"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.

"I gave him life."

I didn't always have the prestige of a blogspot address. Way back when I still had my own personal Facebook page, I heard tell of an unfortunate mortal, so young, so innocent, she had not grown up going down to the local video store to rent horror movies. Streaming video was the only world she had ever known, and thus, she lived in slobbering ignorance of one of the greatest films of all time.

Her conundrum inspired me to report in a Facebook status that the movie was on Netflix, just sitting there, waiting to be discovered by a new generation of fans. That simple, three-sentence review I wrote has been lost to the ages, and the movie is still sitting there, which has to be some kind of record for a good movie to still be on Netflix.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Re-Animator.

This 1985 Stuart Gordon film is based on an H.P. Lovecraft story called "Herbert West: Re-Animator". Jeffrey Combs plays West, a student who studied under the famous Dr. Gruber in Munich. One day, they were doing an experiment and Dr. Gruber's eyeballs exploded all over the place, so West had to switch schools. He attends Miskatonic University and immediately confronts his instructor Dr. Hill (David Gale) with charges of plagiarism, and the two build an adversarial relationship consisting mostly of mad scientist smack talk.

West rents a room in the house of fellow medical student Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott). Cain is dating the dean's daughter, Megan Halsey (Barbara Crampton), who spends a fair amount of her screen time naked. West shows Cain the special reagent he developed with Gruber. The reagent raises the dead. If you could raise the dead you'd be the best doctor ever, right? So why not study it?

There are really only two problems:

1.) West can never seem to find a fresh enough cadaver. Mere minutes of decomposition so compromises the specimens so on returning to life, they come back as juiced-up rage zombies.

2.) Miskatonic University frowns on medical research about raising the dead, which seems pretty conservative considering its reputation in the Lovecraft mythos as a place where people are always summoning trans-dimensional demons because the library keeps loaning out the instructions. You'd think they had admitted West on the strength of his essay, entitled, "I have a syringe full of glowing green shit that makes dead people jump up off the gurney and try to kill everyone they see," but that's not the case, I guess. If West and Cain are caught, their careers are over.

What Re-Animator does so well is blend silliness and gore. The mid-1980s saw a lot of horror-comedies, and I'd put this one up there with the greats like Evil Dead II and Return of the Living Dead. It's one of my all-time favorites, and it streams on Netflix and Shudder.

"If you can't find a friend, make one."

Let's face it: people suck.

Don't get me wrong. Everyone has their good qualities.

For example, someone might have an obnoxious laugh, but maybe the way their flesh burns is interesting. As the heat sets off glowing embers in their hairs and their skin blackens just before it starts to glow red along the lines where it breaks apart, then FWOOMPH! Fat spatters and crackles. Sinew and muscle dissolve in flame as the meat falls from the bones.

What's not to like about that?

This week's Thursday Thriller is May.

This 2002 Lucky McKee film is about a veterinary assistant named May (Angela Bettis), who never had any friends because of her lazy eye because people suck. When May was a little girl her mom gave her a homemade doll to be her friend, but wouldn't allow her to take it out of the glass case because May's mom sucks. May kept the doll well into adulthood, and talked to it every day. The doll silently expresses some jealousy when May tells it that she wants to make a new friend, a man named Adam (Jeremy Sisto) who works at an auto body shop. May thinks his hands are beautiful. May and Adam try dating for a while, but ultimately, he breaks her heart because people suck.

Lonely, May runs to the arms of Polly (Anna Faris), the lesbian receptionist at work whose neck she admires. Because people suck, Polly breaks May's heart as well.

After that May tries to scratch her itch for human interaction by volunteering to work with blind children In a curious move, she takes the doll in one day to show the blind kids, and because people suck, they tear it out of her hands and the case smashes all over the floor. The real fun starts when the kids try to crawl around in the floor and find the doll and learn the hard way that broken glass is hard on the hands and knees.

So May gives up on people and decides her best solution is to make a new friend out of the parts she likes about people.

May is a good movie about a weird girl. It streams on Shudder.

"There is an evil here, an evil you don't want to wake up."

The word "Nazi" has been tossed around a lot lately, and I'm starting to get the feeling people don't know what they're talking about.

The Nazis were a political party that in Germany rose to prominence under the direction of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. Hitler blamed the economic ills of the day on ethnic and religious minorities, and promised to make Germany great again.

OK, so maybe they do know what they're talking about.

Hitler and the Nazis rode a wave of populist outrage into the highest offices of power, exterminated millions of people and set out to conquer Europe. Anyone who passed 10th grade history should know this already, but did your teacher tell you how they bankrolled the war effort?

Legend has it they looted every place they conquered and accumulated a massive stash of what's now referred to as "Nazi gold."

By the way, this week's Thursday Thriller is Dead Snow.

This 2009 film by Norwegian filmmaker Tommy Wirkola is about a group of medical students on a skiing trip who find some of the famous Nazi gold in their cabin, inciting the ire of a bunch of Nazi zombies who will stop at nothing to protect their booty. They're kind of like ghost pirates, but with swastikas instead of skulls and crossbones.

When I first watched this movie a couple years ago, I didn't care for it. Maybe I was just in a bad mood, but it seemed a little too desperate to make countless nods to other horror films, most especially Evil Dead. As I watched it again this week, though, I was a lot more taken with the gory action sequences and found it to be a lot of fun. It's one hell of a bloody movie.

Dead Snow streams on Netflix and Shudder.

"Gobble gobble, motherfucker!"

It's a big family holiday here in America, so even if you're not working, you still likely have a dozen things you'd rather not do today. For example, you might have to eat some frozen, jellied turkey-vegetable salad, because your aunt tried the recipe in 1975 and everyone told her it was good just to be polite and now you're doomed to eat two spoonfuls of this slop every year until she dies. You don't want to pray for someone's death, especially not your own flesh and blood, but come on, it's frozen, jellied turkey-vegetable salad.

Alas, you must endure because it's tradition. That's how I feel about reviewing the movie I'm about to tell you about. Last year I wrote about ThanksKilling, so this week's Thursday Thriller is ThanksKilling 3.

If you're wondering why I'm not reviewing ThanksKilling 2, it's because there isn't one. According to the 2012 sequel by director Jordan Downey, ThanksKilling 2 was the worst movie ever made, in addition to having a curse on it, so a spaceman robot guy and a worm puppet that looks kinda phallic, have destroyed every copy but one.

Turkie, the ugly puppet that's the star of the franchise, catches wind there is only one copy left and sets off with his son to find it.

The movie has fallen into the backpack of Yomi, a Muppet-style creature who has lost her mind and is in desperate search for it. She asks a powdered wig-wearing entrepreneur named Uncle Donny (Daniel Usaj) to take her to Thanksgiving because it might be there. He brings her home where she meets his brother Jefferson (Joe Hartzler) and his grandmother, who is a rapping puppet.

Uncle Donny and Jefferson tell Yomi about their dream to one day open Thanksgivingland, a theme park with rides like The Gravy Train and so on, then Turkie shows up and starts causing trouble trying to get his movie. Not to worry, because they run him through Uncle Donny's invention The PluckMaster and kill him, but then some skeleton turkeys resurrect him, but they couldn't put his penis back on so Turkie attaches a chainsaw in its place in a nod to Evil Dead 2.

After that it gets a little weird.

This movie is a sloppy, all-over-the-place mess with lots of puppets, tasteless humor and trippy, flashy bits with throbbing dubstep for background music. It's annoying on purpose. If I have to say something nice, I'll admit I laughed at parts of it. It's a unique viewing experience and even more outlandish than the first one.

ThanksKilling 3 streams on Amazon Prime.

"Tonight might just be the night you finally outrun those wicked demons once and for all."

As funny as I find the whole situation in America right now, there's not a lot I can honestly say that hasn't been said angrily, thought poorly, spelled badly and delivered confidently with only the slipperiest finger-hold on reality. And that's just the stuff on your new president's top advisor's Web site.

It's still up for grabs whether the last minute panic about Hillary's e-mails had any thing to do with her losing any more than, say, calling half the country deplorable, but I still wish she'd come clean about all the dirty  messages she's been sending me. They're not as dirty as Mike Pence's, so I think people might understand.

And the way you've been treating each other! I honestly couldn't be prouder of you, but you don't click on this blog for adulation. You click on this blog to find out where they're hiding the good horror movies online, and you're looking for good horror movies because you want some harmless thrills that make the truly scary shit people say on social media seem timid.

I don't know if anything can compete with the horror of Americans trying to interact with each other on social media right now, but I found a movie I liked.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Southbound.

This 2015 film is an anthology, of sorts, five stories connected by one thing, a desert highway with no name and no number. It starts with two men, Mitch and Jack, both covered in blood trying to escape their recent past. They pull off at a gas station to use the bathroom and fill up the truck, and get back on the highway. After hours of driving, they find themselves back at the gas station. It then occurs to them that a flying skeleton with no facial features was been following them, and it's really weird because how does it fly when there's no skin on its wing bones? It kills Jack and Mitch checks into a motel where his daughter keeps screaming for him but he can't find her.

After that you're off to the races -- Dana Gould plays an occult priest in one segment, a guy trying to help a girl he ran over with his car gets tormented by 911 operators, there's some strange business about making sure the door of the bar is latched shut. This movie is a hell-ride. The interweaving stories are cool, but I felt like the movie lacked something to tie it all together and make you say, "Oh, that's what the fuck was going on!" if that sort of thing is important to you. I could take it or leave it.

So I'll take Southbound. You should take a break from yelling at each other and watch it. It streams on Amazon Prime.

"I am infected with the filth of pride."

Americans are a funny lot. About half of them will spend the whole day after a presidential election crying, "How? How did this happen?" then two weeks later, sit down with their families and celebrate their heritage as countrymen in a nation that started as a colony founded by buckle-hatted religious nuts, and never draw any connection.

I can hear you now.

"Hey Devil, how come you're always spreading misleading stereotypes? I know you're the Father of Lies and all, but come on!"

And you're right. The Puritans didn't actually have buckles on their hats, and in the movie I'm about to tell you about, you will see zero hat buckles because the costume department obviously got their history straight.

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Witch.

This 2015 period drama by writer/director Robert Eggers is about a pilgrim named William (Ralph Ineson) who's too nutty even for the other pilgrims so they banish him and his family to go live in the woods by themselves. 

That's a pretty good beginning even though it's a little hard to follow what's going on through their thick accents and 1600s dialect. The first step in a lot of horror movies is to isolate the victims. It's rare to find a horror movie these days whose opening title sequence isn't a montage of a car driving out to the ass end of nowhere. Generally, it's either college kids on spring break or a young family moving into a new house with a dark past. It's become so common that if I see people unpacking cardboard boxes in the first five minutes, I turn the damn thing off. So maybe you can appreciate, as I did, the novel approach of having this family shunned by angry pilgrims.

Once in the woods, William's family becomes easy pickings for destruction by supernatural forces. The baby vanishes. The crops go bad. At one point the mother, Katherine (Kate Dickie), hallucinates she's nursing her baby again, when in fact she's letting a raven eat her titty off. The real fun starts when the kids accuse each other of witchcraft and William can't decide which one to kill. 

I've noticed opinion on this movie is split. Some horror fans hate it. I have to admit it's not typical Thursday Thrillers fare. The screams and splatter are minimal, but sometimes I enjoy a movie that's not constantly exploding.  I found the performances compelling, especially from the child actors Anya Taylor-Joy and Harvey Scrimshaw who portray William and Katherine's two eldest. The atmosphere is brooding and the sound design keeps the tension simmering throughout. Story-wise, I'd say it's like The Crucible meets The Exorcist with a dash of The Shining thrown in.

The Witch streams on Amazon Prime, now shut up and eat.