"I've never seen the sky this color before. It's just like flying through a sea of blood."

I watched something on the TV Tuesday night and the words really resonated with me.

"The world's in terrible shape. Trouble between nations grows worse with terrorism breaking out all over the place. Everything's gone crazy!"

     

No, it wasn't the State of the Union, but it was every bit as fucked up.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell.

Remember how last week I said the Japanese were making the hell out of samurai and giant monster movies in the 1960s? This 1968 Hajime Sato film is neither of those.

It starts on an airliner whose passengers include a corrupt politician, an arms dealer and his wife, a psychologist, and a blonde lady who speaks only English but somehow understands everyone else's Japanese perfectly well. Her husband was killed in Vietnam.

The news of the day is that the British ambassador was assassinated. While the politician and arms dealer discuss the sad, but profitable, state of the world, birds start smashing into the windows.

Then the flight crew receives word there's a bomb on the plane. In searching for the bomb, they notice a passenger in a turtleneck sweater, white suit, and wraparound sunglasses.

He doesn't have the bomb, just a sniper rifle. He's the assassin.

Then a flying saucer forces the plane to crash.

While the pilot and surviving passengers argue about the best strategy to assure their survival, the assassin takes a stewardess hostage and escapes. Wandering in the wilderness, they find the flying saucer, and the assassin is compelled to step into its light.

And here's the best part: his forehead splits open, a blob of silver slime crawls into the wound, and he becomes a vampire.

The second best part comes a little later when the aliens use the arms dealer's wife as a loudspeaker to announce their plans of Earth's destruction, then throw her mannequin stunt double over a cliff.

The humans are powerless to stop the alien menace due to their constant bickering and in-fighting. It's a statement about war or something.

A crazy story loaded up with trippy special effects, Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell is the weirdest movie I've reviewed in a week. It streams on YouTube.

"You will meet a harsh, merciless death. You will die!"

On this, the last Thursday of the first month of the new year, while I wait for any paid streaming service to offer up any must-see classic of horror I haven't already written about, it might be a good time to recap what we've looked at recently.

 As soon as I was finished talking about killer Santas, my demon hordes clamored that I must recommend to you 1963's Black Sabbath by Italian filmmaker Mario Bava. The next week, they thought you should know about a wholly yet unseen brand of fright in 1964's At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul by a guy called Coffin Joe. He was from Brazil and they hadn't done any horror movies down there yet, so no one saw that coming. Last week, my Editorial Board of the Damned slammed their fists on the table and insisted that you needed to know about a film out of England called Dr. Terror's House of Horror with Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Donald Sutherland. 

I got sick of them telling me what to do so I fired them and decided to tell you about a Japanese movie from 1966.

• By the mid 1960s, the Japanese were really cranking out two kinds of movies: samurai period dramas, and giant monster smash 'em-ups.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Daimajin. 

It shouldn't surprise anyone that a period, giant samurai smash'em-up exists. It, along with its two sequels, was inevitable. This Kimiyoshi Yasuda film takes place in an ordinary castle in the shadow of an extraordinary mountain. The mountain contains the spirit of the great god Majin, who is often angry and causes tremors. The peasants in the castle, who seem to be well treated despite their low status, throw a fire dancing ritual to keep Majin contained in that damn mountain. Some bad guys decide that the ritual is the perfect distraction to overtake the castle from its beneficient samurai lord and start treating the peasants quite poorly indeed. The lord's children escape and hide out in a cave in the mountain of Majin for ten years. The boy gets caught by the bad guys, who, fresh from hammering on the great statue of Majin, decide to crucify him. The girl prays to Majin to break free and crush the bad guys, who he's already kind of pissed at. When the girl sweetens the deal by offering to throw herself off a waterfall, he really can't refuse. The mountain trembles as he rises, turns from stone to armored, angry, blue-green flesh and proceeds to stomp the shit out of everything in a finale that's sure to horrify lovers of ancient Japanese architecture. 

On a less positive note, the movie does suffer from a problem I've always had with giant monster movies: Majin doesn't show up and start stomping until about the last 20 minutes of the movie. Luckily there's plenty of violence sprinkled throughout, even if it isn't monster-related. 

Daimajin streams on YouTube.

"Something came out of that coffin tonight, something evil and strange."

When Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee were paired as creator and creature in 1957's The Curse of Frankenstein, they re-invigorated gothic horror and stole the screen back from the space aliens and giant, radioactive bugs that dominated genre cinema of the 1950s. The fight scene at the end of 1958's Horror of Dracula cemented their place as an iconic horror duo. So who wouldn't want to see them bickering on a train?

This week's Thursday Thriller is Dr. Terror's House of Horrors.

This 1965 anthology film by Freddy Francis casts Cushing in the role of Dr. Schreck, a fortune teller who boards a train and reads tarot cards for his fellow passengers. Four cards lay out their destinies, and the fifth card tells how they can escape their fate. In each case, the answer is same -- death.

The first two fortunes include an OK werewolf story and a silly bit about a killer plant. They serve as decent warm-ups for the rest of the movie.

The third story stars Ray Castle as jazz musician Biff Bailey, who takes a trip to the West Indies to do a little cultural appropriation. Despite a voodoo priest's warning not to steal the sacred music of the local deity, Bailey does it anyway, and who can blame him? It really swings, man! It's a fun piece with some cool music and I liked it even though Bailey's comeuppance wasn't as bloody as I might have hoped for.

Lee plays haughty, skeptical art critic Franklyn Marsh who spends most of his time during the framing story flapping his newspaper and warning the other guys on the train that Dr. Schreck is an obvious fraud. He eventually acquiesces to Schreck's offer of a reading, if only to prove he isn't afraid.

In his fortune, we see Marsh heaping scorn on the work of painter Eric Landor (Michael Gough). Landor gets his revenge by tricking Marsh into praising a painting by a chimpanzee. Humiliated, his reputation in ruin, Marsh takes the first opportunity to run over Landor with his car. Landor loses his hand and can never paint again. Despondent, he commits suicide, but his severed hand lives on to haunt Marsh. It's probably the most satisfying bit of the film, but it ain't over yet.

The fifth and final story finds a young Donald Sutherland playing Dr. Bob Carroll, who just moved to a new town with his hot French wife Nicole (Jennifer Jayne) and has to come to terms with mounting evidence that she is a vampire.

It would be my favorite story of the set, except for the bat. Had technology not yet advanced enough to give filmmakers a halfway convincing rubber bat by 1965? Seems like something someone would have worked on since 1896. I can't remember ever having seen a good one, but I guess it's something I'll have to look out for from now on.

Dr. Terror's House of Horrors is not a perfect movie, more silly than scary, but I did enjoy it, stupid bats and all.

"Nothing's stronger than my disbelief! Destroy me! I have no faith!"

Not to hold it over your heads or anything, but I've been suffering hard for you mortals this week. I've been concentrating my research on the early 1960s to find you films so unusual they remain fresh to this day. I love Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Vincent Price, but it's as if they're in every movie. I've never even reviewed a movie with Barbara Steele in it, and I'm already sick of her. Every thing she's in, she goes to an old castle and there's a portrait of some 300-year-old witch that looks exactly like her.

Fuck Europe. Ever wonder what was going on in South America back then?

This week's Thursday Thriller is At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul.

Jose Mojica Marins wrote, directed and starred in this 1964 film in which he portrays Ze do Caixao, or to those who speak English, Coffin Joe. And of course Coffin Joe made this, the first Brazilian horror film. Look at the guy. He clearly did everything before it was cool!

Coffin Joe is the town mortician who looks like he probably vapes and knows how to ride a unicycle. Oh, and deep! Man, this guy can't wait to profess his atheism and how much smarter it makes him than everyone else. I mean sure, eat a leg of lamb on Holy Friday, but do you have to be such a douchebag about it?

In his top hat and bushy beard, you wouldn't be out of line if you assumed that he regularly hassles the bartender about which IPA has the most IBUs, but his behavior down at the public house is a little worse than that. 

One night after chopping off one guy's fingers with a broken wine bottle and beating another guy with a whip, Coffin Joe walks home and ponders his existential plight: essentially, that he needs a son to carry on his legacy, and life is pointless without one. His wife Lenita (Valeria Vasquez) can't bear him children, so he kills her by letting a tarantula bite her. He would like to conceive with Terezinha (Magda Mei), but she is engaged to his best friend Antonio (Nivaldo Lima), so he'll just have to die, too. Then he rapes Terezhina, who kills herself in shame. Pretty soon, you're thinking, man, this guy has made a lot of pissed off ghosts and probably collects Spoon bootlegs on vinyl. When will he get his bloody comeuppance?

You mortals know I hate to spoil movies, but I'll give you a hint. It's in the title. 

I joke about Coffin Joe, but At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul is a good movie, a welcome relief to the castle- and portrait-centric horror of the early 1960s. It streams on YouTube. 

"A body like yours can drive a man to madness. And I will kill you."

Netflix just dropped a new season of Black Mirror, and I still haven't finished the first three yet. I've seen a few episodes from each season. I like what I've seen and recommend it highly, even if my experience is limited. It's an anthology series about the potential nightmares posed by new and emerging technologies. It's good. The first one is about a guy who kidnaps a princess and demands the prime minister fuck a pig on YouTube in exchange for her safe return. There's a really smart one where people have an app and they constantly rate each other, and your rating is practically credit. If you average at least 3.6 stars and have some 3.8s to give you a good reference, you can get in to some nice apartments, but if you lash out at an ineffectual airline employee and hold up the line, the consequences can be dire.

But what about old technology?

Consider the landline telephone. For most of the 20th century, you had no idea who was calling without some significant police work, and if the caller had been inside your home, they would know exactly where you stood when you were talking to them.

So much the better to position their telephone, so they might peek in your window at you as they called.

Creepy, huh?

This week's Thursday Thriller is Black Sabbath.

This 1963 Mario Bava film stars the stunning Michele Mercier as Rosy, a gal just trying to slip into something more comfortable, when she starts receiving death threats by telephone. What I like about Italians, Bava, in particular, is the undercurrent of eroticism prevalent in their horror. Mercier leaves plenty to the imagination, but watching her take off her stockings can also leave you plenty of fuel.

This segment, entitled "The Telephone," is the earliest I can remember in which a phone is used as a tool of menace, long before Black Christmas, When a Stranger Calls, and Scream.

Black Sabbath is an anthology film in which Boris Karloff plays the emcee. He opens the film wearing a simple suit and stands on a rocky horizon against a backdrop of flashing, psychedelic colors.  I think this is how you know you're watching the Italian version. In the American version, he appears as a floating, color-changing, disembodied head. Either way, he makes some corny remarks about vampires going to the movies before introducing the Mercier segment.

Karloff returns later in the film in "The Werdulak," which is a kind of vampire. A Russian nobleman finds a dagger stuck in a headless body while he is out for a ride on his horse. He stops into a nearby house and the family insists he leave before Father (Karloff) gets home, for he went off to kill the monster who's been terrorizing  the countryside, and if he does not return by midnight he is surely a werdulak as well.

Wouldn't you know Dad ambled up the driveway just as the clock strikes 12? He wasn't in the house yet, so did he make it or didn't he? He seems all right enough. He has the werdulak's head in a bag after all, and orders it hung from a post as a warning to any others, like you do, but he seems awfully agitated by the dogs barking. How can you be sure?

Will it help when he carries off his own grandson into the forest in the dead of night? Yeah, that'll clear up any doubt you might have had.

The third bit is a decent ghost story with a cartoonishly fun-looking corpse and a stolen ring.

Black Sabbath is a classic, with sexy women and Karloff looking even creepier than he did in Frankenstein. It streams on Shudder.

"He didn't know how to cut a woman into pieces."

I have a perfect New Year's movie picked out for you mortals, but we'll get to that in a minute, as I also have some important movie critic business to attend first.

As we reach the end of another trip around the sun, most other reviewers are publishing their top 10 films of 2017. If you've been following this blog for any stretch of time, you know staying up on what's new isn't what interests me, but I'll give it my best shot.

Here we go:

10.) Death Race 2050 -- Yes, Roger Corman's Death Race 2000 has been remade before with a full reboot of the franchise featuring Jason Statham, but that sucked. This remake by G.J. Echternkamp remembers why the original was so funny in the first place, keeps with the essentials of story and tone, but offers up an all-new cast of currently relevant, satirical racers like Tammy the Terrorist, a religious nut who worships Elvis; rapper and black supremacist Minerva Jefferson; and interactive sex toy Dr. Creamer. For my money, this is the best splatter-comedy of 2017. It's still on Netflix.

9.) The Evil Within -- As heir to an oil fortune, writer-director Andrew Getty got to live out his dreams in a way many of you mortals will never realize. Getty was able to self-finance a film about a mentally retarded boy who finds advice about love and life in an antique mirror that doesn't have his best interests at heart, and he got to do it while addicted to methamphetamine. The film took 15 years to complete and Getty died during post-production. Hate on rich kids and meth heads all you want, the film is touching, trippy, scary and something altogether spectacular. Michael Berryman plays a demon. I predict that time will be kind to this sleeper and it will be revered as a one-of-a-kind classic. The Evil Within streams on Amazon Prime.

8.) The Void -- Technically, this Lovecraftian tale of bizarre sex rituals and human sacrifice by the writer/director team of Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski was released in 2016, but it didn't make it to Netflix until 2017, which is when I watched it and reviewed it. That is to say, I reviewed it in 2017, and that's how things get on this list.

7.) The Babadook -- Thanks to some epic shit-posting on Tumblr, the titular monster of this 2014 Jennifer Kent film enjoyed the renowned status of mascot for Gay Pride 2017. Sure, it doesn't make sense, but are you gonna deny the homosexuals their claim on an allegory about grief? What's wrong with you?

6.) Dog Soldiers -- For many, 2017 was a year of tragic loss and even I am included in that bunch. My favorite werewolf took a silver bullet in June and 2002's Dog Soldiers reminds me of him. You can find it on YouTube.

5.) Invaders from Mars -- In 1974, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was released on an unsuspecting public. It was original, intense and it changed the course of horror history. It was shot over a nasty, hot Texas summer by a bunch of hippies led by director Tobe Hooper, who shuffled off his mortal coil this past August. Amazon Prime no longer hosts The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, so the number five spot goes instead Hooper's Invaders from Mars. It is a 1986 remake of the 1953 original, and is frog-gulping, slime monster fun. It streams on YouTube.

4.) Night of the Living Dead -- Night of the Living Dead is the only movie I've reviewed twice. I wrote about the 1968 classic in February 2016 as part of my Black History Month celebration, but we have nasty mailer-daemons in Hell and they gobbled up every last byte, so I reviewed it again a year later. Little did I know at the time that auteur George A. Romero would cross over in July. Night of the Living Dead streams on Amazon Prime, Shudder and YouTube.

3.) Bride of Frankenstein -- We've established that I don't stay on top of what's new. That isn't among my purposes. One of my goals is to let you know when classics come available online, like six Universal monster films did on Shudder in October. Bride of Frankenstein from 1935 is my favorite of the batch, and you better get to it quickly if you haven't watched it yet as Shudder's got it listed in the "Last Chance to Watch" collection.

2.) Night of the Demons -- I think at this point we've covered that I suck at writing best-of-the-year lists, but my favorite thing to do when writing this blog is to rediscover forgotten gems, and you'll be hard pressed to find a movie as shiny as 1988's Night of the Demons. It's about a bunch of horny teenagers who break into a reputedly haunted house one Halloween to have a party and a seance. Disgusting things happen. It's still available on YouTube.

And that brings us down to number one. The best movie of 2017 is Abby from 1974.

1.) Abby -- Louisville native William Girdler directed this blaxploitation ripoff of The Exorcist. It stars Carol Speed as Abby, and Blacula himself, William Marshall, as the priest. Abby, a faithful wife and devout church-goer becomes possessed by a sex demon. It's funky, psychedelic and appears to have cost $12 to make. Abby streams on YouTube.

So there's the list, and what better way to wrap up 2017 and set the tone for 2018 than with an old slasher flick that takes place on New Year's Eve?

This week's Thursday Thriller is Terror Train.

This 1980 film by Roger Spottiswoode is about a bunch of college kids who played a prank gone awry. The members of Sigma Phi decided to haze a pledge by telling him to go upstairs and lay Jamie Lee Curtis, but when he got to bed, he found a medical school cadaver where she was supposed to be. Three years later, the fraternity throws its New Year's party on a train, and a masked killer starts picking them off one by one. The killer changes costume throughout the movie, and starts off in what's supposed to be a Groucho Marx getup, but looks a lot more like Gene Shalit.

David Copperfield is in it. Roger Ebert called it "gruesome stupidity," but it's definitely in my top 52 of the year. Its thin plot will make it a great background movie to play at your New Year's Party.

Terror Train streams on Amazon Prime.

"Moss Garcia: throws rocks at dogs; uses profane language; picks his nose; impure thoughts; negative body hygiene."

It's the last Thursday before Christmas, mortals. We've been through a lot. We've seen a lot of murdering Santas over the last month. We saw the first murdering Santa in film; we saw the murdering Santa concept stretched to outlandish, pro-wrestling style extremes; we saw murdering Santas menace a sorority house; and we're still not done with this theme -- not by a long shot.

There are plenty of murdering Santas in films that aren't so easy to find online. Some streaming services act like the genre doesn't even exist. They'd rather wallow in more traditional fare, the kind of stuff that's offensive in its harmlessness. Netflix has the whole Tim Allen/Santa Clause trilogy, but can't cough up Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out starring Bill Moseley?

Then over on Amazon Prime they have tons of latter entries in the field, but a lot of them suck pretty hard. There's one called Christmas Slay in which the police come to arrest the maniac, and he just lazily pushes them down on the ground, one-by-one. For some reason they don't all-at-once kick the shit out of him. It's so surreal, you have to wonder if it's possible someone actually made a movie this bad or if you're just dreaming. I'm sure the cast and crew thought they were being ironic or some shit. I had to turn it off.

But I'm afraid our time to explore this topic is coming to an end, and I've saved the best I could find for last.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Christmas Evil.

This 1980 film by writer/director Lewis Jackson is one of those slow breakdown of a fragile mind stories. Harry (Brandon Maggart) has had problems ever since he was a kid and saw Santa Claus kneeling in front of his mom and fondling her legs by the Christmas tree. He has a fantasy of being Santa. He has a middle-management job at a toy factory. He uses binoculars to watch the neighborhood children and writes down when they're naughty. He gets worked up when he sees the big guy make his appearance at the end of the Macy's parade. He lives alone. At work, superiors and subordinates alike treat him like a chump. His brother thinks he's a failure.

So what does he do? He makes a Santa suit and paints a sleigh on the side of his white, windowless van, and behaves in a generally creepy manner, but he doesn't act out until he learns at the factory's charity drive for the Willowy Springs State Hospital for Retarded Children isn't on the up and up. He suits up, steals a bunch of toys from the factory, and delivers them to the hospital. Harry's an all right guy after all, until he stabs a guy in the eyeball with a toy soldier's sword in front of a church.

What's fun about this movie is how it really puts you in Psycho Psanta's mind. Harry is a lonely outcast because he still wants to believe in Santa. He's a simple man, not stupid, but perhaps naive enough to think the world could be simply divided into naughty and nice. He suffers for his own innocence until he learns to stand up for it. You're never entirely on his side, but you might feel at times like he's got a point, you know?

Christmas Evil streams on YouTube with ads and on Shudder.