We had the opportunity to watch the first two episodes of this new series, which is all about a place called Tails. This isn’t the Spearmint Rhino or a fancy white-collar place. This is a topless dive where anything is available for the right price. The owner, Nick Nikolovski (Harley Wallen, Eternal Code) takes advantage of everyone there, from the women who make money from their bodies to the men that spend their cash hoping for a moment of attention. But when the dead body of Amber (Kaiti Wallen, A Bennett Song Holiday), one of his girls, shows up in the bathroom, things start to fall apart.

Ricky Jay was one of my heroes. Beyond acting, writing books and being one of the best sleight of hand men ever, no one else was more devoted to capturing the history of magic than him.

Jay did not have a great childhood, said that possibly the only kind memory he had of his parents was when they hired magician Al Flosso to perform at his bar mitzvah. He was devoted, however, to his grandfather, Max Katz, an amateur magician who introduced Jay to the world of magic.

By the age of seven, he was performing, becoming the youngest magician to perform a full magic act on TV. He was also the first magician to ever play comedy clubs and probably the first magician to open for rock and roll bands.

What I love about this film is more than just seeing Jay do his illusions. I love that he let the curtain back a little and answers exactly who would sit in their room as a child for hours and hours, practicing with a deck of cards over and over.

There aren’t many celebrities that I’d want to meet. But Jay would have been one of them, even just to have a casual conversation.

Why is this movie only 59 minutes long? That’s because it was a failed pilot for a TV series that would have been called The Black Cloak. The series would have been produced by Alfred Hitchcock’s television company, Shamley Productions, but it was considered too scary and violent for TV.

NBC sold it to Universal Pictures, where Hitchcock was under contract, and it played on double bills with William Castle’s I Saw What You Did.

Written by Barré Lyndon (The Lodger, George Pal’s The War of the Worlds) and directed by Harvey Hart (The Pyx), this opens with a caped killer — I love that Wikipedia refers to him as a “hump-backed, long-fingernailed, black hat-wearing, caped and demonically-growling figure” — murdering a woman before introducing us to Brett Kingsford (Leslie Nielsen!). He’s a supernatural detective with a dwarf sidekick named Nikola who is on the trail of a Summarian demon that wants a body of its own.

That sentence alone should make you want to watch this.

That Summarian demon is using a series of Jack the Ripper inspired murders in San Francisco to enter our world. At each murder scene, police find an ivory statue that has a demon coming out of a man. With each new killing, the statue changes more and more.

As if things can’t get any stranger, an antique dealer just happens to have a mummified creature with a seven-spoked wheel, with each of the parts of the wheel representing a different murder that will happen. And before long, that killer is going to be coming for our hero.

Look for Peter Mark Richman (the annoying heel Charles McCulloch from that time Jason went to New York City), Judi Meredith (Jack the Giant Killer), Werner Klemperer (forever Colonel Klink), Bill Quinn (Dead and Buried), Vaughn Taylor (Psycho) and Peter Brocco (What’s the Matter with Helen?).

Jack Laird, who produced this, would go on to create Night Gallery with Rod Serling. Any of the silly parts of that show — like the ones starring Nielsen — can be blamed on him.

You can get this on blu ray from Kino Lorber, who continue to put out some really interesting movies.

Oh man, this week has taken me to some strange places. Like this made for TV movie — cable, one assumes, because no normal network was going to play this — from Dan Golden. Dan Golden, the man who directed Naked Obsession, Saturday Night Special, Timegate: Tales of the Saddle Tramps and T&A Time Traveler, says the voice inside my head? Yes, my imaginary special friend, the one and the same.

How does one even come to explain this one? One just dives in.

Back in 19th Century France, Bram Stoker — yes, the man who would one day write Bram Stoker’s Shadowbuilder and some other book — gets captured by a secret clutch of women who never wear more than bikinis and who have learned to use a flute to hypnotize rats so that they eat men.

Would it surprise you that this is yet another movie where Adrienne Barbeau is the queen of a sect of women who want to kill every man they see? Oh poor Adrienne, who went to Russia to make this and walked right into a coup attempt and then had to deal with the death of most of the trained rats, which meant that she was covered in fish eggs for most of the movie.

Golden used Maria Ford in his movies a whole bunch and she’s here, front and center, as is Olga Kabo, perhaps the only actress to be awarded the Meritorious Artist of Russia and then show up in what is basically a Cinemax After Dark movie.

This movie gets major points for having slow-motion sword fights that go on forever, as well as a cute little miniature guillotine that gets used when any of the rats get out of line. You can tell this movie isn’t from Italy, because when they kill one of them, it’s a puppet.

It loses points for having Linnea Quigley as a rat girl and doing nothing with her. Alas!

Thanks to the anonymous user who sent this video, which previews this movie and the Death Race 2020 comic book.

When a young girl named Ryoko traveled to Europa to study music, her lover was killed in a traffic accident. However, she believes that her psychic powers are what killed him and no one believes her, which sends her to an asylum. As she recovers, she is placed into the care of her brother-in-law Kouji and eventually becomes the governess for his daughter Alice.

Nobuhiko Ôbayashi is best known for Hausu in America, but he made plenty of movies, including this 1982 made-for-TV movie, which is just as surreal and wonderfully strange as his most famous film.

I mean, how can you not love a movie that has a wedding end with the bride doing the Oliver Reed Burnt Offerings leap out a window? I’ve seen folks refer to this as Ôbayashi’s take on The Bad Seed and that works for me. It’s a kid with too many powers being watched by a woman who has had too many horrible things happen in her life, now with no grip on reality.

So many matte paintings, plus ghosts wandering the night, people being set ablaze, tons of broken glass and a really gothic feel — dare I say it’s a Japanese Kill, Baby, Kill! — that hits everything I love in film and then just takes it all up to another level.

You can translate the title as Cute Devil or Lovely Devils. Either way, this is a movie worth tracking down.

How can this be a ripoff of The Towering Inferno when it came out a few months before that movie? I assume that they read in Variety about that film and said, “Let’s get this on TV in a hurry!” That’s not a bad thing, though.

Director Jerry Jameson made Hurricane, Heatwave!, The Deadly Night Tower, Superdome, Raise the Titanic! and Airport ’77, so he knows all about disasters (he also made The Bat People and The Secret Night Caller, so he’s a favorite around here). He’s working from a script by Jack Turley (Prey for the Wildcats, Empire of the Ants) and Edward Montagne.

A Christmas party goes on way too long, which leads to a fire starting in the basement and making it to, well, the fortieth floor. But if you love disaster movies, you know that the plot is secondary to the cast of stars who will be sacrificed for our entertainment.

This one has Dynasty star John Forsythe, TV movie vet Joseph Campanella, Lynn Carlin, Anjanette Comer from The Baby, Monday Night Football announcer Don Meredith, Pippa Scott, Bon Hastings (who also faced death in The Poseidon Adventure) and more. Yeah, it’s not the kind of cast that Irwin Allen would have assembled. Even stranger, only one person dies. Come on — have we learned nothing from movies like Earthquake, where Hollywood favorites are snuffed out with impunity?

You can watch this on Amazon Prime.

Bubba Newman (John Ritter) has been in the minor leagues for way too long and if he goes down one more level, he may as well never make it to the majors. So he quits to become the coach for a gang of poor kids — Walter Matthau, look out — and finds romance with Susan Dey. But since this is a TV movie, tragedy is looming and everyone will have to realize that life is not always fair.

Director Peter Levin made plenty of TV movies, everything from My Father’s Shadow: The Sam Sheppard Story, Deadly Nightshade and Overkill: The Aileen Wuornos Story to Popeye Doyle, The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana and Washington Mistress. He’s working from a script by Joe Landon, who also executive produced this and wrote Ritter’s special, John Ritter: Being of Sound Mind and Body.

This is one to watch for the cast, as beyond Ritter and Dey, there’s Doug McKeon (who everyone else would say was in On Golden Pond, but I remember from Mischief), James Gregory (General Ursus!), Jeremy Licht (a member of The Hogan Family), Patrick Swayze, Angela Aames (Chopping Mall, Basic Training) and Kim Fields before she was Tootie.

Spoiler warning — one of the kids gets killed and it gets really dark. That really shocked me. Otherwise, this is the kind of TV movie that was made for those who couldn’t get HBO and the opportunity to watch Amanda Whurlitzer, Kelly Leak and Timmy Lupis play the Yankees.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Gary Brandner didn’t just write The Howling, he also wrote a book called Walkers, in which a woman named Joanna Raitt nearly drowns at a party and soon finds the undead coming after her, trying to bring her back to the world of the dead. If you’re thinking that a lot of that sounds very Carnival of Souls, well, the movie will confirm that suspicion.

The trailer for this kept talking about how it was directed by the master of suspense, but never said who it was. The answer is Paul Wendkos, who I guess gets that title from making The Legend of Lizzie Borden, Haunts of the Very Rich and The Mephisto Waltz.

Joanna is played by Lindsay Wagner and she’s torn between two loves — her current man Glen Eastman (Robin Thomas) and her old dude Peter Langford (Bruce Boxleitner) — when she isn’t being chased by zombies or shadow people or whatever this is, across two nights and nearly four hours of your life (with commercials).

Diahann Carroll shows up as Joanna’s boss and wow, her shoulder pads are out of control and probably worth watching this movie to see.

From the Dead of Night‘s screenplay was written by Bill Bleich, who wrote some pretty decent other movies, like The Hearse, The Midnight Hour and The Gladiator. He was also a producer, writer and creative consultant for Poltergeist: The Legacy, which was the TV series inspired by the film.

You can watch this on YouTube.

The Milgram experiment was a series of social psychology trials conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, who measured the willingness of men to obey an authority figure who instructed them to administer electric shocks to someone else, even forcing them to continue the punishment until they killed someone. Strangely — or not all that strangely, when you realize how humanity can barely put a mask on when they spend ten minutes in a grocery store — a high proportion of the subjects would fully obey the instructions, even when they thought that it was all real.

That’s what inspired this controversial TV movie, starring William Shatner as Professor Stephen Turner, who is shocked when he discovers just how much pain his students can dish out in the name of science.

Written by George Bellak, who worked on the kind of old TV like Playhouse 90 that this resembles, and directed by Charles S. Dubin, who was ABC’s head director for thirty years, this film was so shocking that it took eight months to line up enough sponsors to get it on the air. It’s never been released in any format.

Shatner gave up his divorce visitation rights on Christmas Day to film this, showing how much he believed in it. It’s pretty stagey — like I said before, it’s very old TV — and even Professor Milgram, who was paid $5,000 as a consultant on the film, thought it was dull.

Somehow, this is my second TV movie in a row with Lynn Carlin in it, so that has to be the universe sending some kind of message. Or maybe she did a lot of 1970’s TV movies, as she was in Silent Night, Lonely Night; A Step Out of Line; Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones; The Morning After; The Last Angry Man; Terror on the 40th Floor; The Honorable Sam Houston; The Lives of Jenny Dolan; Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway; Girl on the Edge of Town; Forbidden Love; A Killer in the Family and The Kid from Nowhere.

It also has Ossie Davis, Viveca Lindfors, Stephen Macht (in one of his first roles), Estelle Parsons, Charles White, Roy Poole, Mike Kellin (Mel from Sleepaway Camp) ad supposedly a young John Travolta, which may be an urban legend.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Also known as With Harmful Intent, this 1993 Richard Friedman (Doom Asylum, Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge, Scared Stiff) made for TV movie has Rick Springfield and Joan Van Ark as parents headed for a divorce when a mystery man beats up their kid. Yes, if you’re the kind of person who says, “Kids never get hurt in movies,” then get ready for this movie, where kids are routinely abused throughout.

Based on the Judith Kelman novel, this giallo-esque film is all about a man — I’m not spoiling it for you — who was abused by the other kids and his mother, while only protected by his sister, but is now out to be the bully to the children of the ones who abused him. It also has an astounding scene where the witness to one of those killings is an elderly man who can’t speak due to a stroke and he keeps trying to tell everyone that they are in the presence of a murderer.

What a cast! Beyond the leads, you have Chris Noth, Daniel J. Travanti, Dey Young (who has been geeky yet loveable Kate Rambeau in Rock ‘n Roll High School as well as the snooty saleswoman in Pretty Woman) and Michael Patrick Carter as the child in danger. You may have seen him in Milk Money and as the kid in the Good Guys commercial in the original Child’s Play.

Man, once major networks stopped making movies like this, the world became a much less bright place.

You can watch this on YouTube.