The first of eight films to pair Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, this has so much less to do with the Edgar Allan Poe story and so much more to do with Aleister Crowley, in particular a series of rituals and did with Betty May Loveday.

Loveday was a model, a dancer, an artist and the lover of White Panther, a member of L’Apache Gang, and a fight over him led to her nickname: The Tiger Woman. She once said, “I have not cared what the world thought of me and as a result what it thought has often not been very kind. I have often lived only for pleasure and excitement.”

After marrying Miles Linzee Atkinson — who had access to cocaine as he was a doctor — they both became addicts, a habit she kept into her second marriage.

In 1922, her third husband Frederick Charles Loveday became an acolyte of Aleister Crowley, who considered Loveday his magical heir but condemned his marriage. In her book Tiger Woman, Loveday claimed she found a chest containing men’s ties which were covered with dried blood. Crowley told her they belonged to Jack the Ripper, who he knew, who was still alive and who had been a surgeon and magician who taught him how to become invisible.

Frederick — who also used the name Raoul — was never a healthy person. In her book, Betty May said that Crowley recommended that he drink a cat’s blood. Regardless of the truth of that story, he did drink water from a stream that Crowley had warned him about and he died in 1923.

The entire time May was in Italy with her husband and Crowley, she had been May had been sending reports to the Sunday Express informing the public of what Crowley was up to. Those rituals that she describes appear in The Black Cat. When she returned to England, she sold the rest of her story to the Sunday Express and John Bull, which is where Crowley’s title The Wickedest Man in the World” comes from.

She also mentions that after the death of her husband, she tried to kill Crowley by firing a gun directly at Crowley’s head at point-blank range and missing. He laughed and she shot again. The gun jammed.

Betty May was the principal witness in the suit brought by Aleister Crowley against Nina Hamnett for libel in her book Laughing Torso which led to someone stealing her letters of proof, more libel suits and Crowley being “bound” by the court for two years.

Anyhow…

Peter (David Manners) and Joan Alison (Julie Bishop) are on a train en route to on their honeymoon in Hungary, during which they share a car with psychiatrist Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Lugosi), a Hungarian psychiatrist who spent the last 15 years as a prisoner a Siberian prison camp. Now, he is traveling to visit Hjalmar Poelzig (Karloff), an Austrian architect.

Somehow, all three end up on a bus which crashes near Poelzig’s home. The foreboding estate sits upon the ruins of Fort Marmorus, which Poelzig commanded during the war. It also turns out that the doctor and architect are not great friends, as Werdegast accuses Poelzig of betraying their side to the Russians, leading to thousands of deaths, as well as stealing his wife Karen and killing his black cat. He might be correct, as Werdegast literally has a collection of dead women on display and Karen is one of them.

Poelzig is quite literally the devil on earth, as he has taken Werdegast’s daughter as his new wife and planning on killing Peter and sacrificing June. Seriously, I don’t want to give away the end of this movie away and I’m amazed that pre-code horror is so grisly and outright filled with darkness. This wasn’t a small independent movie. This was Universal’s biggest movie of 1934.

Poelzig’s chant doesn’t coming from Crowley and is invented Latin nonsense. Thanks to IMDB trivia, it translates as “With a grain of salt. A brave man may fall, but he cannot yield. To err is human. The wolf may change his skin, but not his nature. Truth is mighty, and will prevail. External actions show internal secrets. Remember when life’s path is steep to keep your mind even. The loss that is not known is no loss at all. Heavy thunder. With a grain of salt. A brave man may fall, but he cannot yield. By fruit, not by leaves, judge a tree. Every madman thinks everybody mad. Who repents from sinning is almost innocent.”

Despite this being such a big movie, Edgar G. Ulmer’s career didn’t take off. That’s because he began an affair with Shirley Castle, who would eventually become his wife. At the time, she was married to Max Alexander, a producer at Universal Pictures and nephew of Universal chief Carl Laemmle, who did not look kindly on “outsiders” upsetting his family. The scandal resulted in Ulmer being blackballed from all of the major Hollywood studios for the rest of his career, so he worked on smaller movies about which Peter Bogdonavich wrote “the astonishing thing is that so many of Ulmer’s movies have a clearly identifiable signature despite being accomplished with so little encouragement and so few means.”

He found a home at PRC, the lowest of the low that was Hollywood’s “Poverty Row” studios, but Shirley stayed by his side, acting as the script supervisor on nearly all of his films as well as writing several of the screenplays. Their daughter Arianne appeared as an extra in his movies. If you’d like to check them out, some of his post-Black Cat films include The Amazing Transparent Man, Strange Illusion and The Man from Planet X.

Simon Calow (Four Weddings and a Funeral) is Professor Oliver Haddo, a Cambridge scholar who is reprogrammed by a virtual reality machine into becoming the avatar for the spirit of Aleister Crowley. Now, more than fifty years after his death, Crowley begins his search for a scarlet woman to be part of his next working.

It was directed by Julian Doyle, who edited Brazil, Life of Brian, The Meaning of Life and Time Bandits. He’s also directed music videos for Kate Bush and made Iron Maiden’s “Can I Play With Madness?” video. Speaking of Maiden, he co-wrote this with their lead singer, Bruce Dickinson, and two of his songs (“Chemical Wedding” and “Book of Sorrows”) and two Maiden songs (the aforementioned “Madness” and “The Wicker Man”) are on the soundtrack.

I learned from this movie that we live in the world where Satan is in charge, that you can fax sperm and that even a movie with this much nudity and depravity can be slightly lame. I wanted to love this and it got close, so close, but it’s charitably a complete mess.

Moonchild was an Aleister Crowley book about white magicians, led by Simon Iff, and a group of black magicians fighting over an unborn child. That book also contained a series of magic rituals that would incarnate an archetypal divine feminine named Babalon. If that sounds familiar to the more occult-minded out there, it led to the Babalon Working, a series of rituals by scientist and occultist Jack Parsons and Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard that may have led to Babalon appearing in the form of Marjorie Cameron and the next stage of the working, which was an attempt to conceive a moonchild through sex magic.

Crowley replied to this by saying, “Apparently Parsons or Hubbard or somebody is trying to produce a Moonchild. I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these goats.”

I wonder if he would have enjoyed this movie, in which the student (Mark Travis) seeks to perfect his artistic ability. This brings him to a hotel where Mr. Walker (John Carradine) introduces him to a series of men and women who will battle for his soul, including the holy man known as Maitre D’ (Victor Buono), the manager (Pat Renella), an alchemist (William Challee, Zachariah) and the temptations of that man’s daughter (Janet Landgard, The Swimmer).

This started as a film school project, yet somehow director and writer Alan Gadney got the location and talent to make a near-professional film. For a first project, it was quite the endeavor and the idea of trying to answer the big questions of existence within a movie can be a herculean journey for even the most experienced creator. For a first timer?

Somehow, this art film was sold as horror — having Carradine will do that — and I’m certain that audiences were baffled.

It also starts with an Edgar Cayce quote, so it’s very early 70s dawn of new age. Aww.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising is as much a ritual as it is a document of the counterculture of the mid 60s in California. He was influenced by — as always — Aleister Crowley and his poem “Hymn to Lucifer.”

Ware,
nor of good nor ill, what aim hath act?
Without its climax, death, what
savour hath
Life?
an impeccable
machine, exact
He
paces an inane and pointless path
To glut brute appetites, his sole
content
How tedious were he fit to comprehend
Himself! More, this
our noble element
Of fire in nature, love in spirit, unkenned
Life hath no
spring, no axle, and no end.

His body a bloody-ruby radiant
With noble
passion, sun-souled
Lucifer
Swept through the dawn colossal, swift aslant
On Eden’s imbecile
perimeter.
He blessed nonentity with every curse
And spiced with
sorrow the dull soul of sense,
Breathed life into the sterile universe,

With Love and Knowledge drove out innocence
The Key of Joy is disobedience.

Crowley referred to life as a near-boring machine that must be enlivened by the Lucifer the lightbringer, not a devil, but a near-mythic hero that represents the spirit of art and inspiration.

Anger began to search for a young man who could personify Lucifer for his planned film and seemed to find him in 1966 in the form of a musician named Bobby Beausoleil, who has said: “Before we really got into a discussion of what Lucifer Rising was to be about Kenneth showed me his films. I had heard of Scorpio Rising, but I hadn’t seen any of his films. The idea for Lucifer was to be the antithesis of Scorpio, which was kind of a death-image type of thing. The concept was that I would be representing the coming of the new age. In a mythological sense, we have come through matriarchy, we have come through the mother goddess. We have come to patriarchy where the goddess is male. And the Aquarian Age is supposed to represent the age of the child. This was the character I was supposed to play.”

Beausoleil served as Anger’s chauffeur but as Beausoleil was strictly heterosexual — opposite of Anger — there would be growing resentment and bad blood, as instead of a personal relationship their friendship was more business. For starring in the film and be allowed to score the movie with his band Magick Powerhouse of Oz, Beausoleil would not be paid but could live in Anger’s home for free.

Anger talked about the film more than he made it, according to the actor, but he was also making private films for collectors and also Invocation of My Demon Brother, which also features Beausoleil. After a September 1967 Equinox of the Gods didn’t go to plan, Beausoleil left Anger’s home. Anger then placed an ad in the Village Voice in which he declared his own death — IN MEMORIAM. KENNETH ANGER. FILMMAKER 1947–1967 — before burning several of his films.

Leaving for London in 1968, Anger came into the orbit of John Paul Getty Jr. — who would be a key patron of his art — and the Rolling Stones, whose Mick Jagger would score Invocation of My Demon Brother. After an attempt to make. Crowley biopic, he came back to Lucifer Rising and cast Chris Jagger as Lucifer, Performance director Donald Cammell as Osiris, Marianne Faithfull as Lilith and her brother Chris and the Rolling Stones’ personal photographer Michael Cooper signed on to help, with fashion designer Laura Jameson designing the costumes.

Eight minutes were filmed in Anger’s apartment with directors Cammell Dennis Hopper and Alejandro Jodorowsky in attendance before scenes were lensed in Germany and Egypt, then firing Chris Jagger.

Then the film stalled again.

Jimmy Page and Crowley became friends briefly and he nearly scored the film before Anger got into an argument with Page’s wife Charlotte, who threw him out of their London home.

Meanwhile…

Bobby Beausoleil had joined a whole different group, the family of Charles Manson. After kidnapping Gary Hinman and cutting off his ear before eventually murdering him set up to look like black revolutionaries did it. In 1970, a Superior Court jury in Los Angeles found the 22-year-old Beausoleil guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death, mostly due to the testimony of his pregnant girlfriend Kathryn “Kitty” Lutesinger.

By 1979, he wrote Anger from prison and all was forgiven. With help from a prison teacher, Beausoleil received musical instruments and recording equipment, formed the Freedom Orchestra and recorded a 44-minute soundtrack. As for the Page soundtrack, it was released in 2012 as Lucifer Rising and Other Sound Tracks and is also on the Sound Tracks box set.

This is Anger’s last work and the purest surrealism that I feel he’d create. Sure, the origins are rough, it took a long time to make and it caused no small manner of mental anguish — Faithful taking tons of drugs with her to Egypt nearly got everyone jailed — but the results are true art. And that UFO? A real one buzzed the crew and no one could film it in time and it needed to be recreated.

Also: the best satin jacket ever made.

While you can say that this is but an 11-minute movie, this Kenneth Anger directed, edited and photographed work of art — complete with Moog soundtrack by Mick Jagger — is one of the films that started midnight movies.

Assembled from what remains of the first version of Lucifer Rising, this movie strobes your mind with an assemblage of Anton LaVey presiding over a public funeral for a cat, the cast smoking out of a human skull, Anger on stage leading a ritual, nude men, Vietnam footage, the Stones playing their ill-fated Altamount show and is itself a ritual that follows Crowley’s Holy Law of Thelema in that one must master this universe before achieving the mindset needed to become your own god.

You could also say that it’s a lot of noise over a collage of imagery. Or perhaps Anger’s theory of film as magickal weapon is true. If you follow the logic that this isn’t for everyone, then you believe in Crowley’s thought process and how he claimed the esoteric would become “that which is understood by the people I wish to instruct.”

Evolution will only come by shocking our senses and overloading them with tones, with colors, with images.

Obviously, Bobby Beausoleil is Lucifer and the connections between the occult and the loathsome Manson Family will always be cited.

Kenneth Anger is a near-daily part of my life. He’s a nexus point who has opened my mind to older film, to the power of gossip, to Crowley and to the art that film can be. His first words in the seminal Hollywood Babylon, quoting Crowley, inspires me: “Every man and every woman is a star.”

At once one of America’s first openly gay filmmakers and also one that ran to instead of from homosexual content within his film, he’s also — despite being born into a middle-class Christian Presbyterian family — one of the foremost occult figures of the 20th century.

Anger may or may not have been a child actor, but what is true is that his films were incendiary from the beginning, with Fireworks finding him facing obscenity charges. Yet over the next few years, his work would inspire editing techniques and music videos before they even existed.

It’s astounding that Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome was made in 1954. It could be 2022 or any time or any dimension, as it exists in nearly another universe. Anger was inspired to make the film after attending a Halloween party called “Come as your Madness” and Crowley’s ritual masquerade concept — where party guests dress as gods and goddesses — is shown within this short.

Samson De Brier plays the roles of Shiva, Osiris, Nero, Alessandro Cagliostro and Crowley. De Brier was rumored to be the bastard son of the King of Romania or the son of an Atlantic City politician who was murdered by a jealous woman. He modeled for Picasso, he hosted a radio show in New York City, he rescued old silent movie costumes from the trash. He also had a regular salon that discussed the occult at his Barton Avenue home which was made up of minds like Anger, Curtis Harrington, Anaïs Nin, Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Jack Parsons, Marjorie Cameron and Anton LaVey. This movie was filmed in his home, a place that was a refuge for a retired Anger in the 80s.

That guest list stars in this film. Joan Whitney is Aphrodite, with Katy Kadell as Isis, Nin as Astarte, Harrington as Cesare, Anger as Hecate, Renate Druks as Lilith, Paul Mathison as Pan and Peter Loomer as Ganymede. Perhaps the most important 20th century occult figure outside of Crowley, Marjorie Cameron, appears as The Scarlet Woman and Kali. There is no irony here, as Cameron may be the actual Scarlet Woman who ushers in the end of all things.

The imagery of this movie — even if you don’t comprehend the symbols — can unlock many feelings within a viewer. I’ve often stared at the still image of Cameron from this movie, but seeing her moving shape is a revelation. I wish that these colors always existed in our world and not for this short moment in time, which we may endlessly rewind.

How strange is it that an occult movie has the same look and feel of believer Ron Ormond’s The Burning Hell? They both exist in their own universes, but the wall between them is so thin that you can feel the fingers on each side.

One of Anger’s gods.

One of Ormond’s demons.

DEA agent John Hatcher (Steven Seagal) has come back from Columbia to Chicago and soon discovers that the drug world has found its way back to his hometown. John can’t even get a drink at the club with old friend Max Keller (Keith David) without fighting a gang of Jamaicans led by Screwface (Basil Wallace). The cops want John to stay out but we wouldn’t have a movie if he did.

How can he after they do a drive-by and injure his neice Tracey (Danielle Harris)? I mean, don’t we want to see Steven Seagal strining up beef and shooting it up with a Fleming HK51K with a custom suppressor and a laser sight? Thanks Internet Movie Firearms Database for keeping my gun movie knowledge up to spec.

Hey Jimmy Cliff shows up playing Jimmy Cliff, Danny Trejo is around and Teri Weigel as well. There’s also voodoo, heads being cut off and shown to people and a bad guy killed so many times that I thought this became a comedy. Actually, seeing as how Seagal sings with Cliff, it 100% is.

Seagal recommended director Dwight H. Little after seeing his movie Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. I wonder if he’s a big fan, because Danielle Harris was also in that and I totally would watch Seagal in a Michael Myers movie. I’m weird that way.

Writers Michael Grais and Mark Victor also wrote Poltergeist, Poltergeist II, Great Balls of Fire! and Cool World, so they had a great track record. Seagal rewrote a lot of the film and tried to get their credit, which went to court and they kept their name on the movie.

After all that craziness, Seagal proclaimed during the making of this movie that due to his Aikido training, he was immune to being choked out. Of course, this made stunt coordinator and carny Gene LeBell want to try. Now, there are two manner of conjecture. One, that LeBell knocked Seagal out. The other is that Seagal either urinated, defecated or pulled a number three in his pants.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Salem (Max Von Sydow) has escaped a near-inescapable insane asylum, a place where he’s been trapped since being wrongly charged with killing a farmhand. Now he truly is deranged and is out for revenge on those he believes are guilty: his younger sisters Emma (Hanne Bork) and Ester (Liv Ullmann) and her husband Dr. Anton Jenks (Per Oscarsson), the man who accused Salem of the murder.

Beyond the fact that the villain is actually the hero of this, it has an incredible score by Henry Mancini that was made for synthesizer, 12 woodwinds, organ, two pianos and two harpsichords — with one tuned to be flat and add dissonance.

Originally entitled Salem Came to Supper and released again ten years later by 21st Century Film Corporation as Lunatic (before that company was bought and rebranded by Menahem Golan after the breakup of Cannon), this was directed by Laslo Benedek (who made the 1951 Death of a Salesman) and written by Guy Elmes, who adapted several Italian films for Western audiences.

I was 11 years old when Strange Brew came out and my excitement was like an average kid felt about jedis. SCTV was — and will always be — the best show ever created, after all.

Stars Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas created Bob and Doug McKenzie out of necessity. When SCTV moved to CBC, each episode has two minutes more time than those syndicated in the United States.

To make up the difference, the CBC network heads asked the show’s producers to add specifically identifiable Canadian content for those two minutes, in line with government broadcast regulations.

Moranis and Thomas thought that this was totally ridiculous, as the show was already taped in Canada, with a Canadian cast and crew, but then they decided to make a sketch that was as Canadian as it got: The Great White North. At the end of a day’s shooting, with just Thomas, Moranis, a single camera operator and lots of Molson, everything was improvised and the best two minutes would air.

Thomas said, “Rick and I used to sit in the studio, by ourselves — almost like happy hour — drink real beers, cook back bacon, literally make hot snack food for ourselves while we improvised and just talked. It was all very low key and stupid, and we thought, ‘Well, they get what they deserve. This is their Canadian content. I hope they like it.”

They did.

They even did in America, where NBC specifically requested more Bob and Doug on the show.

There was even a Bob and Doug McKenzie comedy album, The Great White North, which sold a million copies.

Based on this success, they considered a movie. After all, John Candy had made Going Berserk. Then Andrew Alexander, executive producer for SCTV, reminded them that he had exclusive contracts with the two men and that if they wrote a script, he would sue them.

So how do you take a two-minute sketch and make a movie?

You remake Hamlet.

Moranis and Thomas were not going to direct or write the film — Steve De Jarnatt (Cherry 2000, Futuresport, Miracle Mile) is credited with some of the scripting —  but ended up doing both with help from executive producer Jack Grossberg.

The movie starts with an angry mob destroying a theater, enraged over the quality of Bob and Doug’s movie Mutants of 2051 A.D. before going all in on a new plan: placing a mouse into a bottle of Elsinore beer — Molson and every other brewer in Canada wanted to be the beer for this movie until they learned that mice would be inside their brews — and getting free beer for life. Beauty, eh?

This plan ends up with both of them working at Elsinore for the mad Brewmeister Smith (Max Von Sydow), who has been brainwashing the patients of the Royal Canadian Institute for the Mentally Insane, using special beer and music to make them into killers.

The brewery’s former owner, John Elsinore, has passed on under some level of chicanery, leaving his daughter Pam (Lynne Griffin) to be in charge — and Smith to take over — and the truth lies in a Galactic Border Patrol video game. Also, a hockey player who had a nervous breakdown, Jean “Rosie” LeRose (Angus MacInnes), is one of the men under the control of Smith.

So much more happens — van crashes, flying dogs, Bob growing to massive size after drinking an entire brewery — and writing about it makes me want to watch it again.

Speaking of Max Von Sydow, the role of Brewmeister Smith was written with him in mind even if that seemed like a quixotic ask. Freddie Fields, then-president of MGM had just produced Victory, so he sent the script. Von Sydow showed it to his son, who was a huge SCTV fan and that’s how it all came true.