Can a born-again Christian really become an exploitation movie superstar?
Picture, if you will, one Ron Ormond, a Louisiana-born screenwriter, author, magician, showman and, most relevant to the subject of this review, director of motion pictures. If you’ve heard that name before, it may be because Ormond was a rather prolific figure in the world of the grindhouse B-feature picture show, pumping out such lurid titles as Untamed Mistress (1956), Please Don’t Touch Me! (1963, also known as Teenage Bride) and The Exotic Ones (1968) – and, if all goes smoothly with The Geek Show’s release schedule, I’d highly advise you to read Megan Kenny’s take on several of Ormond and company’s drive-in oddities.
However, everything changed when a private plane accident landed Ormond in the midst of something truly unexpected – a spiritual awakening. Ormond’s movie-making trio, composed of Ron, his ex-vaudevillian wife June, and his young adult son Tim, would from that point onwards turn their back on the glitz and glamour (bear with me, now) of Hollywood in order to follow a higher cinematic purpose, bringing the word of God (or, at least, Mississippi-based fire-and-brimstone preacher Estus W. Pirkle) to the silver screen. You may, understandably, be under the impression that the Ormond family’s days of celluloid sex and violence were but a distant memory. As it turns out, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Indicator Films are a distribution outlet that, by now, has a firm reputation for putting out gorgeous collectors’ editions of some truly bizarre and obscure works of cinema. I’m talking really obscure; as in, some of the films they’ve released recently haven’t previously been seen outside of the filmmakers’ basements. The fact that From Hollywood to Heaven: The Lost and Saved Films of the Ormond Family, Indicator’s new boxset containing the majority of said filmmaking clan’s back-catalogue both before Christ and anno Domini, exists in the first place is not entirely surprising – hell, it’s probably the natural next step for the label to take following Santo films and the entire oeuvre of British regional horror master Michael J. Murphy. What is unexpected, however, is the fact that the name of Drive (2011) and Valhalla Rising (2009) director Nicholas Winding Refn is plastered all over the box, discs and accompanying hardback Jimmy McDonough-penned biography (sold separately from the set, but relevant nonetheless). To be completely honest, beyond the fact that he’s a big name that gets credit card details in digital checkout boxes, I’m unsure as to what Refn’s connection to From Hollywood to Heaven is. Nonetheless, as if to ape the Lord himself, Refn is ever-present.
Perhaps about a decade ago we could have all sat down and laughed at If Footmen Tire You with a couple of drinks like we do something like Reefer Madness (1936), wondering how previous generations could have ever thought and said such crazy things…
Given unto us like manna from Heaven, the third disc of Indicator’s set opens with none other than If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (1971), a paranoid God-sploitation midnight movie epic unlike any motion picture that has ever graced this Earth before and, with any luck, unlike any that will ever be made again. The (un)holy missing link between McCarthy’s Red Scare of the ‘50s and the Satanic Panic of the ‘80s, If Footmen Tire You comes upon us in the form of a furious fear-mongering sermon delivered straight from the lips of the aforementioned Reverend Estus Pirkle, a charmless void of charisma with a mind for shockingly creative torture that would put even the Marquis de Sade to shame. In the span of only 53 harrowing minutes, viewers will bear witness to a confounding vision of a near-future where communism has seized control of the United States, and the streets run ketchup-red with Christian blood. “Does this shock you?” cries Pirkle, repeatedly, with increasing frequency as the film progresses, and you too will be shocked by the extent to which this seemingly crazed individual is able to find more and more absurd ways that Fidel Castro’s “footmen” will allegedly kill people with in days to come (my personal favourite impractical murder sequence is when a man is dunked onto several upright pitchforks over and over).
It’s fascinating, sure, in a macabre sense, but after a while the bad-taste laughs become less and less frequent as the morbid reality of what you’re watching begins to take hold; not Pirkle’s imagined horrors of a farcically bloody communist uprising, but the disturbing truth that the man preaching in front of you likely believes every word that comes out of his mouth – and what’s worse is that he’s preaching to a congregation ready to eat up every single one of those words. Perhaps about a decade ago we could have all sat down and laughed at If Footmen Tire You with a couple of drinks like we do something like Reefer Madness (1936), wondering how previous generations could have ever thought and said such crazy things, and lying to ourselves about how thankful we are that we live in a more enlightened age where people would be so stupid – but now, the year is 2023, and we unfortunately know better than that. Estus Pirkle died in 2005, and yet the very talking points that he makes throughout If Footmen Tire You are proclaimed on the daily by hate-preachers and Conservative pundits to increasingly bigger crowds and louder rounds of applause.
Yes, Pirkle, what you have shown me does shock me. It shocks me that, beyond its shot-on-toilet-paper video quality (no offense to the hard work of the restoration team who worked on this release, who did the best they could with the surviving prints at hand), If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do could have been made today. Its portrayal of teachers grooming their pupils into radical left-wing politics and sexual deviancy is directly echoed in the anti-LGBTQ+ “Don’t Say Gay” rhetoric of our contemporary era. Pirkle’s steadfast claims of an immediate day of judgment, upon which those villainous red impostors that have infiltrated our good Christian nation will unmask themselves for all the world to see, might as well come directly from the Qanon playbook. Even the preacher’s chilling final mantra of “will you come… will you come…” feels upsettingly akin to the calls to action put out prior to the January 6th insurrection. If Footmen Tire You has quite possibly missed its turn to become the next big so-bad-it’s-good movie that people show to their friends for a laugh, because the Estus Pirkles of today are making their presences known. Only this time, they’re not preaching to some small baptist congregation in the American south; they’re preaching on national television.
From Hollywood to Heaven is out now on Limited Edition Indicator Blu-Ray
