"You ungodly warlock! Because of you this hotel and this town will be cursed forever!"

It's time to get excited, mortals. The Louisville Zombie Walk is only a month away.

At 8:29 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 25, I will unleash some 45,000 staggering, slobbering, rotten teeth-gnashing zombies onto Bardstown Road. We will convene as usual in front of Mid-City Mall.

If you're planning on doing battle against my legions of the damned, take heed: no guns will be allowed at the event -- not even replica weapons. Louisville Metro Police will take your gun if they see it.

What can I say? Insurance companies take the fun out of everything.

I did check with the organizers. They said Super Soakers would be fine.

Let's get in the mood.

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Beyond.

Lucio Fulci directed this 1981 film as the middle chapter of his Gates of Hell trilogy, which started with City of the Living Dead one year previously.

Apparently there are seven gates to Hell, but he only made movies about three of them. One of the gates is in the basement of a hotel in Louisiana. A lynch mob believes an artist named Schweick (Antoine Saint-John) opened it up in the 1920s, so they chain whip him to death for it. The chains tear the flesh right off his bones and it's the best chain whipping I've ever seen in film. Then they nail him to the basement wall and plaster him in.

In the present day, a New Yorker named Liza (Catriona MacColl) buys the hotel with the intent of fixing the place up, but accidents keep happening to her contractors. Joe the plumber (Giovanni De Nava) goes to see why the basement is flooded and gets his eye ripped out.

Then Liza picks up a blind hitchhiker Emily (Cinzia Monreale) and her German shepherd Dickie. Emily comes back to the hotel and warns Liza that the warlock is still there. She should know. She was there in the '20s when she still had her eyesight.

I could go on about the story, but it's pretty thin. You've got an old hotel that's haunted as fuck with zombies because there's a gateway to Hell in the basement. You don't watch Fulci for intricate story lines. You watch for the absurdly gory vignettes and this movie delivers.

While no single Fulci film is my favorite, each seems to have a scene that I love. Zombie (aka Zombi aka Zombi 2 aka Zombie Flesh Eaters) has the underwater undead versus shark scene. City of the Living Dead (aka The Gates of Hell) has the part where the lady vomits her guts up before turning. The Beyond has a few great moments.

The scene where a bottle of acid turns over on a lady's face and it dissolves and bubbles off is pretty cool.

Then there's the part where a bunch of tarantulas eating a guy's face off, bit by bit.

And then Dickie has a great moment that I would rather not spoil.

The Beyond is absolutely gross-tastic and a perfect film to get you in the mood for zombie cosplay in the streets. It streams on Shudder.

"Curtis? Are you dead?"

Hey mortals, hope you had a great Friday the 13th despite your limited viewing options for Jason movies. I see a lot of you made the best of it and checked out The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs on Shudder. I tuned in myself, but after two hours of waiting for the signal to load, I realized I was drunk on Miskatonic Revivers and still had some damned souls to torment.

The Internet connection in Hell isn't that great to begin with because we're actually stealing bandwidth from Limbo, where every one binge watches Pawn Stars reruns until the end of time, so at first I had no idea that the problem was that Shudder was not prepared for the success of its big promo.

I caught up the next day. It was good seeing Joe Bob again. I stole everything I know about film criticism from that guy.

In fact, I'm about to tell you about a movie I watched Joe Bob host 20 years ago on Monstervision, but because I'm still salty about the technical difficulties, it's not on Shudder.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Maximum Overdrive.

Stephen King himself directed this 1986 film. He explains his reasoning in his epically coked-out trailer.

The action takes place in Wilmington, N.C. It seems a comet is passing over the earth, leaving in its wake a wave of radiation that causes all the machines to become sentient and hostile towards humanity.

First, an ATM calls King an asshole. Then a drawbridge raises while a bunch of cars are still on it and you get to see several minutes of gloriously mindless wreckage. At the Dixie Boy truck stop, the gas pumps quit working until the grease monkey looks down the tube to see what the problem is and it sprays him in the eyes. An electric knife goes crazy on a waitress. And a truck driver playing an arcade game finds new meaning to the term "game over."

Then over at the little league field a Coke machine shoots a coach in the nuts and a steamroller runs over a kid. The scene cuts before we get to see an awesome head splatter that was edited out.

Emilio Estevez plays the heroic line cook. Pat Hingle, who also played Commissioner Gordon in 1989's Batman, portrays Hendershot, the truck stop owner. Yeardley Smith, best known as the voice of Lisa Simpson, plays a none-too-bright country bride, but the real star of the movie is a tractor-trailer with a giant Green Goblin head mounted on the grill.

The Green Goblin truck appears to be the leader of all the trucks who descend on the Dixie Boy and establish a reign of terror. And what is it the trucks want? You guessed it, gas! So they enslave the people to pump the gas for them.

Luckily, there's more to the Dixie Boy than meets the eye. It turns out Hendershot is a gun runner and has a basement full of rocket launchers.

With most movies, you see one guy blow up an evil truck with a rocket launcher, it's awesome and the movie ends. A lot of directors figure if you've seen it once, you've seen it, but not King. No fewer than three trucks meet their demise via rocket-propelled grenade. It's the gift that keeps on giving. Somehow it never gets old.

This movie is deliriously goofy, but despite its flaws, it's the best movie King ever directed. I guess he figured he did it right the first time because it's also the only movie he ever directed.

Still, it's hard to hate 90 minutes of wanton destruction, and the havoc isn't completely bereft of a philosophical viewpoint. The opening titles are accompanied by AC/DC's anthemic "Who Made Who?" because, like, who did make who? Did people make the machines or did the machines make the people, man?

A lot of cocaine was involved in the making of this film.

AC/DC provided the entirety of the all-rock soundtrack, except maybe the cheesy orchestral jabs that punctuate the scary bits.

Maximum Overdrive streams on Hulu, Amazon Prime and E-pix.

"Guys, it's OK. He just wanted his machete back."

Do you mortals want to hear about some bullshit?

Every Thursday the 12th, I try to review a Friday the 13th movie. It's been a problematic run because a lot of times, two weeks before the big day, whatever streaming service has the movies drops them, because the last thing they'd want to offer their viewers is movies they want to watch when they want to watch them.

I thought Starz might be different, because it carried the bulk of the series forever, but alas I was wrong.

I wanted to tell you this week about Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter.

It's a good one. It's got Crispin Glover in it as a geek who can't get laid, and Corey Feldman as Tommy, a young boy who keeps spying on the older kids while they're skinny dipping and having sex. More like Peeping Tommy.

And of course two weeks ago Starz dropped the whole franchise...

Except for one film.

We just have to make do and skip ahead a few chapters.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Jason X.

James Isaac directed this often maligned 2001 entry in the franchise.

A lot of Jason fans think this one is dumb, which I find odd because the series was at least five films past its prime by the time Jason X came out. How many times in a row can you tell the same story?

What distinguishes this one and no doubt fuels the ire of so many fans is it couldn't take place much further from good ole Camp Blood. Jason goes to space.

As the movie opens Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder) is hanging in chains at the Crystal Lake Research Facility, waiting to be cryogenically frozen, but then David Cronenberg shows up with a bunch of green berets and says he's there to transfer him to another lab because his proven ability to regenerate damaged tissue is too important to stick in the freezer and think about later.

Rowan (Alexa Doig), who is in charge of the cryostasis, tells Cronenberg this is a bad idea and is immediately proved right because Jason has already escaped from his chains and killed a security guard. He proceeds to kill all the green berets. Rowan fights Jason into the freezer, but he stabs her through the door, triggering an automated lockdown and the two are frozen for 500 years.

In that time, the earth became uninhabitable and humans fled for another planet. Still, college students from Earth 2 come back from time to time for archaeological studies. One such class finds Jason and Rowan and decides to take them on board their ship.

Jason is so lethal he cuts one kid's arm off just falling out of the freezer.  Luckily for the dreadlocked, stoner doofus Azrael (Dov Tiefenbach) nanotechnology is advanced enough by then to regenerate him a new arm once he's back on board the ship. This technology helps Jason out later on when his head gets blown up and he regenerates looking like a knockoff Terminator.

Also on board the ship is a bevy of midriff-baring space babes, who are just as horny as the kids back at Camp Crystal Lake. Some things never change. Even the android Kay-Em 14 is looking to get some.

Essentially, this movie is just Alien with Jason in the place of the xenomorph. The ridiculous premise allows for more comedic exploration of the killer than a lot of fans might be happy about, but I'd hardly call it a total loss. It's got a couple of my favorite kills -- one involving a vat of liquid nitrogen and the other occuring in a moment of self parody aboard the ship's Star Trek-style holodeck.

Give it a try. It might be as bad as everyone says, but you'll never know unless you take a chance.

Jason X streams on Starz.

"Make sacrifice unto Him! Bring Him the blood of the outlanders!"

Time keeps slipping by, mortals. Soon it will be time for the undead to overtake the streets of Louisville again, and it has been one crazy week.

Dr. Frankenstein had an experiment go awry and now he's in the burn unit, which is difficult because he was supposed to host the all-monsters pool party later this month and no one wants to ask if his skin grafts will be healed up enough for him to keep the date.

Maybe I'll just throw the little demons in the van and take them to see a volcano instead.

Speaking of summer fun, this week's Thursday Thriller is Children of the Corn.

Fritz Kiersch directed this 1984 adaptation of a Stephen King short story.

Burt and Vicky (Peter Horton and Linda Hamilton) are a happy young couple on a cross country drive through Nebraska. They decide it might be fun to take the back roads instead of the interstate. Instead of adventure they find corn, miles of it, and angry Christian radio.

Their vacation turns to the stuff of nightmares when they get lost, and while checking the map, run over a kid who was standing in the middle of the highway. Turns out the kid had his throat slashed right before he wound up in the road, so they didn't kill him, but they're determined to find help anyway. Burt is compelled to do the right thing in the face of all common sense.

You know what they say. No good deed goes unpunished.

Instead of help, they find a town full of children who murdered all the adults one Sunday after church by poisoning the coffee at the diner, then cutting them up with knives and cleavers. One old guy gets his fingers cut off in the ham slicer.

What motivated these ghastly crimes? Were the children seeking retribution because the adults named them all after Old Testament characters? That might have been part of it, but the official reason is that they've been listening to Isaac, who brought them a message from  a new deity called He Who Walks Behind The Rows.

They also crucified a police officer and refer to his corpse as The Blue Man.

John Franklin plays Isaac, the prophet and the spiritual leader of the child cult. He steals the show because he's awfully sinister and fluidly verbose for a 12-year-old. That's because he's not 12. Franklin has Growth Hormone Deficiency. He was actually 24 years old when the film was made. Isaac's enforcer is an equally sinister ginger kid named Malachi, played by Courtney Gains.

It's a decent flick, not especially bloody. As Stephen King adaptations go, it's not exactly The Shining or Carrie, but it's as good as Cujo or The Dead Zone.

Children of the Corn streams on Netflix and Hulu.

"Long live the new flesh!"

If you've read this blog before you already know how it works: every week I seek out the weirdest, grossest and most perverted movie that streams online and tell you about it so you can enjoy it in the comfort and convenience of your own home. It's become more of an obsession than a pastime for me, but I've got nothing on the main character in the movie I've got for you this week.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Videodrome.

David Cronenberg directed this gory, balls-trippy, psychosexual suspense-thriller in 1983, the same year he directed The Dead Zone. James Woods plays Max Renn, the executive of a small, independent cable channel that specializes in sex and violence. He's looking for the next big, sleazy thing. He employs a video pirate named Harlan (Peter Dvorsky), who finds him a show called Videodrome, which is a single, unedited, hour-long shot of someone being tortured to death. He wants to track down the people who make the show so he can play it on his station.

The best part? The show gives you a brain tumor that causes hallucinations.  One night in an especially paranoid state, Renn sits up late watching videos with his gun, and a big vertical slit opens up in his belly. If you said it reminds you of a vagina, no one would say you're terribly off-base. Renn sticks his pistol in there.

Debbie Harry from Blondie plays Nicki Brand, a radio host who helps troubled callers. She's also a masochist. After meeting Max on a local TV talk show, they go out, they go back to his place. They watch Videodrome. She's into it. She wants to go audition. He tells her to stay away.

After that it gets really twisty, a little tough to follow, and even tougher to summarize. It is one weird flick -- weirder than The Dead Zone, weirder even than Scanners.  It's never clear if the action is really happening or all part of Max's hallucinations. The line between what's real and what's TV and what's in Max's head gets a lot fuzzy and that's deliberate -- part of some grander statement about our relationship with television or pornography or something. I'll let you write your own dissertation and tell you that Videodrome streams on Starz.

"It takes a lot of love for a person to do this. You know you want it. You'll like it."

Let's not beat around the bush this week.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Slumber Party Massacre.

I'm getting straight to the point because that's exactly what this film from 1982 does. It was produced by Roger Corman, and it features a lot of boobs and murder. It's about a girl named Trish (Michele Michaels) whose parents go out of town for the weekend, so she has a few friends over to drink beer and smoke dope. As luck would have it a homicidal pervert named Russ Thorn (Michael Villela) just escaped and he kills off most of the barely dressed, nubile beauties with a power drill. The bit is about two feet long. The symbolism isn't exactly subtle.

The whole affair might sound a bit sexist until you consider a woman named Rita Mae Brown wrote it, initially as a parody of slasher films, and a woman named Amy Holden Jones directed it, steering it    back toward the serious. The result is a satisfying slasher flick with a lot of funny moments. And boobs. Did I mention the boobs?

What I like about it is the action keeps moving. You know how slasher films sometimes get bogged down in building a psychological profile of the killer, often dealing with some childhood trauma and a lot of tedious flashbacks? Not the case here. All you need to know about Russ Thorn is that he's an escaped killer. There's not even an explanation where his drill is plugged in, because that would be boring. It clocks out at a lean 77 minutes.

The focus is instead on the killer's intended victims, who receive a fair amount of character development, especially the new girl in school Valerie (Robin Stille), who, instead of attending the party, stays home across the street with her Playgirl-reading little sister Courtney (Jennifer Meyers).

Slumber Party Massacre is full of misdirections, pop scares, funny moments, scary moments, gory moments, and girls showering. It delivers exactly what the title promises and doesn't try to be anything else. It streams on YouTube.

"Strange things have been going on at the hospital. Pieces of corpses have been disappearing."

I don't do it often in the summertime, but this past weekend I manifested myself in the flesh on earth to check in on a fat mortal I know.

I said to him, "Whoa, are you less fat than you used to be?"

He started telling me how he's been on the Kito diet.

I was momentarily impressed by his candor and grim determination.

I said, "You're just telling everybody about this?"

He said, "Why not? I'm proud of the results I've gotten just by switching bread for bacon."

Then I realized he meant the keto diet, not the Kito diet.

You see, they're two very different things. The Kito diet involves eating raw human hearts, entrails, and all the eyeballs you can pluck.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Zombie Holocaust.

This 1980 film was directed by Marino Girolami.

Alexandra Delli Colli plays Lori Ridgeway, who works at a university hospital assisting a surgeon in training medical students. In her free time, she helps an anthropology professor with his research. She also wears nice underwear, we learn as we watch her change clothes a couple of times.

Someone at the hospital keeps cutting parts off the training cadavers. They don't call the police because, as the surgeon explains, "a police investigation would give us a bad name."

Then, they catch an orderly trying to eat a heart out of one of the cadavers. Rather than hang around and ask questions, he throws himself out the window. They find a tattoo on his chest -- the sign of Kito. It matches a symbol on a sacrificial dagger Lori has hanging on the wall of her apartment, except when she gets home, the place has been ransacked, the dagger stolen.

Call the police now? Nah. Instead they organize an expedition to the Asiatic island of Kito to get to the bottom of things. Dr. Peter Chandler (Ian McCulloch) leads the excursion and invites Lori to tag along. Reporter Susan Kelly (Sherry Buchanan) joins them, and so do some other people who don't live long enough for me to bother learning their names.

They stop for a rest at the home of Dr. Obrero (Donald O'Brien), who lives on an island near their destination. He assists them by providing them with guides and giving them directions. While the party is having drinks and delivering exposition, Lori retires to her room, gets undressed and finds a rotten, severed head in her bed, along with the mark of Kito painted on her sheets in blood. Obrero tells Lori to calm down.

The next day, their boat has engine trouble and they decide to pull over to another island where they find cannibals, zombies, zombie cannibals and the mark of Kito everywhere. Numerous minor characters get impaled on bamboo and guts torn out and eaten by naked savages.

In my favorite scene, Chandler and Lori try to escape on a raft, but can't get the motor started. A zombie closes in on them, the motor starts, but there's no time to hop in the boat, so Chandler uses the propeller to chop the zombie's skull into little bits.

There are plenty of Italian zombie movies, and plenty of Italian cannibal movies, all of which are disgusting gore fests, but this one is special because it's got both zombies and cannibals. The outboard motor sequence is one of a kind.

The musical accompaniment to the scenes of horrific violence sometimes sounds like it would fit better in a video game, but IMDb trivia says it's actually the music to Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals. The zombie makeups aren't the best, but the flow of gore makes up for it.

Zombie Holocaust streams on Shudder.