"My family's always been in meat."

Sometimes when I'm searching for movies to tell you about I stumble on one so notorious it requires no review, a film about which so much has been said over the last four decades, anything I try to add to the conversation would be superfluous.

That generally doesn't stop me from talking about it, though. The news here is the movie is available.

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

You probably already know the story to this 1974 Tobe Hooper classic: a forgotten, white, working-class family have lost their jobs to automation in their chosen trade, and The Old Man (Jim Siedow) has to run a convenience store off the side of the road selling BBQ and gasoline, except he has no gasoline.

During their funemployment, the boys become quite the artists, dabbling in sculpture, photography, mask-making, you know, stuff they can do with dead bodies to keep them busy between murdering van loads of lost hippies.

Marilyn Burns stars as Sally, whose nipples protrude through her light blue sweater vest the entire film. A lot of critics fail to point out how well she fills out a pair of white, hip-hugging bell-bottoms.

Sally and her whiny, wheelchair-bound brother Franklin ( Paul A. Partain) have invited a few friends on a road trip in the Texas scrub land to find their late grandfather's house. They run out of gas and stumble upon the family of redneck cannibals and the worst kind of culture war ensues.

Gunnar Hansen turns in an iconic performance as Leatherface, the lumbering, mentally-challenged, masked necrophiliac who wields the chainsaw, but all the bad guys are fantastic.

This movie contributed a lot to the lexicon of modern horror, most notably the chainsaw as a tool of violent mayhem.

Roger Ebert called it "some kind of weird, off-the-wall achievement."  It's been often imitated, never duplicated. If you haven't seen it, it's time. If you have seen it, it's time to see it again.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre streams on Amazon Prime, as does the documentary Texas Chain Saw Massacre: A Family Portrait for you trivia buffs.

"You play a good game, boy, but the game is finished. Now you die!"

Death is unpredictable. Sometimes when it happens, we don't necessarily have all the tools at our disposal to properly honor the life that was lost, or in my case, the soul that was gained.

For example, William Peter Blatty just died and Netflix has taken The Exorcist down. If you were hoping Death would go any easier on famous people in 2017, I have a feeling you're going to be disappointed. This week also saw the passing of William Onyeabor.

Shame about Onyeabor, really. He was a fantastic man.

It all reminds me of how just about this time last year Angus Scrimm died and the best movie I could find to talk about was John Dies At The End, and how I had to wait forever to see Scrimm's signature work.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Phantasm.

As many times as I've watched this 1979 Don Coscarelli film, and it's been many, I still can't say for sure what exactly happens and why. It's like a weird dream. It starts with this blonde woman having sex in a cemetery with a guy named Tommy, who has a handlebar moustache. By the sound of things, he finishes, and then she stabs him, and then she turns into Angus Scrimm. You get a sense that the sequence of those events is important. The blonde lady could have turned into Scrimm before murdering the guy. Scrimm didn't have to finish Tommy off, did he? But he did. What does that mean?

Then we learn at the funeral that Tommy was in a band with Jody (Bill Thornbury) and Reggie (Reggie Bannister). Reggie is the ice cream man, and Jody drives a sweet car and has a little brother named Mike (A. Michael Baldwin). Jody and Mike's parents died, and Mike is afraid he's going to lose Jody, so he follows him around everywhere, and asks a old, blind, psychic lady for advice. She has her granddaughter instruct Mike to stick his hand in a black box, and whatever's in there won't let go of his hand until he learns not to fear.

Later, Jody picks up the same blonde lady that was actually Angus Scrimm that killed Tommy at a bar and they go to have sex in the cemetery, but Mike was following and watching from afar, when all of a sudden he gets attacked by satanic jawas.

I could go on forever about the strangeness of this movie, how Scrimm's severed finger turns into a giant, red-eyed fly, how Scrimm, undercover as the undertaker is actually an alien stealing corpses and sending them to another dimension, but the coolest thing is the flying silver balls that stab people in the head and pump out all their blood.

Phantasm is a strange trip you can watch time and again, enjoy the visuals, and still not know what the hell is going on. It streams on Shudder.

"It's got a death curse!"

Sometimes when you're clicking through your favorite streaming service, you might get the idea that the Ole Devil's power and influence over this world are waning. When faced with sub-standard pre-weekend viewing selections, some people even start to doubt my existence.

"If the Devil is real," they reason, "how come Big Trouble in Little China is the only John Carpenter movie on Netflix? If the Devil has any power, why is Creepshow 3 on Hulu, but never Creepshow or Creepshow 2? If he can't even force Amazon Prime to get its shit together and carry the entire Nightmare on Elm Street series forever, then why call him The Devil?"

Look, I work in mysterious ways, OK? Streaming services are run by people who have Free Will, so the best I can do, same as you, is complain like I did on Thursday, May 12, 2016. It appears my complaint has been heard.

Today is Thursday, January 12, 2017, so this week's Thursday Thriller is, I shit you not, Friday the 13th.

How's that for power and influence?

This 1980 Sean Cunningham film is about a murderer stalking the woods of Camp Crystal Lake where Steve Christy (Peter Brouer) is preparing to open up for a highly profitable season of providing upscale American adolescents with memories for a lifetime. I mean, I guess that's why you try to re-open a camp no one else will touch because of its history of having two counselors murdered there 30 years ago, and the year before that a special kid drowned in the lake. The locals don't go near the place. Crazy Ralph (Walt Gorney) says, "It's got a death curse!" Not many people would be ballsy enough to undertake such entrepeneurial risk, but Steve Christy loves risk .He sports a moustache and a neckerchief and no shirt.

Pretty soon, Christy's staff start dropping like flies.

If you haven't already seen Friday the 13th, you've at least heard about it. It spawned 10 sequels and a remake,was the basis for one of the worst Nintendo games ever and is due for a video game reboot, Drawing heavily on Halloween as an influence, it helped set a tone for popular horror in the 1980s.

It's a mystery who's killing off the young folks, and if you're familiar with the series only by reputation, you're probably wrong about who it is.

But was it any good?

It made a fuck ton of money and earned its place in horror history.

Kevin Bacon dies in it. Tom Savini did the makeup F/X. Just watch it.

Friday the 13th streams on Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime and YouTube. If you're looking for a guy in a hockey mask, you might go ahead and skip to part 3.

"Wendy darling, light of my life, I'm not gonna hurt ya."

I meant to tell you about a particular movie almost a year ago, but I got sidetracked by Death. He brought me Abe Vigoda and instead I wound up talking about The Stuff. However, the movie I wanted to discuss is still on Netflix, and thanks to millions of people who have nothing better to do with their TV or Internet time than gawk at the mentally ill, it's back on everyone's mind. 

No, there's not a movie about Donald Trump's cabinet yet. I'm talking about how Dr. Phil pointed a camera at Shelley Duvall so she could say crazy things about how Robin Williams isn't dead, just shape-shifting. He's both, but I don't have time to explain how that all works to feeble-minded mortals like yourself. I've got a movie to talk about.

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Shining.

This 1980 Stanley Kubrick film is based on a Stephen King novel. King hates the adaptation.

It's the story of Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), his wife Wendy (Duvall) and their son Danny (Danny Lloyd). The boy has psychic powers and talks to his finger. Jack is a writer seeking some solitude so he takes a gig as winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, a swanky joint that rests atop a mountain in Colorado. The Overlook is haunted by the old caretaker, who got cabin fever one winter and chopped up his family. His daughters also haunt the overlook. So does some old lady.

 

So do people who like to put on bear suits and fool around with men in tuxedos, and vice versa.

What happens in a nutshell is Jack goes crazy and tries to kill his family with an ax. It's scary, it's trippy, and making it sure as hell didn't do Shelley Duvall any favors, healthwise. 

The Shining is a feast of disturbing imagery and sound that'll make your skin all prickly, no matter what Mr. King says. It streams on Netflix.

"I'll show you which one of us is crazy."

I'm starting to reassess my partnership with Death.

You might think it would be cool all the famous souls he's brought me over the past year, but it's starting to feel like he's trying just a little too hard. If a friend brings you a present, you might say, "Oh how thoughtful. I didn't even know how much I needed that. Thank you ever so much," but if that same friend brings you a present every couple weeks for a whole year, you start to wonder what it is they're after, like they're building up credit in the favor bank because they're about to ask for something big, uncomfortable and inconvenient.

Maybe I just think that way because I'm evil and so are most of my colleagues, but that's how I think.

Then sometimes I think, man, I haven't watched a good movie with a ton of maggots in it in a while.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Phenomena.

This 1985 Dario Argento film is about Jennifer (Jennifer Connelly), a pop star's daughter who's been shipped off to a fancy Swiss boarding school. Jennifer has a psychic connection with insects and.there's a maniac on the loose near the school who likes to kill girls who are Jennifer's age.

One night Jennifer goes sleepwalking and witnesses a murder, then falls in the middle of the street, where two guys in a convertible pick her up and drive off with her. She puts up too much of a fight for their liking, so they throw her out of the car into the woods. As luck would have it, a smiling chimpanzee was in the neighborhood and takes Jennifer by the hand to meet Professor John McGregor, an entomologist. The two become instant friends because they like bugs.

Were you aware insects can be used to fight crime?

Back at school, the headmistress is angry at Jennifer for sneaking out at night. Then she gets angry at Jennifer for summoning a swarm of insects to cover the building when the other students are taunting her. The headmistress tries to have Jennifer committed to a psych ward.

Jennifer escapes back to McGregor's lab, where he shows her a fly whose larvae only feeds on dead bodies. He sends Jennifer off with one such fly in the hope that it will lead her to where the murderer is hiding the remains of his or her victims. I'd say she succeeds, more or less, then a bunch of gross, weird stuff happens. I'd rather not spoil it for you, though.

Phenomena is like Suspiria with bugs. Its soundtrack includes music by Goblin, Iron Maiden and Motorhead. It streams on Amazon Prime.

"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.