As we enter the spooky season, let’s kick things off with a literal scare flick—and one with a semi-interesting backstory at least. It was directed by Ron Ormond, who until a certain point in time mostly directed cheap exploitation films—with such titles as the Monster and the Stripper, Outlaw Women, Mesa of Lost Women…you get the idea. Then, after a plane crash, he apparently became a born again Evangelical Christian—and so teamed with up with Deep South preacher Estus Pirkle (stop laughing, that was his actual name) to produce…well, pretty much exploitation films except now they’re trying to convert you to this particular brand of christianity. So, let’s see how successful they were with this mouthful of a title, If Footmen Tire You What Will Horsemen Do!
Straight off the bat we have our format established—in that of a literal sermon, with Pirkle talking to his congregation, who all look like they’re fantasizing about hamburgers, are nodding off to sleep, or are wishing they had a joint in their hand, and frankly I sympathize.
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| That lady on the right did us all a solid by encapsulating nearly every reaction to this one. |
Anyhoo, Pirkle is declaring that unless America embraces the word of god (as he sees it), it will have twenty four months before it gets put under the thrall of communism! We all remember that rather rough time in 1973 when the whole US was abruptly put under the Soviet thrall for, er, watching television and dancing to music, don’t we? Pirkle’s concern is that ‘god might move on to some other country’, as I guess his edition of the Bible reads that God only hangs around in one time and place where He can easily get cheap milkshakes.
For a bit, we have a lot of rambling about the moral decay of the US, how schools have gone to pot with sexual education that basically amounts to teaching the karma sutra apparently (boy would most high schoolers wish), and how things were so much better in the old days! Gee, the more things change huh. You certainly don’t get all of this from rambling middle-aged men now don’t we, right?
And oh does he make it clear what the symptoms of this decay are. Like…drive in movie theaters! I mean, how is surround sound supposed to work with those? And…miniskirts shorter than twelve inches! Or…preachers marrying people who have been married before! It goes on like this for ten straight minutes, before he finally gets to the main crux of things—that all of this will enable a communist takeover of the whole of the US in fifteen minutes as all governors are killed at the same time! You see, every politician and member of the military was, I can only presume, too busy dancing the jitterbug and gawking at hippies to notice the millions of Soviet infiltrators taking up position. Oh, if only the drive-ins had been closed and miniskirts thirteen inches, then that would’ve scuppered the bolshevik ploy entirely.
It turns out that despite his complaining of violent content on television, Pirkle is fine with violent content as long as there’s Jesus mentioned somewhere. We get lots of grainy footage of dead bodies sprayed with ketchup, before we have scenes of commissars whose accent keeps jolting between well below the Mason-Dixie line to ‘a very hungover Bela Lugosi’. These involve interrogating children about their love of ‘your Jeeeeesus’ and telling them to pray to Fidel Castro instead, rounding up congregations who apparently thought open air masses was a good idea in a violently atheistic occupation, or hanging little boys. And then there’s a scene of one of our occupiers heavily implied to force himself on a woman, because, you know, once again this kind of content is suddenly okay if Pirkle decides it is.
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| Truly the Red Menace became invincible when it recruited ageing porn stars to lead the onslaught! |
And so it goes on—in a way, you can’t help watching because of how ridiculous and how utterly seriously it takes itself. Nevermind accuracy, one standout moment is where a young man announces his intent to lie to his Soviet captors about his religious beliefs…when said captors are three feet away. I guess Ormond took ‘things only exist if they’re in frame’ literally!
Other highlights include a man being impaled while his Bolshevik laughs like a pothead who discovered a bad Hong Kong dub of The Little Mermaid, or the horrors of Communist indoctrination, which apparently amount to sitting in a field while a voice rather half-heartedly repeats ‘christianity is stupid’—a line that was gleefully used for techno samples years later.
Finally, we get the most gruesome moment of a kid being decapitated, which prompts a young woman in the framing sermon to come forth and be saved of her wicked ways of going on car rides or listening to the Beatles or whatever. And so the film ends off a closeup of Pirkle’s face, asking us if we ‘will come’. Repeatedly. To a whisper. And at that point, if you haven’t started laughing, you will now.
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| Oh my god oh my god he's about to pounce-- |
It’s shoddy and about as effective as an anvil to the face—and, ironically, while the film focuses almost exclusively on lurid Marxist persecution of christianity, the truth is a little more complicated than that. Certainly religion was discouraged in the USSR and its satellites, often violently with some individuals at times, but it wasn’t outright banned as this film goes—rather, it became used as another tool of state, from Stalin on. And indeed, Pirkle seems to see his own faith as something to be used as an imperative to impose his own views and values on his state, as he makes very clear.
But hey. When you just declare yourself righteous by default, all’s fair, right?
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