Continuing on our journey From Hollywood to Heaven, we must first take the road through The Burning Hell (1974), with the Reverend Estus Pirkle as our Dante, Ron Ormond our Virgil, and The Neon Demon (2016) director Nicholas Winding Refn still ever-present for some as-of-yet indiscernible reason.
The Ormond family’s second collaboration with Pirkle, The Burning Hell, is exactly what it says on the tin. Similar to If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?, the film is yet another classic Estus Pirkle sermon / rant, this time of the typical street-preacher “repent or burn in hell forever” flavour. Ormond’s vision of hell, whilst fairly unpleasant, isn’t exactly anything new; compared to the sunday-school Salo that was If Footmen Tire You, Pirkle’s Burning Hell feels almost quaint. For as loathsome as the previous Ormond / Pirkle picture was in its messaging, its hysterically paranoid depiction of a world gone mad under communist rule gave it character and some gonzo entertainment value. Here, in The Burning Hell, originality is no more. Any entertainment value is long-gone. Only Pirkle remains, and he has lost none of his enthusiasm. Perhaps, truly, this is the burning hell that the title refers to.
After 58 excruciating minutes of boring Biblical re-enactments, conservative Christian guilt-tripping, and lacklustre repetitive sequences of damned souls shuffling about whilst seemingly smeared head-to-toe in poop, you too may believe in the existence of otherworldly spiritual evil. The Burning Hell might well be the purest example of a “psychotronic film” out there, in the most literal of terms; headache-inducing and fuelled by hate, Ormond’s film may be the most accurate real-life counterpart to the brain-damaging broadcasts from Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983). Film is used here as a weapon, and it has a target – one “Dr. Long”, presumably a religious rival of Estus Pirkle, whose teachings of love, forgiveness and alternative interpretation of the scripture really seem to boil the pastor’s blood.
The Ormond family’s next visit to church would come in the form of The Grim Reaper (1976), a Pirkle-less effort that, considering the master tapes were lost in a flood, maybe even God doesn’t want you to see. With a salvaged print that is less in need of a remaster than it is an exorcism, The Grim Reaper is largely more of the same that came before from these Ormond Christian scare films; it’s essentially the same film as The Burning Hell, with a little added warning on the dangers of spiritualism (and intersectionality) on the side. Pirkle is thankfully absent, meaning that this film is mildly less despicable than its precursors, but unfortunately we still have to put up with a whole host of rail replacement bus service preachers who regurgitate the same rhetoric with less conviction; names of note include notorious televangelist Jerry Falwell and alleged serial child predator Bob Gray, so this might be an “out of the frying pan, into the (hell)fire” situation.
With a salvaged print that is less in need of a remaster than it is an exorcism
To its (very minor) credit, the absence of Estus Pirkle in The Grim Reaper permits the Ormonds to take to the stage in ways which they weren’t really given the opportunity to in If Footmen Tire You and The Burning Hell; it’s the title on this disc which is most obviously a family affair, and as such it’s the one which carries the most cheapo charm. You may be disappointed to hear that the titular spectre isn’t among Ormond’s congregation of ghouls and ghosts (his thoughts on horsemen, after all, are already clear), but The Grim Reaper’s Hades is populated by a whole host of deadite-esque demons and prankster imps courtesy of June Ormond. As dreadful as the film may be, there’s no shortage of variety – a shonky technicolour seance, June providing an eccentric performance as a warty fairytale witch, and even a bloody nightmare sequence which feels like a redneck precursor to one of the more memorable images from Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988), all feature. It’s typical low-rent “turn or burn” schlock with the same reprehensible messaging and extremely limited entertainment value, but it somehow manages to be the most (if still not remotely) respectable entry in this era of the Ormond family’s cinematic career.
The same cannot be said for The Believer’s Heaven (1977), the final film on the disc, as well as the Ormonds’ final screen collaboration with the Reverend Estus W. Pirkle. Here, Pirkle’s intent is less to scare cinema-goers into repenting (although there is a fair deal of that) but rather to entice viewers by presenting to them all the glorious wonders of Heaven – and yet, somehow, this manages to be the most disturbing and abhorrent chapter in Pirkle’s foul trinity. With a poster boasting that the film was “photographed on five continents”, the first impression that I got from The Believer’s Heaven was that Ormond and Pirkle had finally gone full Mondo movie – but the film itself is somehow doubly exploitative and cruel even when compared to the aforementioned ‘60s travelogue shockers of Jacopetti and Prosperi. Whether we’re watching South Asian disaster victims being used as supposed evidence of the coming end times, Pirkle showing off a preacher friend’s lavish mansion home as an example of heavenly riches to come, or even a sick resurrection of the carnival freak-show as disabled people are made to sing a deeply morbid and upsetting song as the camera lingers on their disfigurements for able-bodied viewers to gawk at, The Believer’s Heaven somehow marks a new low in just how shameless these Ormond films can be. It is, unintentionally, a perfect exposé of the connections between capitalism and organised religion which run so deep in much of culture and society.
“But why”, you may ask, “would Indicator release these films?” – sure, this is the label that put out a lavish set of the Fu Manchu movies, but even with them not being strangers to tackling controversial and even problematic material, it does somewhat boggle the mind as to why we now have a Blu-Ray release of these bigoted, reactionary, poorly-thrown-together scare flicks that exist purely to spread the hateful social, political and religious views of their creators? In the noble and valiant quest for media preservation, there will inevitably be examples of cinema which some would deem unworthy of being salvaged, and films which many may (somewhat understandably) believe should have remained lost – and yet, the films of the Ormond family were found, and they were saved. In spite of my suffering whilst watching these wretched pictures, I’m glad that they were shown mercy and were given a second chance at life – I’d be lying if I said that If Footmen Tire You wasn’t a fascinating little curio of early ‘70s regional exploitation. Perhaps, in a way, From Hollywood to Heaven is an important historical document, with Estus Pirkle’s warning of horrors to come having evolved into a chilling reminder of the fact that the talking points used by today’s religious right are nothing new.
Indicator have done a fine job with this disc, and for you masochists out there who are worried that there’ll be too little doom-and-gloom apocalyptic raving on this set, fear not – included as a bonus feature is a never-before-released 60-minute Estus Pirkle sermon! Buyer beware, though, you may be in for a scare, as it turns out that the discs in this set are formatted in a way which, through extensive testing, I have discovered makes them practically impossible to play on a USB Blu-Ray disc drive (which, conveniently, is the method I and many other reviewers use to watch screener discs for the purposes of these write-ups). Beata Indicator, please answer my prayer and fix this formatting issue for future releases!
From Hollywood to Heaven: The Lost and Saved Films of the Ormond Family is out now on Indicator Series Blu-Ray
