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.

Steven Seagal is back as ex-Navy SEAL, Casey Ryback, now on a train instead of an aircraft carrier. Instead of Andrew Davis (The Final Terror, Above the Law) directing, Geoff Murphy (The Quiet Earth, Freejack) is making this. J. F. Lawton, who wrote the first one as well as Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death, Pretty Woman, Blankman and DOA: Dead of Alive, as well as creating the Pam Anderson show V.I.P., is out and Richard Hatem and Matt Reeves are in. That’s right. The same director who made The Batman once made a Steven Seagal movie. Busey and Tommy Lee Jones aren’t the bad guys. Now, you get Eric Bogosian and Everett McGill.

But hey — Admiral Bates (Andy Romano), Captain Garza (Dale Dye) and Tom Breaker (Nick Mancuso) come back. And you do get Katherine Heigl as Ryback’s niece. Morris Chestnut as a train porter and Sandra Taylor (who somehow was a Penthouse Pet in March of 1991 and also did a Playboy pictorial in July of 1995 to promote this movie; she mentioned not even knowing if her character survived) as a barmaid so calm down. And oh wow, it’s the same train from Runaway Train.

But hey, this is one of Becca’s favorite movies. She loves it more than the first one, no matter how many people say that this was horrible in comparison. You can’t change her loves, which makes me lucky, because she married a fat child who ran upstairs breathless today to let her know that Arabella the Black Angel — a movie that she doesn’t want to see, need to see or should ever see — is on Tubi. And she loves me at least as much as this movie.

It’s the John McClane issue: how can the same hero be in the same situation all over again?  Oh well. This would be the end for Seagal, who would not make it to the end of Executive Decision and not get many movies in theaters after 1996.

Originally, Jon Peters was slated to be a producer for the movie. He wanted to bring Gary Busey back, but after he was told Busey’s character had died in the original , he quit. That story sounds like BS, but so does the story that Busey was hired and the casting director had no idea he had died in the first movie. He had the kind of contract where he got paid no matter what. That can’t be true.

Based on an outline that Roger Zelazny wrote, his novella “He Who Shapes” and the novel The Dream Master, this wasn’t made with any other input from the author. At least he got paid!

The story is credited to David Loughery, who wrote the fifth Star Trek and I still wonder why God needs a starship. The script is from Chuck Russell, who would go on to make A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and The Blob. Director Joseph Ruben made The Pom Pom Girls, The Stepfather, The Good Son and Sleeping With the Enemy. He knows how to make entertaining trash and I say that in the kindest of ways.

Alex Gardner (Dennis Quaid) might be a psychic, but he doesn’t want tested any more. Not after all the poking and prodding in his youth by Dr. Paul Novotny (Max von Sydow). But when Novotny saves him from some low level goons who want to use Gardner’s psychic powers, he starts listening to how he’s now involved in government-funded psychic research. What really gets Alex on board is one look at Dr. Jane DeVries (Kate Capshaw).

The goal is to send people into the dreamscape. There’s some exposition about the Senoi natives of Malaysia thinking that the dream world is as real as our own and you know me, I’m always here for movie BS.

Tommy Ray Glatman (David Patrick Kelly) is the only person who has entered the dreamscape, but he’s a daddy and old lady murdering maniac, so luckily Alex can get in and help little kids get over their bad dreams. Horror novelist Charlie Prince (George Wendt) — who wrote a book called Stab, so is this Scream universe canon? — tells Alex that he’s just a weapon to be used by Bob Blair (Christopher Plummer) to kill the President (Eddie Albert) and preserve the military industrial complex.

Yeah, a lot happens.

The end of this movie is wild. Alex is inside the President’s post-nuclear terror dream, as mutants hunt the President and Tommy Ray has nunchuks and can also be a snake man before Alex takes the form of Tommy’s dad, tells the final boss that he loves him and then the leader of the free world stabs the bad guy from behind, killing him, because even the most hopeful of Presidents still ordered drone strikes. Then our hero goes into Blair’s dream and straight up kills him so he can be with Kate Capshaw.

The second PG-13 movie ever released — after Red Dawn — this is also the second movie that Kate Capshaw would be in in 1984 where a man’s heart is ripped out of his chest.

You know, I love this goofy movie. The effects are dated, there’s fog everywhere and the poster is totally trying to make you think Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s one of the first movies I ever rented and watching it again, it made me so happy knowing that I can just put it on at any time.

I was ten years old when Blade Runner came out and it played theaters so briefly in my small hometown that I never got the chance to see it. Also, ten year olds didn’t get to see R rated films in 1982. So my first experience was reading the Archie Goodwin/Al Williamson Marvel Comics adaption, a book of which I literally read until the cover came off.

I must have read this issue a thousand times.

Steranko cover!

I also asked my uncle, a librarian, for a copy of Philip K. DIck’s Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? Perhaps a ten-year-old was not yet ready for the complexity of Phillip K. Dick, but he never dumbed it down for me.

The first time I finally saw Blade Runner on HBO it was after a year of reading about the film in Starlog, obsessing over the comic book and the source novel, so my experience was so alien to anyone else that saw it in theaters in 1982.

For a movie seen as a failure — it made $41.6 million on a $30 million budget, so I have no idea how that is failure — this is a movie that literally changed the world and has grown to become our world.

And yet, this is a movie that has seven different versions thanks to all of the changes from studio executives. Even the voiceover, which was added by them, has star Harrison Ford reading the words as if he has no interest, perhaps hoping if they were bad they’d never be used.

The blade runner is former police officer Rick Deckard (Ford), who is charged by Gaff (Edward James Olmos) and Bryant (M. Emmet Walsh) with doing what he does best: hunting down robotic humanoids and retiring them. Now, he must stop four Nexus-6 replicants: Leon  Kowalski (Brion James), Zhora Salome (Joanna Cassidy), Pris (Daryl Hannah) and Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer).

Yet within this film noir story set in a neon-filled future straight out of a Moebius drawing, the real tale is about whether Rick and his lover Rachael (Sean Young) are humans or machines themselves. In fact, of all the characters, Batty is the most human of them all, a character of both deep menace and surprising tender thoughts.

Blade Runner arises from pain. Ridley Scott had left Dune and lost his brother in short order and wanted something to take his mind off life. Dick had no idea it was even being made, but his initial distrust was saved somewhat when he saw the script revisions and special effects footage. Ford and Scott also fought throughout.

Neither can agree if Deckard is human or replicant, even if they’ve made up.

I think about Blade Runner a lot. I think about Pris flipping across the room, how her face paint looks, how deadly these killing machines are with such grace. I think of Rutger Hauer ad-libbing “All those moments will be lost in time…like tears in rain” and caressing the dove. I remember the spinner police car and Deckard’s car that I had as a kid and played with constantly. And I wonder, does Gaff leave the silver unicorn after not killing Rachael as him telling Deckard to pursue his dream or is Deckard’s dream of the unicorn just one progammed into him?

Most of all, I’m so thankful for this movie because without it, I may not be so fascinated by Philip K. Dick, a person who I quote or reference every day. My uncle knew what he was doing.

When I wrote about CarousHELL, I said “Don’t expect a budget. Do expect women to have sex with unicorns. See? You can’t always get what you want, but when you try sometimes, you just may find a tusk in the meat locker.”

Well, the second movie blew my mind.

It’s like someone had fan fiction of the first movie and someone said, “Sure, here’s $1700.”

But seriously, writers Aleen Isley (who also plays Ilsa) and Steve Rudzinski (who directed both of these movies) have done the impossible and made a movie that blew what’s left of my mind, creating a story in which Duke the carousel unicorn seeks his purpose in life, learns that he’s a father and also discovers that his origins lie within the occult secrets of the Third Reich.

Also, he’s an unmoving carousel unicorn.

Steve Rimpici is back as Duke’s voice and Brittany Barnabei plays his son Robbie. The film actually has pathos and moments of sadness that make you feel something and yes, I was making myself realize that I was getting emotional about a wooden horse and a stuffed animal, but that really points to just how good this is.

Also, human heads blow up.

Look, I have no idea how this was so great. But I’m so happy that I found the magic inside this film.

You can watch this on Tubi or purchase it from the official Silver Spotlight site.