Between Death Line, Dead and Buried, Vice Squad, Wanted Dead or Alive and Poltergeist III, Gary Sherman has made some interesting movies. At the same time, he was doing plenty of work in TV, including the TV movie The Streets, the series Sable (based on the comic book Jon Sable: Freelance), and so much more. These are some fascinating pieces of his work, well worth tracking down.

Mysterious Two is one of the strangest of them, based on The Two, a cult led by Marshall Herff “Do” Applewhite Jr., that he co-led with Bonnie Lu “Ti” Nettles, also known as the UFO Missionaries. When she died in 1985, he continued leading the group, which changed its name to Heaven’s Gate. And you know how that went, right?

A failed pilot, this is the story of He (John Forsythe) and She (Priscilla Pointer), who are travelling the backroads of America and preaching a non-Christian gospel while hinting that they aren’t from around here. The authorities (Noah Beery Jr. and Robert Englund), a reporter by the name of Arnold Brown (Robert Pine) and a flute-playing young man named Tim Armstrong (James Stephens, not the Tim Armstrong from Operation Ivy) are trying to rescue his girlfriend Natalie (Karen McLarty) from the cult are all suspicious. Still, one night, the entire congregation at one of their tent revivals just disappears into the light. And hey — Vic Tayback!

Everyone is on a bus with no idea how they got there, all brought to a missile silo and bathed with green light. Somehow, they even take the baby out of one woman and never say where it went. And then, everyone disappears again, leaving the flute-player to find them, which would be the hook for a TV series that never aired.

Filmed in 1979 and left sitting on a TV pilot shelf until 1982, this is the kind of thing I would have watched and been obsessed about as a kid, drawing comics and writing stories about it, wondering why no one else cared. Now, I’m an old man who does the same thing.

Forsythe brings a strangely paternal, calm authority to the role, which aligns with The Two’s early recruitment style. They speak of “The Twilight and Midnight of Today,” promising an “Eternal Peace” that requires the total relinquishment of Earthly ties. They keep saying, “It is time,” and that’s shown by a pentagonal shape in the sky that keeps appearing, even after they disappear.

Watching this now, it feels less like a standard TV thriller and more like a proto-folk-horror piece. It captures that specific late-70s anxiety where the utopian dreams of the 60s had curdled into something much more isolated and dangerous. We wouldn’t really explore that until the 90s in TV series form, as The X-Files found a way to create a mythology that everyone could get into.

You can watch this on YouTube.