I swear that my wife and I could do a whole podcast episode about documentaries about cults. Yeah, we watch a few of the bigger true crime docs, but what we really enjoy is sitting down for a couple of hours and getting the inside story on fringe religious groups. Over the past several years, we’ve watched probably more we’d like to admit, from that LuLaRoe documentary to the two NXIVM docs to stuff like Wild Wild Country and Mother God. For the most part, I’d say they’re spectacle. Some horrible things happen and we are appalled by them, of course, but there’s also the feeling of “What the hell is going on here?”

When it comes to what we’ve seen, a number of them are infuriating (the NXIVM and Scientology docs we’ve seen as well as that one on the Duggars), funny (the LuLaRoe one and Wild Wild Country had some “shake your head and laugh” moments), and even sad (HBO’s Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults). We’ve yet to get into some of the bigger-named ones like Jonestown and the Branch Davidians (although I do recommend The American Experience‘s “The Road to Oklahoma City” documentary). I think we’ve got a couple of those saved, though.

Recently, as television is kind of boring and some of the Wimbledon reruns are of matches we watched earlier in the day, we picked up watching things that were in our streaming queues. After making our way through the Dan Levy show Big Mistakes (so funny and so worth watching), we bounced around a couple of sports docs and then three cult docs. And what did we think of the cults? Well, here’s some quick reviews, and I’m going to say that all three are watchable.

Orgasm, Inc.: A look at “One Taste,” a cult that began more like a wellness movement dedicated to empowering women through their orgasms. Now, the concept is salacious enough for anyone to want to watch, and the footage of lectures and orgasm demonstrations is both silly and bizarre, but when the group became popular and started exhibiting the tell-tale signs of a wellness pyramid scheme it was only a matter of time they went full NXIVM. Seriously, this one didn’t disappoint and it’s a really good example of a non-religious cult and how certain patterns always emerge.

Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed: This one’s about a massive evangelical/pentecostal church that began in Australia and then made its way to the U.S. where it became a big-profile “celebrity” church in the 2000s and 2010s (Chris Pratt was famously a member). Its methods were very “Cool Church”, so less of the pastors/priests in robes and standing on ceremony that you’d get from your average Sunday church service and more like a concert or convention experience. It was all definitely an outgrowth of the televangelism boom of the Eighties. And like so many of these stories, we have a charismatic leader who preaches a message that he does not follow, suppresses any kind of alternate thought, and eventually stories of abuse and misconduct come to the front. But I think it’s important because of the ubiquity of these types of churches, especially where I am in the South.

Bring Me the Beauties: A Model Cult. Oh man, this was the strangest of the three. It’s a three-parter on HBO Max that goes behind the spiritual group Eternal Values, which was led by Frederick von Mierers, a Ken doll-looking guy who had made his way into high society and recruited young models to join his movement. The centerpiece of the documentary is Hoyt Richards, who was “the first male supermodel” in the late 1980s and early 1990s (and when you see him, you might recognize him). Von Mierers’ philosophy has to do with the book Aliens Among Us by Ruth Montgomery, saying that some people on earth are actually aliens whose souls have “walked into” human bodies. And apparently it was the inspiration behind a Van Halen song? Anyway, things get more bat guano crazy as the documentary goes on, which includes old footage from a talk show hosted by Richard Bey along with one of the heroes of Hoyt Richards’ story being … Fabio? Seriously. Check it out.