Entertainment Made by Cults ("Paper Will," 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Before 8 p.m. last night, when I wanted to watch the Lifetime movie Cruel Instruction, I watched a YouTube video by someone credited as “Paper Will,” an hour-long film called Entertainment Made by Cults (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq2_xcTdhI8) that was precisely what the title indicated: a series of film clips, song videos and other ephemera actually produced by religious cults to justify themselves and hopefully recruit new members. The cult videos are of a delightful cheesiness – I especially liked the ones by a French cult leader who calls himself Raêl (true name: Claude Maurice Marcel Vorilhon) and who claims that all humanity was created by extraterrestrials through DNA manipulation and that they are waiting for us to end war so they can come back and usher in a new utopia. The Raëlian videos look like someone just got their first copy of Photoshop and are playing around with it, including some especially cheesy-looking flying saucers that resemble the incredibly tacky-looking videos from the very early days of gaming. My biggest surprise was that he didn’t mention probably the most (in)famous, and certainly the biggest-budgeted, entertainment ever produced by a cult: Inchon, the 1981 Korean War movie personally produced by Reverend Sun Myung Moon (though a wealthy Japanese press baron named Mitsuharu Ishii fronted for him) and starring Laurence Olivier as General Douglas MacArthur in one of those wretchedly campy performances that he gave in later years to get the money to send his kids to college. (My comments on Inchon are on https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/06/inchon-one-way-productions-unification.html.)