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.