A couple of months ago, I posted about the movies of Estus Pirkle. He was the amazingly insane preacher responsible for three movies. One describes hell, one describes heaven and the other describes the imminent communist take over of America unless we all accept Jesus Christ as our personal savior.

This movie is, of course, the 1971 classic If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?

The basic plot involves pastor Estus Pirkle preaching to his flock about the coming communist invasion. He claims that within two years, because of our Godless ways, God will turn His back on us and the communists will take over, killing all of the Christians. I’m not sure why some Christians really want God to be a complete asshole.

He then foretells this invasion. Through the use of flash-forwards, we jump from Pirkle’s little church to the near future where very southern men with bad Russian(?) accents terrorize the God-fearing (and sort of bored looking) believers.

One minute Pirkle is telling us about the Godless ways of television and the violence in cartoons and the next we’re shown a scene where a small child has stakes driven into his ears by a communist soldier who looks kind of like Quentin Tarantino, so that he can no longer hear about Jesus.

Other memorable moments include the mild, but surreal school room scene where the communist leader asks the kids to pray to Jesus for candy, but when Jesus doesn’t deliver the goods, who else can? Our glorious leader Fidel Castro can give us candy! See that here.

And don’t forget about the gunning down of church-goers, the beheading of a child (watch his head bounce across the ground!).

There’s also a scene where a farmer’s children are forced to hold him by a rope, suspended over pitchforks until their little arms give out and they drop him to his death while some creepy guy who looks suspiciously like Drew Carey giggles. Cute!

Remember, this is an exploitation film.

But how do I go about reviewing something like this? The quality of such a film is acceptably bad. It was directed by Ron Ormond after he turned Christian. Prior to seeing the light, he produced such gems as Please Don’t Touch Me and Monster and the Stripper. This movie is bad. The shots are bad, the acting is bad and the writing is bad. Everything about it is bad. But this isn’t something you can really judge on quality.

You can’t really judge it on content either. You know you’re not going to agree with it. Pirkle claims that everything he says is either scriptural or based upon what communists have done to Christians in other countries. It’s fairly doubtful if either are true.

So let’s judge it on entertainment value. That alone makes it all worth while. It is a messed up movie made by a guy who really did believe that the commies were going to take over. I guess that’s something to keep in mind, right? He really did think he was doing us all a favor.

As we all know, the commies didn’t take over come 1973, so a year later the Pirkle/Ormond team made Burning Hell. I hope to see this one next, though it might be a while since I’ve yet to buy it.

Shortly thereafter, Pirkle and Orman went their separate ways. Orman made two more Christian films (Grim Reaper and 39 Stripes – both of which are pretty available at some cult DVD stores online).

There is another film called The Believer’s Heaven, but I’ve not been able to track this down at all. A few clips have surfaced on YouTube, but that’s it.

You can see the full version of If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? here. I strongly suggest you do. You can also visit my other post about this for more clips (the last two on that post are the most fun).

So go ahead and watch it and let me know what you think. Ryan, Smartz and I watched it last week and it was appreciated by all.

All of his films were shown at churches and pretty much no where else. This one was also called Blood with Flow Like Water. A poster for it is here.