me collect souls down at The Devil's Attic. Send an e-mail to thedevilsattic@hotmail.com to find out if you've got what it takes to join the best haunted house cast in town. Live the nightmare, and make sure and tell 'em Old Scratch sent ya.