Desperate to save her granddaughter, Mary Jane, from an encroaching supernatural rot, the wealthy Mrs. Nugent turns to the only experts she can find: Nora (Phyllis Diller) and Jack Mills (Lawrence Tierney). Nora is a wisecracking, flamboyant medium, while Jack is a hard-nosed cynic. They are career con artists used to fleecing pockets and putting on dim-lit seances, but Mrs. Nugent’s $50,000 bounty is enough to make them ignore the smell of sulfur.
Mary Jane claims to be Aisha Candisha, a Moroccan demon of legendary malice. To prove her pedigree, she doesn’t just growl. She casually unhinges her jaw and consumes a silver spoon like it’s a communion wafer. Nora, realizing they are wildly out of their depth, tries to bow out, admitting they are merely fortune tellers. Jack, fueled by greed and a stubborn refusal to be intimidated, doubles down. He wants to try a transfer ritual, removing the entity from Mary Jane and trapping it inside a live pig.
Directed by T.J. Castronovo and written by Edithe Swensen, this ends with both Aisha and Gad finding new bodies to live in. As the demons argue over their prize, the con artists realize that playing at being the Warrens has invited a darkness that doesn’t care about their bank accounts.
Man, I love Sylvester Stallone. He’s my John Wayne. Anyway, I want to tell you all about it and share my feelings on Judge Dredd, Demolition Man and Cobra. What’s your favorite Stallone movie?
There are supposed to be seven of these; I’ve been through three, so I am ready for what comes next.
This time around, here’swhat’s on the menu:
Anti-Christ Themes: The documentary contends that these media franchises normalize or promote anti-Christ themes.
Glorification of Occult and Violence: The series alleges that storylines often glorify violence, the occult, blasphemy and sexual perversion.
Satanic Imagery: It investigates whether comics and movies reframe Satan or demonic figures as heroes or saviors.
Influencing Children: The film argues that leading writers use manipulation and occult themes to alter how children view the God of the Bible.
Occult Roots: The series explores the influence of occult figures like Aleister Crowley on popular media, specifically in relation to characters like Doctor Strange.
I was wondering when these guys would get to Grant Morrison and Garth Ennis.After all, Morrison openly admits to practicing occult rituals to fuel his work. The documentary views this not as creative quirkiness, but as a literal attempt to use Sigil Magick through comic panels to alter the consciousness of young readers.
You can only imagine what they thought of Preacher.
And wow, that reveal in Avengers #31 that — in the words of We Got This Covered — when Tony Stark was investigating the mysterious appearance of a million-year-old Iron Man helmet, he teams up with a talking snake, who’s actually Mephisto, the Marvel Universe’s devil. The talking snake reveals to the hero that Howard Stark made a deal with him: if Howard was to become the most intelligent man on the planet, he would give his son to the devil.”
It’s hard to tell whether the stories in this are What If or Elseworld stories, and so many of the upsetting tales have been retconned. This also recycles a lot of the Stan Lee and Jack Kirby hate.
The series often takes a hard line on the creators, suggesting that the Jewish-Christian roots of early comics were a facade for deeper occult interests. By recycling the hate, the film attempts to show that the industry’s foundation was flawed from the start, moving from Kirby’s Celestials (space gods) to the overt Satanism of modern runs.
Directed, written, and featuring Joe Schimmel, as well as David Jeremiah, this explains the idea that all Hollywood films are based on Gnosticism, a syncretic religious movement centered on dualism. They believed in two forms of God: one a transcendent, true God, and the other a lower Demiurge responsible for the material world. In this framework, salvation is redefined as the intellectual and spiritual recovery of the divine spark within the individual.
This breaks down The Matrix, The Truman Show, Donnie Darko, Pleasantville, V for Vendetta, Vanilla Sky and more. I mean, The Matrix has a ship called the Gnosis, Neo becoming the one after his mind is opened to forbidden knowledge, cities and people named after Biblical figures, and so much more.
Also: The Architect in The Matrix or Christof in The Truman Show are totally the Demiurge. The Pleasantville allusions in this are pretty spot on as well.
This wants you to understand Luciferian inversion, which is when Satan becomes the good guy and the religious world is the villain. That’s because they’re often cast as the enforcers of the Demiurge’s rules. It’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. When the faithful act like the moral police, they fit the Gnostic villain archetype perfectly.
A good way to stop doing that would be for most Christians to stop being assholes, but I digress.
Will this mention Crowley and Helena Blavatsky? You know it.
People can believe whatever they want, but wow, this is quite the movie. They should add commentary tracks to films so I can hear their views while I’m watching the actual film.
James Alan Hydrick was a self-professed psychic who could perform tricks like moving a pencil across a table. He first appeared on That’s Incredible! What’s, well, incredible is the fact that five years before, Hydrick was arrested for torture and kidnapping. He escaped three prisons, once by kicking right through a concrete wall, another by going right through the gates and the last time, pole vaulting his way out.
Hydrick claimed that he had psychokinesis and could turn the pages in a phone book by looking at them. As you can imagine, if you were around then, James Randi saw this magic trick trying to pass as psychic power and went after Hydrick, even replicating one of his tricks when Hydrick couldn’t on That’s My Line.
Investigative journalist and professional magician Dan Korem finally got the “psychic” to confess, at which point Hydrick claimed that he was trying to see just how dumb the public was. After all, he convinced many people that he was given these powers by an ascended Eastern teacher named Master Woo.
That didn’t stop him from performing and starting karate schools, places that he used to lure children in and abuse them. Wanted on an outstanding warrant, Hydrick was arrested after police recognized him from Sally Jessy Raphael. Hydrick was sentenced to 17 years for molesting five boys in Huntington Beach, California, andthen sent to the Atascadero State Hospital for treatment under the sexually violent predator law.
This is the movie directed and written by Danny Korem that got the truth out of Hydrick. Hydrick would balance a pencil on the edge of a table. He didn’t use his mind; he used sharp, controlled puffs of air. Korem noted that Hydrick would turn his head to the side to make it look like he wasn’t blowing, but the air currents would travel along the surface of the table, moving the object.
To move objects under a sealed glass tank, Hydrick relied on the fact that most tables are not perfectly flat. He would blow air through the tiny gaps between the tank and the table.
During the investigation, Hydrick became extremely agitated and refused to perform when Korem placed sensitive microphones near him (to pick up the sound of his breathing) or used tape to seal the gaps under the glass tanks.
Narrated by Jack Palance, this shows how it all went down. You can see Hydrick pretty much blowing air out of his mouth to move these objects before we learn how he learned karate to fight his brother, who he claimed killed his brother. To be fair, Hydrick’s family members admitted to shocking levels of abuse. His father would tie him to a barrel and put ping pong balls in his mouth so he couldn’t scream while being beaten, and his aunt even recalled his mother using a wooden paddle to sexually abuse Hydrick.
Hydrick admitted that as a child, he would imagine himself going to the moon or living in a mansion in China to escape the pain, childhood fantasies that became the lies he told the public about his Eastern training. Because his parents couldn’t handle his active nature, he was dumped in the Whitten Center, an institution for the mentally deficient, despite having a normal IQ.
This ends up all falling to pieces for him while we watch, a fascinating forty minutes of cringe and the knowledge that you’re watching a criminal in the act. Hydrick wasn’t just looking for fame; he was looking for a following. He admitted to Korem that he used his tricks to convert inmates in jail, making Bible pages turn by the power of God, just to see if he could control them. As we see Hydrick’s 1982 arrest, which occurred just days after he confessed to Korem, we learn that he was caught receiving stolen guns from his own students—the young boys he was supposed to be mentoring in his karate school.
Even while in jail for these charges, he continued to perform, once faking a suicide attempt with a trick rope just to amuse himself and manipulate the guards.
Produced by Screw Magazine founders Jim Buckley and Al Goldstein and what was to be the first of several movies from the New York City magazine, this was directed and written by Peter Locke, who produced The Brave Little Toaster, The Hills Have Eyes, Freeway, the cartoon Spiral Zone and lots of adult films, which he also directed.
This is shot on 35mm, has a theme song — “Porno Queen” by Liz Torres, who was married to Locke at the time and would one day be Miss Patty on Gilmore Girls and this is a a far cry from the town square of Stars Hollow, yet the fact that she sang that and apepars in a non-sex role speaks to the “anything goes” hustle of New York’s theater and film scene at the time — and Wes Craven was the assistant director and editor.
It’s a simple story. Felicity Split (Melissa Hall, a one-and-done actress who is actually more conventionally attractive than many 70s porn queens) is great in bed and turns that into a career. First, it’s her boyfriend Elliot (Harry Reems without facial hair!) — well, she also urinates on a human bidet (Peter Bramley, the first art director of National Lampoon with Bill Skurski), proving that early 70s adult is way filthier than 2026 smut — and then gets hooked up with an agent named Peter Pull (Marc Stevens) and getting into a $4 million dollar adult movie about the Bible, three years before the Mitchell Borthers made Sodom and Gomorrah: The Last Seven Days and six years before Caligula.
Other actors include Cindy West (who was also known as Susan Sands, Terri Scott, Joy Otis, Cindy Travcrs, Helen Highwater, Linda Terry, Laura Bentley, Teri Reardon, Laura Lake, Terry Ruggiera and here appearing as Tammy Twat; she’s also in Alfred Sole’s adult movie, Deep Sleep), Jamie Gillis (billed as Buster Hymen and acting just like you’d hope Jamie would), Roger Caine (who was in Martin as Al Levitsky), Gus Thomas (who went on to be a District Attorney for Cortland County, New York, and an adjunct professor for 17 years at Syracuse University Law School), Tanya Tickler (she’s given the thankless job of orally servicing Goldstein), Mike Sullivan (he also did props on this movie and would go on to do effects for Mortal Kombat, Star Trek V and Little Shop of Horrors, as well as play Dippy in Madman), David Buckley (who directed Saturday Night at the Baths) and Jim Buckley (AKA Jim Clark, director of Debbie Does Dallas).
It’s alright; it certainly wasn’t going to ride the wave of porn chic, but then again, is Deep Throat a good movie?
It Happened In Hollywood is perhaps best known for a live read on WMCA 570 AM in New York by “Long John” Nebel. Nebel was ahead of Coast to Coast AM by decades, taking calls from people who wanted to learn more about UFOs and the weird things that go bump in the night. During this moment, Nebel was trying to read an ad for this movie and, well, things got out of hand.
Westchester County played host to a veritable army of maniacs, including Ed Adlum (Shriek of the Mutilated), the Findlays (Snuff) and Ed Kelleher (Prime Evil), who were armed with a camera, $24,000, some stage blood and cases of beer to pay off the cast. The result is a movie that seems like it could fit in with Motel Hell at first before you realize that these farmers are druids out to raise their queen from the dead with the blood of the stupid.
These Sangroids are bringing back Queen Onhorrid and they won’t let anyone stand in their way and that includes puppies. It’s a movie that doesn’t care if it’s shot in the day, the night or day for night. It is also relentlessly devoted to being weird without being a try hard movie. This is just plain weird.
Throw in an atonal soundtrack, the chunkiest blood you’ve ever seen and a woman in a glass case who gets to come back from the beyond and rule for all of 45 seconds and you have a movie.
If you watched Manos: The Hands of Fate and were hoping to find something just as odd and as poorly realized, this would be the spiritual East Coast sequel that you crave. If anyone else wrote that sentence, it would be a put-down. Coming out of my typing fingers, it’s the highest of compliments.
You can watch this on Tubi or get it from Severin.
Based on Ray Russell’s novel of the same title, Incubus is all about demon rape. There’s really no other way to say it. If you’re looking for the definitive word on the subject, this movie would probably be your best choice. And hey, John Cassavetes is in it!
The film opens in a rock quarry where Mandy and her boyfriend are swimming. More likely, they’re fooling around until an unseen force caves in the dude’s head and attacks her, putting her in the hospital with a ruptured uterus. While all this is going on, Tim Galen, a local teen, dreams of hooded men tying a woman down and torturing her.
Dr. Sam Cordell (Cassavetes) is treating the girl and we soon learn a lot about his life. His wife has recently died, he’s relocated to the town of Galen following a scandal and his daughter, Jenny, doesn’t really get along with him. Oh yeah — and she’s also dating Tim.
Sheriff Hank Walden (John Ireland, whose career stretches from classics like All the King’s Men and I Saw What You Did to Satan’s Cheerleaders) and reporter Laura Kincaid are on the case too, which expands when a librarian is killed and murdered. It turns out that she has red semen inside her body — so much semen that she’s literally been filled up and destroyed by it. If you’re thinking this is a totally scummy storyline, well, buckle up.
The rapes and murders continue and every single time, young Tim is having the dream while they happen, including an attack at a movie theater where he’s gone to try and distract himself. Look for an appearance by a really young Bruce Dickinson singing for his pre-Iron Maiden band Samson in this scene!
What is Dr. Sam doing? Oh, you know, showing Laura photos of his recently deceased second wife — the reason why he left wherever it was he lived before — and she looks exactly like the reporter. She has some news, too. The town of Galen has a long history of Satanic activity and these rape crimes are nothing new.
Is Tim the killer? Was his mother a witch? Or is his family part of a long line of witch hunters? Is the real killer a shapeshifting incubus, which rapes women in their dreams?
We get our answers pretty quickly. Sam tries to induce Tim’s demonic state while Laura takes Jenny up to bed. Tim tries to attack Laura with a witch hunting dagger his grandmother has given him, but Sam stops the boy and kills him. That’s when we learn that Laura had been the incubus all along. As she lovingly holds Sam, he looks to the bed where his dead daughter is bleeding between the legs.
Yes. That’s really the ending. I warned you that this film was rough, didn’t I?
Incubus was directed by John Hough, who was behind one of my favorite movies of all time, Twins of Evil. He also helmed The Legend of Hell Houseand both of Disney’s Witch Mountain movies. It’s written by Ray Russell, who also wrote plenty of other horror fiction that was made into movies and screenplays, including X the Man with the X-Ray Eyes, Mr. Sarndonicus, Zotz! and Roger Corman’s The Premature Burial.
While this movie moves slow and some subplots go nowhere, the last few minutes are exactly what you want the movie to be and Cassavetes is — as always — better than the material.
When a movie has the working title Want A Ride, Little Girl? you know it’s going to be scummy. What may surprise you is that William Shatner — who director William Gréfe met at an airport — is in the lead role.
Don’t be fooled by the supernatural looking poster. No, this is a slasher with Shatner’s Matt Stone as the bad guy picking up young women, freaking out Shat-style and getting rid of their bodies. He’s being trailed by a detective named Karate Pete (Harold “Oddjob” Sakata), which is, pardon the pun, pretty odd. He’s on the trail because Stone keeps bilking and killing old women for their money.
Jennifer Bishop (who is also in Gréfe’s Mako the Jaws of Death) plays the daughter of one of these older women who suspects that the leisure suit-wearing Stone is a shyster. And oh yeah — Ruth Roman is in this!
Sakata almost died making this, as the rig that was used for his hanging death failed and he was nearly hung for real. Shatner saved his life — breaking a finger in the process — and the entire accident can be seen on the He Came from the Swamps documentary.
This movie belongs to Shatner. As a child, his character kills William Kerwin with a sword in a kind of pre-Piecesopening, then murders a puppy and gets so worked up in one scene that he supposedly farts on camera. His assortment of 70’s fashions are pretty astounding and every single frame of this feels as sweaty and gross as a night in the Everglades.
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