"I kick ass for the lord!"

Greetings faithless mortals,

Thank you for taking a minute from accusing each other of being violent and counter-violent, and clicking over here to read about horror movies.  It means a lot to me, and whether your schedule for marching in the streets is all booked up with defending or condemning statues of dead racists, I've got a reason for you to take to the streets that has nothing to do with any of that.

I am, of course, talking about the Louisville Zombie Walk, which is just over a week away. On Aug. 26 at 8:29 p.m., I will sound the alarm and unleash some 40,000 living dead on Bardstown Road. Come join us. Bring the kids.

To put you in the mood, this week's Thursday Thriller is Dead Alive.

This 1992 splatter comedy was directed by Peter Jackson, who later gained international notoriety for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I prefer Dead Alive. In fact, it's one of my all-time favorites.

It's about a love-hungry girl named Paquita (Diana Penalver).  Her grandmother (Davina Whitehouse) reads her fortune in tarot cards one day and tells her that she will find true love with a Norman Batesy type named Lionel (Timothy Balme) who has an overbearing mother (Elizabeth Moody).

Mum is so bad she follows Paquita and Lionel to the zoo on their first date and gets herself bitten by a Sumatran rat monkey and seizes the opportunity to turn Lionel's attention back on her.

The monkey bite makes her very ill. Her ear falls off into her custard while she's eating. She finally dies and gets up and kills her nurse, so Lionel locks his two zombies in the basement while he steps out to buy some tranquillizers from a Nazi scientist to keep them quiet.


Add to this mix a greedy uncle who wants a cut of Lionel's inheritance, and you wind up with the bloodiest third act I've seen outside of Japan.

Eventually, Mum gets buried and Lionel meets some rockabilly hooligans one night in the cemetery. Mum escapes her grave and kills them, and Lionel is at the mercy of the zombie greasers. Luckily, Father McGruder (Stuart Devenie) hears the ruckus and leaps into the fray.

If the priest-on-zombie kung fu sequence that follows does not make you smile, you may feel free to stop the movie and never read this blog again because you clearly don't understand the nature of basic joy and you're way beyond my help.

Maybe you should consider church or opiate addiction.

Before you know it, Lionel has a cellar full of rowdy zombies, and they start to multiply. Yes, zombie priest and zombie nurse get it on and make a baby zombie who runs amok during a casual stroll in the park.

Dead Alive is as disgusting as it is hilarious, a zombie comedy that gets it right. It streams on YouTube.

"Out there! They're coming back to life! They're everywhere!"

Death brought me Glen Campbell this week. He's been jamming with Merle Haggard non-stop for the past couple days. I can't handle this. See, I thought country singers, though their lives be fraught with as much adultery and addiction as any other kind of musicians, were supposed to go to Heaven, on account of all those schmaltzy gospel records they were always making. Turns out, no, I have to listen to this crap.

Hell is too full again. The time is nigh for me to make room by unleashing some 40,000 undead onto Bardstown Road in Louisville, KY. I'll be doing that on Aug. 26. I can't wait to not hear "Rhinestone Cowboy" ever again.

And boy am I in the mood for a zombie movie!

This week's Thursday Thriller is Zombie.

This 1979 Lucio Fulci film opens with a sailboat adrift on New York Harbor. After the Staten Island Ferry nearly plows through it, police board the vessel to talk to the captain, but no one is on board... except for a fat, undead cannibal who chews an officer's throat right out.

The police call in a lady named Anne Bowles (Tisa Farrow) for questioning because it was her father's boat, but she hasn't seen her father. She later sneaks onto the boat to look for clues to his whereabouts and meets and English reporter named Peter West (Ian McCulloch) who was also looking for Anne's dad due to his connection to some kind of strange research on some voodoo-infested island. They hitch a ride on a boat with Brian Hull (Al Cliver) and Susan Barrett (Auretta Gay) to find the island and whatever became of Dr. Bowles.

Not long after that, the second greatest thing to ever happen in movies happens. The athletically-built Susan strips down to go skin diving and is immediately menaced by a shark. Naturally, as everyone in 1979 had seen Jaws, she's terrified. She swims to the surface to tell her travelling companions she's being attacked by a shark, then swims back to the ocean floor where a rotten hand grabs her shoulder and she finds she's also being attacked by an underwater zombie. She fights herself free of his grasp, leaving the zombie and the shark to fight each other.

After that? You know, it's an Italian zombie movie from the 1970s. The soundtrack is trippy. The zombies are extra rotten. Eyeballs get punctured. There are maggots. The effects seem a little fake, but are still absolutely disgusting. It's a classic!

Zombie streams on Shudder and YouTube.

"He keeps talking about a centipede with 12 people. What does that mean?"

Let's assume that if you're reading this, you're a horror fan. What does that mean to you, though? Do you buy tickets to conventions and pay extra to meet your heroes in person and have them sign a piece of memorabilia? Do you get a job in a haunted house so you can feel what it's like to be a monster, if only for a few short weekends in the early fall? How far will you go to prove your devotion to your favorite film?

I'd like to tell you about a movie that shows what it means to be a true horror fan.

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Human Centipede II: (Full Sequence).

This 2011 Tom Six film is about a guy named Martin (Laurence R. Harvey) who adores Six's other film The Human Centipede: First Sequence. Who can blame him? It's a groundbreaking feature in the field of sewing people's mouths to other people's buttholes.

Martin has a job as a security guard in a parking garage, which allows him a lot of lonely hours to study his favorite film, but other than that he hasn't got a whole lot going for him. He's short, fat and mentally handicapped. His father sexually abused him when he was a baby, and his screaming bitch of a mom blames him for his father's imprisonment. Martin's life is pretty bleak, but he finds comfort in a homemade scrapbook he's made about The Human Centipede and some special pictures he has of one of the film's stars Ashlynn Yennie. Martin likes the movie so much, he decides to make his own human centipede.

As a horror fan, Martin embodies a DIY spirit that far surpasses that of anyone who ever made their own Freddy glove. He proves you don't need a surgeon's expertise or fine instruments to build your own 'pede. You just need a can-do attitude and a staple gun.

Imagine what the world would be like if you could all try and be a little more like Martin.

'Pede II is grittier, gorier and more intense than the first one, with a higher body count and a longer centipede. In places it plays more like a traditional slasher movie.  It streams on Hulu Plus.

"Hell is behind that door! You're going to meet death now... the LIVING DEAD!"

I haven't really talked about giallo films lately, if at all. Sure, I've talked about Italian zombie movies, Italian cannibal movies, and that one movie where Christopher Lee beat a girl with a whip on the beach, but those aren't really giallo films. Giallo is specifically an Italian movie that works like a mystery/thriller, but is usually coupled with heavy gore and horror elements, and the movie I want to talk about is a classic example. 

This week's Thursday Thrillers is Suspiria.

This 1977 Dario Argento film is about a young woman named Suzy (Jessica Harper) who goes to study dance at a prestigious academy in Germany. The night she arrives in Freiburg,  her friend gets pulled through a window, stabbed numerous times, dropped through a stained glass skylight, and hanged. Then when she moves into the dorm, the ceiling is full of maggots. As Suzy digs deeper into her dance school's past, she unravels a dark history of witchcraft.

Full of bold, garish colors and a prog rock soundtrack by Goblin, Suspiria is a cool movie. Even if it is a little slow and hard to follow in places, it's pretty to look at. Even in those moments where it sounds like Goblin is playing Christmas music, it's still strange enough to jam. The ending is worth sticking it out for.

Suspiria streams on Amazon Prime.

"It's unnatural, you and that monkey!"

You're probably already aware that George A. Romero died this week. It seems every obituary column makes mention that he was the innovative, independent filmmaker who pioneered the zombie subgenre, a fact that I've already covered. I've actually written about a couple of his zombie movies.

Everyone knows what Romero did for zombies. Almost no one is talking about what he's done for psychic, killer monkeys.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Monkey Shines.

Romero directed this 1988 film, based on a novel by Michael Stewart. It's about a law student named Allan (Jason Beghe), who is the kind of guy who loads his backpack up with bricks to go jogging.

During his morning run, Allan gets hit by a van and is paralyzed from the neck down. Shortly after, Allan notices a distance growing between himself and his girlfriend Linda (Janine Turner). His mom Dorothy (Joyce Van Patten) hires him a bitchy, live-in nurse named Maryanne (Christine Forrest), who brings along her obnoxious parakeet Bogey. Allan grows despondent and attempts suicide.

Lucky for Allan, his buddy Geoffrey (John Pankow) had just dropped by to check on him. Also lucky for Allan, Geoffrey is an ambitious, young scientist who's been experimenting on capuchin monkeys by injecting them with human brain cells to see if it will make them smarter. When his experiment seems to be going nowhere, he wonders if the animal's environment would make a difference. Geoffrey finds a monkey trainer named Melanie (Kate McNeil) to help get Allan set up with one of his lab monkeys so it can help fetch things for Allan when he needs them. Allan and Melanie name the helper monkey Ella.

Ella and Allan bond almost instantly. She does everything for him -- changes the battery in his wheelchair, brushes his hair, brings him his sippy cup. When Allan can't raise his hand in class, the monkey raises hers. Ella is also very protective of Allan. When Bogey gets loose one night and attacks Allan's face, Ella gets revenge. Ella gets revenge on a lot of people for Allan. Then Allan falls in love with Melanie. Things get complicated.

Monkey Shines is a decent movie. It's not Romero's best, but it's not his worst. It streams on Hulu Plus.

"Statistically you're more likely to die in a hospital than anywhere else."

Are you sitting down? Are you ready to embrace the idea that you live in the future? Chinese scientists announced this week that they successfully teleported a photon to a satellite in space.

They say this discovery is a major step toward establishing global quantum internet, but who knows? It could also open gateways to other dimensions. Science could make it happen, though religion could get there first with the power of prayer, bizarre sex rituals and human sacrifice.

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Void.

Writer-director team Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski created this 2016 cosmic horror about a cop named Daniel (Aaron Poole) who picks up a meth head having some kind of fit in the middle of the road and drives him to the hospital where Daniel's estranged wife Allison (Kathleen Munroe) works. The hospital is low on supplies because it's closing down after a recent fire. While there, Daniel catches a nurse named Beverly gouging out a patient's eyes, so he shoots her. The sheriff shows up and takes Daniel's gun away, which is really inconvenient when the two rednecks who were trying to kill the meth head in the first place show up. Then Beverly comes back to life as some kind of hideous otherworldly beast and Daniel tries to tell everyone to leave the hospital, but the rednecks won't let him leave and take everyone hostage, because the hospital is surrounded by religious nuts wearing robes that look like a cross between a burka and a hazmat suit.

To top if off, the pregnant teen whose grandpa brought her to the hospital goes into labor, so Allison goes off in the building to find supplies while Daniel and the rednecks go to his car for a shotgun. They make it back, but Allison doesn't. Their search for her reveals a sinister plot to unleash trans-dimensional abominations upon this earth.

The Void is a twisty, Lovecraftian thriller and comparisons to The Mist and The Thing have been batted around, but if I had to use math to tell you about it, I would say it is greater than The Mist, but less than The Thing. It streams on Netflix.

"This is a hell of a lot better than a mountain lion, son."

Picking out a movie to watch can be hard. You don't want to watch something you've seen a zillion times already, but you don't necessarily want to gamble a couple hours on something so new and obscure you have no frame of reference for enjoying it. You crave a fresh viewing experience, but the comfort of the familiar is irresistible.

I might just have the movie for you.

If you haven't already seen it, that is.

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Woman.

This 2011 film was directed by Lucky McKee, who also directed May and All Cheerleaders Die. It's based on the novel he wrote with Jack Ketchum, who also wrote The Girl Next Door. Angela Bettis, who played May is in it. So is Lauren Ashley Carter, who was in Darling.

The Woman is about a lawyer named Chris (Sean Bridgers) who, while hunting, discovers a feral woman (Pollyanna McIntosh) living in the woods, with her rotten teeth, taking bites out of live fish she just stabbed with her Bowie knife, her hair matted, her filthy boobs hanging out. Wait, where did she get a Bowie knife? It doesn't matter because she obviously doesn't have it with her later to cut her way out of Chris's net. Chris drags her home to the cellar and chains her up, then goes about assigning his family chores for her feeding and care while he civilizes her. Civilization entails being cleaned with a pressure washer, then later raped after the kids are put to bed. It's for her own good, right?

Chris's wife Belle (Bettis) isn't comfortable with the idea of keeping another human chained up in the cellar, no matter how wild she may be, but Chris persuades her to put her worried mind to rest by slapping her across the mouth. Chris and Belle have three children. Peggy (Carter) the oldest is going through a rough patch of baggy sweatshirts and outbursts of nausea in geometry class. Adolescent son Brian (Zach Rand) diligently practices his free throws. And little Darlin' (Shyla Molhusen) loves to bake gingerbread men.

Having the woman around piques Brian's sexual curiosity so much that he skips hanging around with his friends after school just so he can come home early and molest her with a pair of needle nose pliers.

Maybe this doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun, but I assure you, everyone gets their violent comeuppance. It's a feminist film, after all.

The Woman streams on Shudder.