Ashura (Gloria Yip), the Holy Maiden of Hell, could destroy the Earth as easily as I’ll crush my next mixed drink. To keep that from going down. Some Buddhist monks trap her in a cave. She’s placed under the watchful (and often overwhelmed) eyes of Peacock (the legendary Yuen Biao), Lucky Fruit (Hiroshi Abe) and a trio of female abbesses. What follows is a surreal blend of fish-out-of-water comedy and high-octane supernatural warfare. Ashura attempts to navigate girlhood alongside her bizarre companion, Genie, while being hunted by the Hell Concubine, villains whose name and design scream 1980s dark fantasy manga (fitting, as this is the sequel to The Peacock King, based on the Kujako O series).

Directed by Ngai Choi Lam and Sze-Yu Lau, this feels like a movie kids would love, what with the cute monster, but the monster is threatened so many times in this film that I started to worry about it. Sure, this is kind of all over the place and has way too many comedic asides that derail the film, but it looks gorgeous, like Dario Argento was the substitute director for one day of Big Trouble In Little China, as neon colors and fog swirl around steel-clawed evil and giant monsters. 

The 88 Films Blu-ray release of Saga of the Phoenix has a new 2K scan, commentary by Frank Djang and F.J. DeSanto, alternate Japanese footage, a reversible sleeve with two sets of art, a 40-page book, a poster, and it all comes inside a gorgeous rigid clipcase. You can get this from MVD.

A story so amazing it can only be true.

Sure, Bill Rebane.

A small town has turned its Bigfoot sightings into a tourist destination. A bunch of people get killed, and everyone thinks the sasquatch must be behind it, so sawmill owner Harvey Olsen (Richard Kennedy) decides to hunt down the creature with the help of the people of Gleason, Wisconsin, by offering $10,000 to anyone who captures the beast. Who can save Bigfoot? Maybe game ranger Dave Garrett (Stafford Morgan)?

Maybe it’s more than Bigfoot. It could be The Legendary Creature of Arak, a white yeti that shows up. There’s a child Sasquatch, too. That’s Bill’s son Randolph.

According to the local lore, Arak is a man-like creature that protected the Arak tribe near the Lake of the Clouds.” Far from being a mindless killer, Arak was a spiritual guardian who escorted the tribal elders to the afterlife when it was their time to die. This adds a layer of noble protector to the beast, making Harvey Olsen’s mission to cage it even more villainous.

At least George “Buck” Flower is on hand with his daughter Verkina. November 1980 Playboy Playmate of the Month Jeana Keough is, too. Everyone looks like they’re freezing, because it’s always snowing in Wisconsin or at least in Bill Rebane movies.

This movie really unites ecohorror actors. Kennedy was in Holy Wednesday AKA Fangs; his henchman Jason is Otis Young, who was in Blood Beach, and Burt is John Goff from Alligator. George “Buck” Flower was in Skeeter. Denise Cheshire went from Graduation Day to mime work where she played apes. And oddest of all, Janus Raudkivi, who plays the white creature, was security on Deadly Eyes, a movie that dressed up dogs as mutant rats. 

After the chaos at the sawmill and the final confrontation in the woods, Dave Garrett realizes the creature isn’t the monster. The men hunting it are. As the creature retreats back into the wilderness, the folk song “Life is a Journey” plays, reminding the viewer that “You’ll only find freedom the day when you die.”

You can watch this on YouTube.

Part documentary. Part dramatization. All bullshit. I say that with love. This is yet another movie of a time and place where we got obsessed over things like the Bermuda Triangle, something we could care less about today for some reason.

Director Donald Brittain mainly made documentaries and shorts, this being the lone paranormal film he worked on. He was joined by co-director Laurin Render (who also composed the music with W. Michael Lewis, who did the music for Enter the Ninja, The Killing of America, In Search Of and Blood Beach, where he wrote the club music) and writer Alan Landsburg, who created In Search Of and wrote the books that Manbeast! Myth or Monster? and The Outer Space Connection were based on.

Planes will be lost, as will the rescue ships went after them. Such is the power of the brutal Bermuda Triangle. What if it also informed us of high-profile cases such as Flight 19, the disappearance of the USS Eagle and other unexplained disappearances, as well as reports of mysterious personality changes and strange weather patterns?

Here’s one mustery I can solve: it’s cinematographer was Brianne Murphy, who also directed the movie Blood Sabbath. Her career found her doing a bit of everything, whether that meant beinga production assistant on The Gay Deceivers, a dialogue director on The Incredible Petrified World, shooting stills on the Cheech and Chong movie Nice Dreams, working in the costume department for Teenage Zombies, being a DP on In the Heat of the Night and Highway to Heaven and directing six episodes of Acapulco H.E.A.T. and the Ami Dolenz movie To Die, To Sleep. She was also the first woman to be invited into the American Society of Cinematographers.

She worked with J. Barry Herron on this and man, his career went everywhere from shooting aerial photography on Chatterbox (what did that movie need that for?) and Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo to underwater work on The Love Boat, Strange Brew, Big Trouble In Little China and Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives and being the DP or cinematorapher on The Young Graduates, In Search of Ancient Mysteries and Orca. He even directed two episodes of Airwolf and wrote one of Acapulco H.E.A.T.

Anyways, back to the BS. The idea of a time dimension or parallel world was popularized by pilot Bruce Gernon in 1970. He claimed to have flown through a tunnel-shaped”cloud (which he called Electronic Fog) and emerged miles ahead of where he should have been, having traveled through what he believed was a time hole. This story fueled the theory that the Bermuda Triangle isn’t a graveyard, but a gateway.

Some legends suggest that the pilots of the famous Lost Patrol of Flight 19 didn’t crash but were transported. There is a long-standing legend that ham radio operators in Florida intermittently eeceived the final transmissions of Flight 19 decades after they vanished, with some versions of the story claiming the voices sounded calm and elsewhere. That was further legitimzed by the fact that this is how Close Encounters of the Third Kind ends. There are also many accounts of ghostly radio transmissions from ships like the SS Cotopaxi or the Cyclops, where listeners claimed to hear voices long after the ships disappeared.

There’s also the Raifuku Maru, which was the 1925 disappearance of the Japanese freighter, which left one final message: “Danger like dagger now… come quick!”

So yeah. Maybe no one cares because scientists claim they figured it all out. Geologists and oceanographers generally point to more grounded explanations for the disappearances, like methane hydrates, which are large pockets of gas rising from the ocean floor that could theoretically sink a ship by rapidly reducing water density. The Gulf Stream is also pretty dangerous, as it’s an extremely fast and turbulent current that can quickly erase any evidence of a crash or sinking. Or Hexagonal Clouds in the triangle could drop high-velocity air bombs that create 170 mph winds.

But totally aliens, you know?

The film serves as a feature-length spiritual successor to the Leonard Nimoy-hosted series In Search Of. Produced by Alan Landsburg, it utilizes the same formula: ominous narration, grainy reenactments, and a synth-heavy score that makes even a calm ocean look terrifying.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Wheeler Dixon and Sidney Paul spent a lot of time together in 1978 and 1979. That said, maybe they did all of this in four hours, making several movies and doing no small amount of drugs. 

What are we into this time? Well, flying saucers, cryptozoology, ghosts, alien life on their home planet, psychic phenomena, Kirlian photography, Uri Geller, earthquakes, the home movies of Hitler, aliens eating us, fairies, the Loch Ness monster… nothing is off the table. I mean it. Have you ever talked to me and wondered how I can change subjects so quickly that you wondered if I was high? I am high. But I can’t jump around as much as this.

I decided to transcribe some of this so that I can share with you the words that fly by so quickly.

Welcome to the World of Mystery, a world of strange sights and sounds, a world of unexplained mysteries and visitation from other planets. It is a world of ghosts, of monsters from outer space, of demons and sorcery, of monsters from the depths of the seas, of werewolves and Satanic ceremonies, of despotic rulers and wars. In short, a world of contradictions, continual conflicts and unexplained phenomena which scientists are only now beginning to unravel.

Throughout this movie, I yell at the screen during the narration, things like, “No, they aren’t!” and “That’s not true!”

This is how fast this movie changes things on you: Seen in this photograph is the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, supposedly surrounded by tiny fairies. Actually, this photo is a fake, constructed to show that fakery was possible. This photo of a medieval tapestry depicts a seven-headed dragon, known in the Book of Revelation as the Beast of the Apocalypse.

Wait, were we talking about faeries? Have you ever had an old person keep showing you photos on their phone, and every image is blurry, you have no idea what it is, and you don’t even know who they are? Just me?

This is a breakneck, psychedelic journey through the paranormal that feels less like a film and more like a fever dream. If it feels like the creators were operating on an entirely different plane of reality, it’s because the movie refuses to stay on one subject for more than a few seconds, hurtling from the occult to deep-space nihilism without catching its breath.

This isn’t even the end of the movie, as somehow, this continues after this:

Yet out in the vast reaches of space, how little this all matters. Man is just a small and not very important part of the vastness of the universe, less than a millionth of its contents. Man thinks he is immortal. But what is age to the denizens of the stars? From a small portion of space, we can grasp the relative insignificance of our own existence. Whether we look at a small portion of the universe or a larger area, we can easily see that mankind could cease to exist without the universe even noticing it.

Now we’re just destroyed. Thanks, World of Mystery.

You can watch this on YouTube.

There are three things you need to know: A coven of witches is aiding and abetting wives as they murder their husbands. A slacker has transformed a pizzeria into a video rental shop, years after it would have been a good business decision. A lonely soul ends up in a doomed romance with a serial killer. You have 97 minutes to figure all that out, but along the way, there will be metal shows, tons of dudes rocking Samhain shirts, Iron City beer, women who will kill you in your sleep and no shortage of noise, both musically and all over the picture.

Sure, this looks like 90s SOV, but unlike so many people who steal that style, this feels earned and lived in. 

In this blackened world, we meet Vi (Morrigan Milam), who is in a doomed relationship but has also fallen hard for Clover (Zoe Angeli), who works in an occult store and may be part of the coven. Vi is desperate to save her connection to her lover, but Clover gives her a potion that addresses that problem in a grimy, vomit-inducing way. Soon, she’s swept in, taken Vi off her feet and brought her into her world. Vi and Clover feel like people you’d actually see at a mid-week metal show, not caricatures.

I really think that this was made for me. Did I get so high one night that those rituals I do in my basement really worked out and I got a film with an Acid Witch cameo and Tina Krause walking into the frame? Why is her hair so perfect forever? How can a movie straddle being exploitation yet have lesbians in it that feel like anything but a fake exploitation male gaze BS disaster? Throw in some dick mutilation, gloomy girls in Misfits leather jackets haunting cemeteries, and people who don’t just know what W.A.V.E. Productions is but bought the t-shirt, and you have something beyond.

I would 200% make mixtapes for everyone in the cast and crew, but I think we have all the same albums.

Movies like this give me hope. This wasn’t made. It was summoned.

The Blu-ray release of Coven of the Black Cube includes behind-the-scenes clips, outtakes, and a commentary track with writers Brewce Longo, Zoe Angeli, Josh Schafer, and DP Michael DiFrancesc. You can get it from MVD.

This historical sit-down, originally titled The First Family of Satanism, serves as a fascinating time capsule of the Satanic Panic era, capturing the sharp ideological divide between Bob Larson’s evangelical world and the Schrecks’ elitist Social Darwinist philosophy.

Recorded in 1990 and later released in 2002, the program features Bob Larson, a well-known Christian evangelist, engaging in a direct conversation with two prominent figures in the Satanic and occult communities: Zeena Schreck, the daughter of Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, and Nikolas Schreck, leader of the Werewolf Coven, a modern pagan and occult group with ties to the Church of Satan. 

The conversation begins with Larson questioning the Church of Satan’s sincerity in its founding in 1966. Zeena defends her father, Anton LaVey, stating that the showmanship and gimmicks (like using nude women as altars) were necessary to pave the way for Satanism to be a recognized religion. She also confirms several Satanic legends, including her father’s alleged affairs with Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, as well as Mansfield’s devout membership in the Church.

Nikolas Schreck presents a bold, apocalyptic view of the 1990s, predicting it would be the Satanic Century and describing Christianity as being in its last extravagant death throes. He argues that religious media’s growth is actually a sign of its end, as it has turned to entertainment, something he claims Jesus would never have condoned.

Zeena was raised within the Church of Satan and during the 80s was the organization’s first spokesperson, as her father was in exile. How did she end up speaking for the Church? She told Obsküre Magazine, “In 1985, a U.S. news show called 20/20 accused The Satanic Bible of being responsible for child daycare Satanic ritual abuse, new allegations then. … I called my father and asked him what his media strategy would be to deal with this catastrophe. Nothing. He didn’t care. As far as he was concerned, it didn’t concern him. It wasn’t anything he needed to worry about. He certainly wasn’t going to do anything about it in public. He admitted that many media outlets had already contacted him and that he was just going to ignore it until it went away. I tried to convince him that this would only get worse if he didn’t respond and that he really needed to get someone to answer calls quickly, or it would be taken as an admission of guilt or suspicion. Finally, he admitted he had no one to deal with interviews or media. I offered to help temporarily until he found someone. This was not what I’d intended to do with my life; I had other plans.”

She was also a major part of working with police departments to defuse the Satanic Panic. In 1990, she resigned her position, severed ties with her father and renounced LaVeyan-based Satanism before embracing Tibetan Tantric Buddhism and forming the Sethian Liberation Movement in 2002. She said, “In the process of defending the Church of Satan from these unfounded claims in the U.S. mass media, Zeena’s media appearances attracted a new upsurge of membership to the formerly moribund organization even as she began to question and ultimately reject the self-centered philosophy she promoted. As she toured the United States on behalf of the Church of Satan, Zeena’s crisis of faith reached its highpoint when she learned that most of her father’s self-created legend was based on lies and that many of his works were plagiarized. When jealousy and spite motivated Anton LaVey and his administrator, Densley-Barton, to endanger Zeena’s life, she could no longer continue to cover up her progenitor’s true character in good conscience. This behind-the-scenes tension should be kept in mind when viewing or hearing Zeena’s interviews from that time.”

As for Schreck, he founded the music and performance collective Radio Werewolf and was affiliated with the Church of Satan and the Temple of Set, but later disavowed both and became a Buddhist. Schreck was part of the Abraxas Foundation, an occult-fascist think tank that included Boyd Rice, Adam Parfrey and Michael J. Moynihan. At one point, as he padded out pro-AIDS brochures, his ear was cut off. 

Bob Larson? I listened to him every day as a child. The pastor of Spiritual Freedom Church in Phoenix, Arizona, hosted Talk Back and went after, well, everything I loved from heavy metal to role-playing games. He went from doing exorcisms on the radio to charging people nearly $300 to do them over Skype.

This is a sit-down among all three, and it’s no different from a bunch of people high at a party talking psychology. Yet it’s a wonderful relic of a time I lived through, one that never went away.

You can watch this on YouTube.

My parents were saints. 

Instead of getting a child who loved playing football or one who was devoted to scholarship, they got a chubby kid who wanted to be a stuntman and who was obsessed with the Loch Ness Monster. 

I wish my dad were around so I could apologize every day.

Director Richard Martin also directed King Monster, Jaws of Death, UFO Journals, UFO Syndrome and The Lost City of Atlantis. His IMDb bio states that “Richard Martin has been an active member of the entertainment industry for over thirty-five years as a motion picture and television executive. Serving as Chief Executive Officer for Transworld Films and Cinema Arts, he was responsible for the development and production of over a dozen major theatrical releases. Richard helped pioneer the revolutionary movement of “Four Walling,” a system of combining film production, marketing, distribution and theater leasing.

Someone alert Sunn Classics. Kroger Babb, too.

Like most of his paranormal films, this is narrated by Arthur Franz, who appeared in Invaders from Mars, Monster on the Campus, The Atomic Submarine and more. This goes from the stuff you expected, like you know, the Loch Ness Monster, before the focus goes all over the place, and we learn about fish fossils and lizards. We also see a jet boat crash and see Boleskine, the home of Crowley, which was once owned by Jimmy Page.

Will we also watch a priest try to exorcise Loch Ness? Yes, we will. There’s also a shark, so every exploitation topic in 1976 is covered. I’m surprised this doesn’t have inserts.

You can watch this on YouTube.