Some years back — ’84, ’85, I’m no “pray TV” expert — this freaky religious nut named Gary Greenwald made a freaky religious propaganda program, Deception of a Generation, in which Greenwald invokes the name of God to denounce children’s Saturday morning cartoons as All That Is Evil.

It’s funny because he is not joking, and it’s not funny because he is not joking. (It’s also quite funny because Greenwald is quite hairy, but that’s beside the point.) Greenwald welcomes a guest — whose name I didn’t feel was important enough to write down, but he talks like a girl and wears glasses — who claims God told him to spend years studying cartoons to unearth the satanic elements within them.

So Gary and Guy (as I’ll call him) go back and forth chastising the likes of The Smurfs and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. For the whole, it unfolds something like this:

Greenwald: “Now we’re going to watch another clip from Scooby-Doo, is that correct?”
Guy: “Yes, watch how witchcraft and astral projections play a part in this clip.”
Greenwald (post-clip, flustered): “Well, I must say, this is not the Scooby-Doo I remember, what with all the witchcraft and astral projections!”
Guy: “Amen.”

They go on to imply that the writers for these shows are not under the employ of Hanna-Barbera or Filmation, but Beelzebub; in reality, it’s not likely they were worshipping the dark one with their quickly written scripts, but rather flying higher than a kite. —Rod Lott

Depending upon where you stand on the subject, the documentary Bronies can be viewed either as a celebration of the fandom or a portrait of it presented for your mockery.

A “brony,” for those of you with better things to do with your time, is a male fan of the current cartoon series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, a show aimed at children, and primarily girls at that. The guys featured here don’t just like it — they live it, from collecting figurines and attending conventions to creating their own songs and immortalizing the characters on their car windows. (Perhaps “immortalizing” is too strong a word when the windows get busted by homophobes.)

Funded by Kickstarter and featuring Pony voice stars John de Lancie and Tara Strong, Bronies is not without interest to the viewer curious about ways of life that are alien to them. The level of fandom on display is as bewildering to me as suspending oneself by hooks in the nipples or surgically altering your face to resemble a celebrity; while I support one’s freedom to pursue such adventures, I do not get what compels one to take it to such an extreme. Hobbies are good; obsessions are unhealthy.

The kids of Bronies are likely to outgrow the phase as fast as a previous generation did Pokémon, but the adults … I mean, what good can come out of calling yourself Starlight Ironhoof? Something about that strikes me as deeply sad — an emotion with which the film does not intend to leave you. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

When the last Blockbuster Video in my neck of the woods closed recently, I smiled on the inside. Then I got nostalgic for the era of movie-watching that corporation exploited and killed: the VHS revolution. Anyone who recalls the days of frequenting mom-and-pop video stores or now spends weekends trolling flea markets for unwanted tapes will feel that joy return in a rush from Rewind This!

Josh Johnson’s documentary chronicles the VHS format from birth to death, and those for whom the words on its “Be Kind Rewind” sticker remain a way of life. In 94 minutes, he covers a ton of ground: the Beta vs. VHS showdown, the porn explosion (pun intended), the dawn of sell-through tapes, the lost art of cover art, the proliferation of the aforementioned Blockbuster, the legion of DIY filmmakers inspired, the tape-trading and bootlegging circuits — heck, even how the sudden glitch on a tape signaled that a lucky renter was seconds away from seeing sure-as-shit nudity.

Among Johnson’s interviewees are Something Weird Video’s Mike Vraney; Basket Case director Frank Henenlotter; Cassandra Peterson, aka Elvira, Mistress of the Dark; Full Moon’s Charles Band; Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman; and a number of film programmers, shop owners and obsessive collectors still touting VHS’ dominance. What I can’t tell — and it’s impossible to know — is if their love is misplaced; the format is inferior, but the sheer volume of titles it brought to their homes is mind-boggling.

Rewind This! is rife with clips, including oddball releases and outright obscurities. It’s a kick to see snippets of Bubba Smith’s workout video, Until It Hurts; Corey Haim’s misbegotten vanity project, Me, Myself and I; Leslie Nielsen’s Bad Golf Made Easier; a shot-on-video Western titled Death Rider; the first SOV adult film, Football Widow; 1984’s tasteless “horror” movie Black Devil Doll from Hell; and other atrocities, now preserved for the enjoyment and delight of future generations. —Rod Lott

Buy it at iTunes.

Word association time: Does hearing the title Orgy of the Dead make you think of Ed Wood? Odds are, it does, and man, did that ever piss off Stephen C. Apostolof! See, under the A.C. Stephen pseudonym, Apostolof directed that 1965 cult curio, whereas Wood simply wrote what few pages the script entailed. But who did Tim Burton choose to make a biopic about?

That jealousy is one of the major takeaways of Dad Made Dirty Movies, a documentary about the wild and crazy career of the “Bulgarian erotic director.” Because Apostolof died in 2005, his story is told largely by his third wife and four of his five children. It’s certainly an interesting one, since before the man hit it big on Hollywood’s fringes, he toiled in a concentration camp, worked as a whorehouse piano player and fought in the French Foreign Legion.

But what made him “one lucky donkey” was directing movies that featured “the world’s cheapest special effect”: female nudity. Including such titles as Suburbia Confidential and College Girls Confidential, his sex flicks had no actual sex — just big, bare breasts, which he called “ticket sellers.” And sell tickets they did until hardcore pornography — and worse, the combination of that with the VCR — had to spoil everything.

Rife with great stories — from Criswell intoxicated on the Orgy set to Apostolof supposedly being poisoned by his first wife — Jordan Todorov’s Dad Made Dirty Movies shines the spotlight on a guy who, yeah, is way overdue for his turn. I just wish the documentary were longer; at 58 minutes, not a moment is wasted, yet I could have been held captive for at least another half-hour. Other than that, the only complaint is having the thing narrated by someone doing an Apostolof imitation, wavering accent and all. This one’s tough to find, but well worth the hunt. —Rod Lott

Get it at Vimeo.

Director George Ratliff’s Hell House is a documentary that follows the parish of an Assembly of God church just outside of Austin, Texas, as it prepares for its 10th annual haunted house.

But the show they put on is not your average haunted house with Leatherface lookalikes and heads of cauliflower subbing for brains — the “Hell House” seeks to scare guests into fearing the Lord by depicting sinners at their worst: an AIDS patient rejecting Christ as he withers away on his deathbed; a girl about to commit suicide and blaming God after being roofied and raped at a rave; and a picked-upon student taking revenge on his classmates by killing them, as Satan has instructed.

In all cases, they are shown heading toward eternal damnation. The goal of the attraction is to have as many as of its tens of thousands of visitors converted to Christianity by the time they enter the final room.

At turns hilarious and sad, entertaining and disturbing, Hell House is a terrific, fly-on-the-wall look at this regional phenomenon, yet takes neither side. The characters may come off as sympathetic or zealots — that depends upon your own interpretation of their behavior. My favorite shot notes a pentagram the event volunteers have painted for a devil-worship scene, but mistakenly (?) made the Star of David instead. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.