Weird Wednesday: If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?

This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.

Man, I sure do love communism! Now that I’ve gotten myself on a government list, let’s talk about If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?

Footmen is a Baptist propaganda movie about a Communist takeover of the US in the late '60s. It’s normally the kind of thing that sits in a church basement for years before finally dissolving from vinegar syndrome. 

That’s not what happened in this case because this propaganda movie was directed by Ron Ormond, master of exploitation. Like all the greats, from Ed Wood to Roger Corman, he built his legend by taking a tiny production budget further than anyone could imagine. Ormond had been in the proverbial grindhouse throughout the 1950s and 60s, turning out films like Rimfire, The Untamed Mistress, and White Lightnin’ Road to keep American drive-ins humming with content. 

The pictures were cheap and profitable enough for Ormond to stay afloat, and the pursuit of ever cheaper production brought him to Nashville, where he booked film editing facilities at the United Methodist Church. Perhaps this factored into his 1968 come-to-Jesus moment, when a near-fatal plane accident rattled him enough that he decided to use his talents to serve the Lord.

How exactly? By turning in one of the strangest, most gruesome, grindhouse propaganda movies Christendom has ever seen.

Enter Estus W. Pirkle, an old-fashioned fire and brimstone Baptist preacher (and so-so Scrabble hand). He looks about like you might expect: white dude, straw blond hair cemented into place with pomade and Ray-Ban clubmaster glasses that seemed to be standard issue for every poindexter in the 60s.

We open with a narrator asking if what we are about to see is true. Estus insists yes, it could happen here! His sermon is based on accounts from real Communist nations like Russia, China, Cuba, and “Ko-rea.”

The main story is about a hypothetical Communist takeover of America, and specifically the environs of New Albany, Mississippi. Scenes of Pirkle’s sermon are filmed in front of his (very bored-looking) congregation. The framing scenes are interspersed with dramatized takeover scenarios performed by members of his flock.  The production design is underwhelming, it sits somewhere between a school play and a student film. I will give credit where it’s due, namely to the sewing circle that stitched the adorable hammer and sickle armbands onto Sunday suit jackets. 

There are many unintentionally hilarious scenes about this film. Chief among them are those featuring Cecil Scaife, the only real performer in the movie. As he lectured a room full of kids while wearing a cheap uniform and cheaper moustache, the unearned sense of smug satisfaction reminded me of Barth from You Can’t Do That On Television.

Scaife plays the Commissar, the face of the invaders. But don’t turn around, the Commissar’s in town to ride around on horseback, threaten school children, and occasionally round people up in a Ford pickup. I think it might have been Stalin who said he would rather push a Ford than drive a Chevy. 

There’s a recurring scene where citizens collapse lackadaisically in a hail of machine gun sound effects before a jump cut to bodies on the ground splattered with red tempera paint, like a Jackson Pollock painting class that got way out of hand.

A few minutes into the film the viewer is introduced to the point of view character: Judy, played by Judy Creech. A fast-time party girl, she listens to rock’n’roll music and wears her hair down low and her skirt up high. She seems like the most fun at a party, so you know she’ll be converted by the end of the movie. Judy arrives late for the sermon because she’s been out partying with secular boys. 

Pirkle’s so wrapped up in his Tom Clancy fever dream he doesn’t really clock the late arrival. Instead, he continues his horror story of commies riding around on horseback rounding up the innocent. We see the titular horsemen clumsily chase children through a shallow stream. The children fail to convince the viewer that this isn’t an absolute blast. What kid wouldn’t rather be splashing around a stream in the fresh air, filming a movie? They avoided sitting through a boring sermon on uncomfortable pews in a sweltering Mississippi church that day. Good on you, kids.

Child endangerment is an overarching theme. The Communists want to abduct all the kids for brainwashing, and any kids they can’t convert, they kill! This leads to a long sequence with the commissar talking the schoolkids through a typical brainwashing scenario. According to the commissar: Jesus can’t bring children candy no matter how much they pray, whereas Fidel Castro will send them a sackful of candy right now, today.

The middle of the movie pivots into scenarios designed to sell churchgoers on the stark reality of the communist threats. Soldiers poke a little kids' ears out, they bust into a home and demand a night with an average man’s lovely blonde wife. Scenarios that may have played better in Ormond’s earlier exploitation film career, but in service of a sermon they seem extra vulgar by association.

In any event, I would take the threat more seriously if it wasn’t from the imagination of a man named Estus Pirkle.

Footmen sprang from the same font of Cold War movies like John Milius’s Red Dawn, but it lacks the action movie dynamism that Milius achieved. As propaganda, the film offers no lesson for how to fend off a Communist takeover; the peaceful churchgoers listening to sermons under Mississippi shade trees offer no meaningful resistance. Pirkle fails to explain what Jesus would do in this situation, and specifically how He might sabotage a long-range Russian Katyusha Rocket Launcher.

But Pirkle is eager to tell us about what the Communists have in store for the men: more Geneva Convention violations. But then the real torture begins: Bureaucracy. 

Citing nebulous “research,” Pirkle recounts that Communists will come into your home and demand a log of all your activities “from when you were five until your present age.” Speaking for myself, I don’t know what I had for dinner two nights ago unless I took a picture of it, and airport security still has my phone.

That’s also when we are introduced to young Tommy who thinks he’s found an exploit in the Communist system. Tommy can just tell them he’s a godless Communist and he’s free to go! The assistant commissar insists that if Tommy claims he’s not a Christian, then he should have no problem killing his Christian mom on the spot! If he doesn’t do it, he himself will be killed. Check and mate Tommy!

After that, the film cuts back to Judy in the real world. She flashes back to when her mom told her that if she doesn’t give up her un-Christian smoking and drinking and listening to rock records with all her friends, she’ll burn in hellfire. The kind of consequences that last forever. Like this sermon.

When Judy snaps back to reality, Estus doubles down on the paranoia. He’s making the case that since God failed to send Jesus back to help poor suffering Christians in China, Russia, and “Ko-rea” why would He save America? Pirkle’s reasoning is simple: God will protect us from the Communists in exchange for devotion. If we don’t get right with God, then he’ll just skip right over the good ol’ USA and go save Burkina Faso or something. It’s not just a Cold War with the Communists, Pirkle is in a theological arms race! We cannot allow an ecclesiastical gap!

How do we make it up to God? I think we can all guess: stop smoking, drinking, doing hard drugs—no cool drugs either—and no violent television. Instead, start reading more (of the Bible), study more (of the Bible), and come back to church on Sunday morning. 

In Pirkle’s gospel, Christians and godless Communists can’t occupy the same space at the same time. The Communists in his world are right to be concerned about his Baptists as well. It’s difficult to control a population with torture and oppression when you’ve got Estus Pirkle over here threatening hellfire and damnation unless you stop watching television. 

The climax arrives when we learn Judy’s mom has suddenly taken ill for plot reasons. Before you can say “That escalated quickly” she begs Judy to repent from her deathbed. Then Pirkle puts the grim cherry on top of the gruesome cake: a kid gets beheaded. The cheapness of the effect dulls the impact somewhat. Especially the way the dummy head bounces lazily across the lawn. 

The climax really reveals the film’s fatal flaw and the quality that has cemented it as something of a seeing-is-believing cult classic. A self-serious religious propaganda through the lens of exploitation cinema escalates already campy scenarios to a point of self-parody, leaving the narrative in a feedback loop where all it can do is reinforce it’s own exaggerated reality.

But it’s real enough to Judy to shock her into atonement. Pirkle takes her to the altar and she vows to end her wicked ways in front of God and everybody. In a final montage, the women’s chorus plays us out to the credits like a grim Saturday Night Live. Judy is now fully in the fold, and you can tell because her hair is up as the Lord intended.

If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do? is worth at least one serious watch for how it reveals film’s potential for propaganda and exploitation. We usually pay it no mind when movies propagandize causes we already support or exploit our desires, including for merchandise. But watching something tailored for a different place and time hones our ability to recognize a filmmaker’s attempts to manipulate our emotions and opinions.

Ultimately this is the work of one group with an extremist viewpoint with an axe to grind against a different kind of extremism. What’s left in its wake is an infamous B-movie oddity.

If you enjoyed this article, please consider becoming a patron of Hyperreal Film Journal for as low as $3 a month!