This is like a mixtape of other 70s paranormal documentaries, Journey Into the Beyond, Mysteries from Beyond Earth, The Amazing World of Psychic Phenomena, The Force Beyond, Unknown Powers and Death Is Not the End.

Because this film acts as a massive clip show, it required a small army of producers to clear the rights and wrangle the reels. Here is the expanded roster of the players behind the curtain and the madness they put on screen. The credits for Beyond Belief read like a “Who’s Who” of independent hustle:

Alan Baker: Wearing two hats as both producer and director, Baker had the unenviable task of editing these disparate paranormal threads into a cohesive (and creepy) 90-minute experience.

Ron Libert: CEO of Libert Films International from 1973 to 1976, as well as Apollo Productions. He also worked with producer, writer and director Robert J. Emery as part of American Pictures Corporation. He produced eleven other movies, including Roy Colt & Winchester Jack, The Devil with Seven Faces, Encounter With the Unknown, Angela, Willy & Scratch, My Brother Has Bad Dreams, Alan Ormsby’s The Great Masquerade, Charlie Rich: The Silver Fox In Concert, the aforementioned Death Is Not the End and Never Too Young to Rock.

Hal Lipman: Known almost exclusively for NFL documentaries, Lipman is the true wildcard here. Seeing his name next to automatic writing and alien abductions is the cinematic equivalent of a linebacker doing a tarot reading.

Malcolm Pierce Rosenberg and David S. Wiggins: One and done producers.

Charles E. Sellier Jr.: Before the internet told you what to watch, Sellier was out there four-walling. For the uninitiated: he’d rent out the whole theater, keep 100% of the ticket sales and bypass the studio middleman. According to his IMDb bio, he had a 52% success rate in the domestic market. Compare that to the big Hollywood studios, which were lucky to break even on one out of every seven movies. That’s because Sellier didn’t guess; he tested. He marketed movies like they were bars of soap, pre-testing everything to make sure the audience was already hooked before the first frame even rolled. Even Orson Welles told the guy, “Young man, you are light-years ahead of the rest of the industry.” And he didn’t just stop at theaters. He took his “what does the audience actually want?” data to NBC and made The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams. In 1981, Variety listed the top independent champs, and Sellier’s name was all over it with movies like In Search of Noah’s Ark, The Boogens and Hangar 18.  Let me pile on some more facts: Sellier wasn’t just a producer; he was a best-selling author. He spent 22 weeks on The New York Times Best Sellers list with The Lincoln Conspiracy. Whether he was investigating the Bible or hunting for Bigfoot, the guy knew how to tell stories people needed to see through his Sunn Classics company.

You can tell this isn’t a Sunn movie because it’s hosted by Richard Mathews, not Brad Crandall. But you do get to learn about telepathy, hypnotic regression and past lives (that would be the Death Is Not the End footage), psychokinesis, ghosts (always ghosts), UFOs and alien abductions, automatic writing, and so much more.

The film kicks off with the legendary Cleve Backster, a polygraph expert who claimed that plants and even yogurt have feelings. You get to see distressed yogurt reacting to remote stimuli under an EEG. From there, it jumps to Sister M. Justa Smith, a nun and biologist, proving that faith healers can actually repair damaged enzymes in a lab setting.

One of the most wince-inducing segments features Jack Schwarz, a man who claimed total control over his involuntary systems. He pushes a 5-inch sailmaker’s needle through his bicep on camera, pulls it out, and then, through sheer non-attachment, stops the bleeding instantly.

Then, a group of researchers in Toronto creates a ghost. They invented a fictional 17th-century aristocrat named Philip, gave him a fake backstory, and held a seance. To their shock, the fictional Philip started rapping on tables and sliding furniture across the room. Is this any stranger than the story of Matthew Manning, a British teenager whose home was plagued by teleporting objects and automatic writing? You’ll be amazed to see the walls of his room covered in hundreds of signatures from spirits, including one from a man named Robert Webb, who supposedly lived in the house in 1733.

This wouldn’t be a 70s weirdness documentary without aliens. Get ready for the harrowing testimony of Charles Hickson, the Mississippi shipyard worker who claims he was kidnapped by creatures with lobster-claw hands in 1973. This is bolstered by interviews with nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman and astronaut James McDivitt, who recounts his own unidentified sighting during the Gemini 4 mission.

Beyond Belief is a time capsule of an era where science and the supernatural were having a very public, very weird first date. They broke up soon after.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Lager SSadis Kastrat Kommandantur isn’t the kind of movie you put on for your mom, unless your mom is Eva Braun.

Blame director Sergio Garrone, whose career went from Westerns like If You Want to Live… Shoot! and Django the Bastard to the Kinski giallo/mad scientist/krimi movies The Hand That Feeds the Dead and Lover of the Monster, and a very late in the game — 1981! — giallo starring Corinne Clery and George Lazenby, L’ultimo harem.

But most people will remember him for his two Nazi movies. He made this at the same time as SS Lager 5: L’inferno delle donne AKA SS Camp: Women’s Hell, and they share many of the same shots. Same idea, I guess, as the war is almost over, but this camp wants to perfect the master race before time runs out. 

How rough does it get? Even the ads for this movie started the UK video nasty era. 

Helmut (Mircha Carven) is, I guess, our hero. He’d rather read than pal around with his fellow SS officers and soon falls for Mirelle (Paola Corazzi, who really ends up in the most horrific of Italian exploitation and remains gorgeous no matter what) while everyone else works on mating women with the officers to try and fix Col. Von Kleiben’s (Giorgio Cerioni) decimated balls, I kid you not. Yes, we see a flashback where a Jewish woman once bit them clean off. How do you fix a problem like Von Kleiben’s balls?

Matilde Dall’Aglio, who was one of the people watching the snuff movie in Emanuelle In America, is in this, along with Agnes Kalpagos (not her first or last Nazi movie), Mara Carisi (who is in the somewhat classier Salon Kitty), Inga Alexandrova, Giovanna Mainardi and Patrizia Melega, who goes for it as the sapphic doctor in charge of most of this. 

Do you like long surgery scenes? How about shocking people in electric chairs until they piss themselves? Want an unhappy ending? This has all of that and more, a movie that is like Salo but has no redeeming social commentary, just people doing a woman in prison movie with fascist uniforms. Unlike WIP films, this has women boiled alive and also frozen, so if you’re seeking that, good news. This will deliver.

The 88 Films release of this film has a new 4K remaster from the original negative. It looks great, and watching blood-boiling and electric-chair-pissing in ultra-high definition is an experience that will make even a seasoned grindhouse veteran blink. Extras include audio commentary by Italian cinema experts Eugenio Ercolani and Nanni Cobretti; interviews with Sergio Garrone, Pierpaolo De Sanctis, Eugenio Alabiso and Maurizio Centini; there’s also the Italian opening and closing titles; a trailer; a reversible sleeve with censored and uncensored art and a book with articles by Tim Murray and Rachael Nesbit. You can get this from MVD in UHD and Blu-ray formats.

My parents were saints. 

Instead of getting a child who loved playing football or one who was devoted to scholarship, they got a chubby kid who wanted to be a stuntman and who was obsessed with the Loch Ness Monster. 

I wish my dad were around so I could apologize every day.

Director Richard Martin also directed King Monster, Jaws of Death, UFO Journals, UFO Syndrome and The Lost City of Atlantis. His IMDb bio states that “Richard Martin has been an active member of the entertainment industry for over thirty-five years as a motion picture and television executive. Serving as Chief Executive Officer for Transworld Films and Cinema Arts, he was responsible for the development and production of over a dozen major theatrical releases. Richard helped pioneer the revolutionary movement of “Four Walling,” a system of combining film production, marketing, distribution and theater leasing.

Someone alert Sunn Classics. Kroger Babb, too.

Like most of his paranormal films, this is narrated by Arthur Franz, who appeared in Invaders from Mars, Monster on the Campus, The Atomic Submarine and more. This goes from the stuff you expected, like you know, the Loch Ness Monster, before the focus goes all over the place, and we learn about fish fossils and lizards. We also see a jet boat crash and see Boleskine, the home of Crowley, which was once owned by Jimmy Page.

Will we also watch a priest try to exorcise Loch Ness? Yes, we will. There’s also a shark, so every exploitation topic in 1976 is covered. I’m surprised this doesn’t have inserts.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Directed by Ed Ragozzino  and written by Ed Hawkins and Ronald D. Olson, this is a pseudo-documentary, which, according to Wikipedia, is a movie that uses “documentary camera techniques but with fabricated sets, actors, or situations, and it may use digital effects to alter the filmed scene or even create a wholly synthetic scene.”

The North American Wildlife Research may not exist, but Chuck (George Lauris) from there is the narrator. He tells us all about the actual historical evidence of Bigfoot, including the Patterson–Gimlin film. His group is using computers to find the most likely place — in northern British Columbia — to see an undisturbed Bigfoot. If they can find it, they’ll get the money they need to do more research. 

The group that goes to find the Sasquatch has Chuck, along with Native American guide Techka Blackhawk (Joel Morello), explorer Josh Bigsby (Ken Kienzle), reporter Bob Vernon (Lou Salerni), anthropologist Dr. Paul Markham (William Emmons), animal handler Hank Parshall (Steve Boergadine) and even a cook, Barney Snipe (Jim Bradford). 

Following the feel of so many Bigfoot movies that came before and would come after, the group’s adventures are interspersed with other Bigfoot stories and tales are told around a campfire. Of course, we never see Bigfoot — well, stay tuned — but we do see rocks thrown and shadowy invasions into the camp, which, Aliens-style, are outfitted with motion trackers that, by the end, everyone thinks have been smashed by multiple Sasquatches. Once the crew leaves, there he or she is. There’s Bigfoot, in the shadows, all fuzzy. Congratulations, the movie is over.

The film was produced by Ronald Olson, a genuine Bigfoot researcher who founded the Eugene, Oregon-based North American Wildlife Research Company. Olson’s background gave the film a layer of authenticity that resonated with fans of the unexplained. I laughed as I wrote that, by the way. His father also owned American National Enterprises, a company well-versed in producing nature documentaries.

When this film played in theaters, there was merch! You could order a postcard featuring a picture of Bigfoot from the famous Patterson-Gimlin film, as well as a 7-inch record of the film’s soundtrack. It had the songs “High In The Mountains,” “Bigfoot Theme,” “Cougar Attack,” “The Pack Train,” and “Barney’s Theme.”

You can watch this on YouTube.

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Thanks for picking this, Eddie R. It was very much a blind spot!

Janine Talbot (Delvene Delaney in her only full-length theatrical role, but she’d go on to be a TV game show presenter) is hitchhiking through Australia, but please — spoilers all over this — don’t get to know her. Whoever has picked her up, she instantly begins to make love to them, even calling out how quick they’re moving, but not stopping them. Then, without warning, she’s dead.

Was it merchant sailor Mark Gifford (John Waters, a child star who was on the Aussie TV show Play School for twenty years; since then, he’s done a one-man show about John Lennon), who has disposed of the body? Or perhaps his brother, Robert (George Mallaby, mostly known for playing a police officer on Homicide, The Box and Cop Shop in Australia; he also owned the first hazelnut farm Down Under; sadly, Mallaby spent the last four years of his life in a wheelchair after a series of strokes), a tense young man confined to a wheelchair?

These adopted brothers spend most of the movie literally at war with one another, mainly because they’re both in love with their cousin, Margaret (Belinda Giblin, who was on the Australian TV show Sons and Daughters). Despite the fact that Robert doesn’t have use of his legs, he’s really rough on his brother, who the police suspect in a series of hitchhiker murders beyond the one we’ve seen in the opening of this film.

Based on Russell Braddon’s novel, which was set in England, this was directed and written by Tim Burstall as a two-lead, single-location film that could be done on a budget while he prepped the film Eliza Fraser (which also stars Waters and Mallaby). He may be better known for movies like Stork, Alvin Purple and Attack Force Z, at least in the U.S.

There are so many issues here: Robert is about to get worse, losing the use of his arms, so his brother will be fully in charge of him. And yet he despises Mark, who has taken his girlfriend from him. Most of the film is a menacing battle of emotions between the two men, but by the end, things get awfully bloody. And as always, things may not be as they seem when it comes to who the killer is, despite this seemingly telling us who the guilty man is right at the beginning. After all, the poster says that this is a film “in the Hitchcock tradition.”

Between this, Road Games and Fair Game, my personal vision of Australia is a lawless land where women are constantly in danger of being murdered. Or being killed and then dressed up and kept in someone’s house before it’s taken to a theater and placed in a seat to watch a ripoff of A Clockwork Orange. If you look, Delaney is both blinking and breathing when she should be deceased, but don’t let that distract you from this movie.

End Play works because it messes with the previously called out Hitchcock tradition, “it claims to follow. By showing us a disposal of a body early on, it tricks the audience into a false sense of moral superiority. We think we know who the monster is. The film then spends 90 minutes making us second-guess exactly who the villain is, as well as the mental stability of both men.

What should we call Australian giallo? Down Under Sunburnt Gothic? Moscato Giallo?

You can watch this on Tubi.

When several important judges are murdered, Inspector Rogas (Lino Ventura) is put on the case, but what starts as a simple detective story soon becomes a conspiracy thriller.

Based on Leonardo Sciascia’s book, this was directed by Francesco Rosi (The Mattei Affair, The Moment of Truth), who wrote the script along with Tonino Guerra and Lino Jannuzzi.

When three judges are killed — during the Years of Lead, the times of great political unrest in Italy — Rogas is told not to go into the crimes that the men committed and just to solve their murders. This leads to Rogas being demoted after the murders don’t stop and told to work with the political division so that the crimes can be blamed on revolutionary Leftist terrorist groups and not Cres, a man who was set up by the judges and his wife (Maria Carta). 

Or maybe it goes deeper. Even the chief of police is in on the crimes, which leads Rogas to believe that while Cres killed the first three judges, the other murders were ordered to justify the prosecution of the far-left groups. But he’s too deep, and there’s no way he can learn this much and make it out alive.

In case you’re wondering, the title of this film is based on Cadavre Exquis (Exquisite Corpse), the surrealist game invented by André Breton. It’s when players contribute words or images to a collective piece of art without seeing what others have done.

The last line of this, when the reporter asks whether people will ever know the truth, and the answer is “Truth is not always revolutionary,” sparked widespread controversy.

The Radiance release of this film has a 4K restoration of the movie by Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata and The Film Foundation, as well as audio commentary by filmmaker Alex Cox, archival interviews with director Francesco Rosi, Francesco Rosi and Lino Ventura, an interview with Gaetana Marrone, author of The Cinema of Francesco Rosi, a trailer and an image gallery. It has a reversible sleeve featuring designs based on original posters, a limited edition booklet featuring new writing on the film by Michael Atkinson, and newly translated writing by and an interview with Rosi. This is a limited edition of 3000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings. You can get it from MVD.

Hardboiled: Three Pulp Thrillers has three pulp thrillers in the spirit of Dirty Harry from director Alain Corneau.

Police Python 357 (1976): The second screen adaptation of Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock — the first has Charles Laughton — this stars Yves Montand as Inspector Marc Ferrot. How close to Dirty Harry is this? The beginning is pretty much Magnum Force. Ferrot is in love with Sylvia (Stefania Sandrelli), a mysterious woman who has already been sleeping with his boss Commissaire Ganay (François Périer), despite him being married to Thérèse Ganay (Ferrot’s real-life wife Simone Signoret). That woman was killed by Ganay, and Ferrot is now the main suspect. This is very much noir, despite being influenced by early 70s violent cop movies from America.

While the box set is sold out, MVD has this by itself. You get extras like commentary by Mike White, Maxim Jakubowski on Police Python 357’s source novel and adaptation and an archival interview with Alain Corneau and François Périer about Police Python 357. 

Serie Noire (1979): An adaptation of Jim Thompson’s A Hell of a Woman, this moves the story to Paris. Franck Poupart (Patrick Dewaere) is a door-to-door salesman stuck in a dilapidated apartment and married to a depressive wife (Myriam Boyer). He’s drinking all the time as he gets over being on drugs. But when he hunts down a man who owes him money, he falls for a young prostitute named Mona (Marie Trintignant). When he’s arrested for stealing, she bails him out, and they decide to steal the money her madame has hidden. The attraction he feels for her will cause him to give up everything that matters to him: his morals, his job, even his marriage. Is it the right choice? 

While the box set is sold out, MVD has this by itself. You get extras like an interview with Alain Corneau, Patrick Dewaere, and Miriam Boyer; a making-of documentary; another interview with Alain Corneau and Marie Trintignant; and a visual essay about Jim Thompson adaptations for the screen by Paul Martinovic. 

Choice of Arms (1978): Noel Durieux (Yves Montand) is an old gangster content to be retired with his wife, Nicole (Catherine Deneuve). This all ends when an old accomplice shows up, only to die, but brings along the wild Mickey (Gérard Depardieu) with him. Two cops, Bonnardot (Michel Galabru) and Sarlat (Gérard Lanvin), start to hunt down Mickey and make life dangerous again for Noel, who just wants his wife to be safe. As this film reveals, that’s probably not possible. A life of crime is not an easy one to walk away from forever. This is less a noir than a tragedy.

While the box set is sold out, MVD has this by itself.