"Here is Sub-Zero, now plain zero!"

Earlier this month, Arnold Schwarzenegger announced he would be leaving The Celebrity Apprentice. President Trump tweeted he'd been fired. The two obscenely wealthy and powerful men then bickered about it for a bit, but for me the real question isn't why Arnold won't be on the show any more, it's, what the hell was he doing there in the first place?

It's not like he needed more money or accomplishments. The Richest estimates his net worth at $300 million. He sat for seven years as the chief executive of the world's sixth largest economy. That all pretty much makes him the most successful lifter of heavy objects in all of human history. A lot of things would qualify as a step down, but a reality show?

I guess he just needed to get out of the house.

Back when he was Hollywood's premier ass-kicking tough guy, Arnold was in a movie that somehow satirized reality TV before it had even been invented.

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Running Man.

I can hear you whining already. "Dark One, that's not even a horror movie. It's action/sci-fi if anything."

Look, a guy's head explodes. Another guy uses a chainsaw as a weapon. It's violent as all get out. It suits my needs just fine. Plus, you get a lot of what Arnold does best, deliver corny one-liners as he dispenses horrific death to one enemy after another. I should also point out, in his total career, Arnold has more on-screen kills than Jason Voorhees. 

This 1987 Paul Michael Glaser film is based on a story by Richard Bachman, aka Stephen King. It's set in the far-off future year of 2017. Society is such a dystopian mess, the movie has to open with crawling text to tell you exactly how hard the shit has hit the fan.

Arnold plays Ben Richards, a helicopter cop who refuses to kill unarmed civilians in a food riot in Bakersfield, CA. The other cops take control of the mission, kill the rioters, and Richards takes the fall for the massacre. He goes to prison but escapes with the help of fellow inmates. He gets caught at the airport.

Nowadays, they might put Richards back in  prison, but in 2017, they put him on America's number one television show, The Running Man, hosted by Damon Killian (Richard Dawson).

Richards and his fellow fugitives have to run through a 400-square block section of the city without being killed by whimsically themed stalkers. The guy who uses the chainsaw is called Buzz Saw. Jim Brown plays a guy who uses a flamethrower. His name is Fireball. If the prisoners survive the run, according to the rules of the game, they will be given full pardons. Not likely, though, as that's only happened three times in the show's history, and no one's ever killed one of the stalkers.

But then Arnold hasn't played yet.

You could call it a spoof of American Gladiators if it hadn't predated the show by two years. I'm not sure if it's a big-budget Death Race 2000 or a low-budget Hunger Games, but I do know that The Running Man is a lot of fun and it streams on Amazon Prime.

"Wouldn't it be marvelous if the two natures in man could be separated -- housed in different bodies!"

This Sunday is the day many of you mortals will spring your clocks forward by one hour to fully enjoy more daylight. This means your little blue marble in the cosmos is rolling back toward Halloween, and for me, it means the end of a cycle.

One year ago, I swore to go all the way back into the annals of horror cinema and review one film every week in chronological order. When it was time for your clocks to fall back, I reviewed the newest watchable film I could find online, and worked backward through the years.

This approach to film criticism has taught me one thing: it can be a frustrating way to enjoy watching movies. So it ends here. Next week I'm going to start reviewing things in whatever order I want, but this week, I'm going to tell you about the second-oldest feature-length horror film I could find.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

This 1920 John S. Robertson film is about Dr. Henry Jekyll (John Barrymore), a highly moral and hardworking doctor who is betrothed to a woman named Millicent Carewe (Martha Mansfield) who doesn't have very much to do until the end of the movie. Her father Sir George Carewe (Brandon Hurst) has Jekyll over for dinner and questions his morals and manliness. They adjourn to a London music hall, where they watch a dancing girl named Miss Gina (Nita Naldi) and Carewe sends his waiter over to the proprieter with an offer. It's uncertain what exactly he offers, but it must have been a lot because Miss Gina is immediately ordered off stage in the middle of her act and sent over to flirt with Jekyll. He denies her advances because he's engaged, but kinda wishes he hadn't because how often does your father-in-law try to buy you a prostitute? So he goes home and invents a drug that allows him to compartmentalize his lust and other base impulses into an alternate personality -- Mr. Hyde, who spends most of the movie looking weird and occasionally tramples a child and treats Miss Gina in an unkindly fashion.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came out the same year as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but was neither the first nor the last screen adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's novella. Filmmakers have been out to spoil the ending of Stevenson's story since 1912.

The Scottish author's story reads more like a mystery, and you don't find out Jekyll is Hyde until the end. My memory of 1886 is a little hazy, but the first time reading that was a lot like finding out Darth Vader is Luke's dad. Stevenson's telling is gripping and suspenseful, but doesn't really translate into movie magic without a couple revisions. The novelty of motion picture allows you to watch Jekyll change into the evil Mr. Hyde before your very eyes, so that shit's gotta go in the first half hour. With a little makeup and a few simple editing tricks, actor John Barrymore carries off one of the great transformations in film.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde streams on Amazon Prime, Shudder and YouTube.

"I swore I would have my revenge. They will never be rid of me!"

Dr. Frankenstein has met with many fates, and quite frankly, Mary Shelley's is the least satisfying. Exhaustion? Boring!

Trapped in a burning windmill with the monster was a more interesting way to go.

Todd Merriman suggests he once saved Christmas.

But if you're a fan of Peter Cushing you already know what he really did. He moved from town to town under a series of aliases and continued his research.

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Revenge of Frankenstein.

This 1958 Terence Fisher's film is the first in a string of sequels to the highly successful The Curse of Frankenstein.

Peter Cushing offers a cold, ruthless portrayal as Victor Frankenstein, who has escaped the guillotine and moved to Carlsbruck, Germany to start a medical practice under the name Dr. Victor Stein. At least he didn't change his first name to Franklin. In Carlsbruck, he incites the ire and the envy of the medical council, is pursued by a woman who wants to marry off her daughter to a man of status, and works tirelessly to provide health care to the poor while collecting their body parts on the sly.

He transfers the brain of his crippled assistant Karl (Michael Gwynn) into a new body he's preserved and assembled, but Karl sneaks out and gets in a fight before his brain can properly heal from the procedure. Murders ensue.

It's uncertain who specifically Frankenstein is taking revenge against, as he is the film's only returning character. Maybe The Persistence of Frankenstein would have been a more apt title. He does indeed persist as Peter Cushing starred in at least five Frankenstein movies for the UK's Hammer Studios. My favorite was actually the gender-bending Frankenstein Created Woman, co-starring Playboy's  Miss August 1966 Susan Denberg.

Revenge is still pretty good, though -- no bunnies in it, but there is a chimpanzee.

The Revenge of Frankenstein streams on Shudder.

"This is no dream! This is really happening!"

In the landmark case of Roe V. Wade way back in 1973, the United States Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that abortions within the first two trimesters of pregnancy are a constitutional right under the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment, and that settled that little matter once and for all.

I'm kidding, of course. People have blown each other up over this shit.

Just last week, an Oklahoma state legislator proposed a bill that would require the father's written permission for a woman to get an abortion.

But what if the father is a rapist?

What if I'm the father?

What if the lady's husband is so desperate to advance his acting career he conspires with satanist neighbors to drug the lady so I can rape her while a bunch of naked, old people stand around singing and she thinks she's on a boat the whole time because she's tripping balls and now she's pregnant with the Anti-Christ?

I'd probably sign off on it because either way, I win. I'm getting ahead of myself, though.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Rosemary's Baby.

This 1968 Roman Polanski film is about a good Catholic girl named Rosemary (Mia Farrow), who never even considers an abortion, no matter how sick her pregnancy makes her or how much evidence mounts that she is the object of a witch conspiracy to use her body as a vessel to bring a demon into the world and usher in a new age of all-encompassing evil. John Cassavetes plays Rosemary's douchebag husband guy.

Short on gore, but long on suspense, it's a true classic. Don't get your hopes up about getting a good look at that baby, though. It's just not that kind of movie. My hands look cool, though.

Rosemary's Baby streams on Amazon Prime and Hulu Plus.

"Don't you know what's going on out there? This is no Sunday school picnic."

It's hard to believe it's only been a year since last Black History Month. So much has changed. America has its first white president since its first black president, and the Oscars are no longer so white.

However, I do feel it is my duty to point out that racial equality in scary movies online still eludes us. Three of the four horror films I reviewed last year have been taken down. I swear last February I spent a whole week watching Pam Grier escape from prison on Amazon Prime just so I had context in which to discuss Scream Blacula Scream, but now if you want to watch those kind of movies, it costs extra. And not one service has tried to replace these movies with Abby, William Girdler's blaxploitation knockoff of The Exorcist.

You might get the idea that the streaming services are promoting a white nationalist agenda, but I don't want to spread fake news. Maybe a cameraman is just standing in the way of the movies and that's why you can't see them.

Luckily, the movie that remains is an indisputable classic. It's one of the first films to feature a black man as the hero and might be the first movie that was actually scary. It's one of my favorite films with the words "of the living dead" in the title.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Night of the Living Dead.

I consider it a great honor to once again review this 1968 George A. Romero film since last year's review was eaten by Nazi mailer-daemons trying to suppress the achievements of African-Americans in cinema. That, or I accidentally deleted it. It matters not, because like a schoolkid who re-writes the same report about George Washington Carver every February, I remember the gist. (Peanut butter is delicious, and we should be thankful.)

The dead en masse mysteriously rise from the grave and start eating the living.It sounds like a trope now, but this is the first movie that happened in.

A truck driver named Ben (Duane Jones) has been forced to seek refuge in an abandoned farmhouse to avoid the swarms of ambulatory non-living persons, but gets stuck inside with the most useless white people you'll ever see this side of C-SPAN. They can't even put gas in a truck without blowing it up. Ben's got to take charge of the situation if he's going to survive. Can he hold out until rescue arrives?

It's one of the must-sees of the horror genre. That means if you haven't seen it, it's time, and if you have seen it, it's time to see it again.

Night of the Living Dead streams on Amazon and Shudder, and there's a color version on YouTube.

"You cannot be both virgin and vampire."

Your radio advertising has called to my attention to the fact that Valentine's Day is coming up. By the sound of things, a lot of you are planning to celebrate with your sweeties -- making reservations at fancy restaurants, taking out second mortgages to afford to give each other shiny pebbles that have been dug out of the earth by children. You will likely buy these trinkets from a guy who boasts about eliminating middlemen, so we can only assume he's taken to whipping the kids himself.

Honestly though, most of you are going to "Netflix and chill" and to you I offer an alternative called "Shudder and fuck."

This week's Thursday Thriller is Requiem for a Vampire.

This 1971 film is just one of a handful of films by French director Jean Rollin, who made a bunch of movies that could be best classified as vampire softcore porn. I picked this one because it's an especially strange work, even in its own niche. 

The dark sexual fantasy starts off as a car chase. Some men in one car seem keen on killing Marie and Michelle (Marie-Pierre Castel and Mireille Dargent, respectively), who are wearing clown costumes. People in both cars are shooting at each other, and the man driving the girls takes a bullet. Michelle manages to steer the car down a dirt road to evade the pursuers, and she and Marie set the car, along with their dead driver on fire and take flight on foot across the countryside. They wash their makeup off in a stream and find a busted-down, old house to change out of their costumes. They emerge from the house in tiny clothes and pigtails, which you'll no doubt enjoy if you're into the whole barely legal thing. They get on a motorcycle and drive til they find a food truck, at which point Marie teases the proprietor until he abandons his station to chase her through the woods and forces himself on her while Michelle steals lunch. 

Don't worry. Marie gets away.

Then when the girls are hiding out in a cemetery Michelle falls into an open grave and somehow gets buried alive by highly inattentive grave diggers. Marie pulls her out and they wander through a forest of giant bats before they find a castle. They don't find anyone at home and are obviously quite tired, so they lie down in the upstairs bedroom for some nude snuggling. 

I can hear you already: "But Devil, when does this movie get weird?" 

About the halfway point, after the girls discover the castle is home to vampires and their henchmen, they run away, then get caught and dragged back and shown around the sex dungeon. It will be a tough scene for you to get through if you're off turned off by simulated rape or women who don't shave their armpits. They don't shave their crotches either, but if you're put off by that, all I can tell you is grow up.

What happens after that? Who cares? You should be bumping uglies by that point.

Requiem for a Vampire streams on Shudder and YouTube. 

"Ghosts galore. Headless horsemen, horseless headsmen, everything."

I hope I didn't overstate the importance of Texas Chain Saw Massacre last week. It's a great movie, a true classic, a groundbreaking effort, but no single movie can define the direction of a whole genre. By 1974, movies like Night of the Living Dead, Rosemary's Baby, Last House on the Left and The Exorcist had already started the dynamic shift in the content and subject matter of horror.

A shift from what, though? Well, for instance, there were a lot of Gothic period pieces coming out of Europe at the time. It had been hanging around since the late 1950s when England's Hammer Studios landed a hit with The Curse of Frankenstein. By 1973, Hammer's formula had started to stale, but imitators had sprung up and mutated. Mario Bava was doing similar work in Italy, but with an even sexier edge. In France and Spain, the whole form evolved into a weird sub-genre of vampire porn, (more on that next week).

And right there in England, Amicus International had established itself. I could do hours of research to explain the whole relationship but between these two companies, but I'd rather get this written quickly so I can get back to watching vampire porn so I'll leave it at this: I like to think of Amicus as the Cracked to Hammer's Mad.

Now you know me, I'm a big fan of everything I've mentioned in the preceding three paragraphs, and that includes the fine films of Amicus International. That said, this week's Thursday Thriller is Amicus's And Now The Screaming Starts!

This 1973 Roy Ward Baker film is the kind of movie that takes place in a haunted castle with a bunch of creepy, old portraits on the walls.

Catherine (Stephanie Beacham) has moved into the House of Fengriffin to marry her betrothed Charles, a rich douchebag from a long line of rich douchebags. In giving Catherine the tour, Charles leaves her for a moment to marvel at the portraits of his forebears and she's transfixed by the portrait of grandfather Henry. While she stares at the painting, a bloody hand bursts through it and tries to grab her.

And then the screaming starts!

And then it dies down for a couple minutes.

And then it starts again.

And then it gets real loud.

And then it looks like Catherine might pop out of her corset.

And then the screaming tapers off for a good long while.

And then Peter Cushing shows up.

And then the screaming gradually picks back up as the movie nears its conclusion.

Seriously though, Catherine is haunted by a bloody apparition of a man missing both eyes and one hand. Sometimes the hand follows her around. On the young couple's wedding night, Charles escorts Catherine to the bed chamber and instead of immediately taking her to pound town, he steps into another room to change into his fancy jammies, during which time the apparition assaults her. When later she tries to unravel the secrets of this ghostly mystery, she learns she is pregnant.

So gentlemen, please, when you get your virgin bride home, get down to business and don't dither about tying your sleeping cravat.

And Now The Screaming Starts! streams on Shudder.