Heaven and hell on earth: the films of the Ormond family

• From Hollywood to Heaven: The Lost and Saved Films of the Ormond Family is available to buy from Powerhouse Films/Indicator

At a certain point in my slog through this vast box-set of films by B-movie evangelists the Ormond family, I started to think it was in fact I who was being punished. The flames of eternal damnation are licking the godless homosexuals, hippies and communists who cohabit the raging infernos of these deranged Southern Baptist spectaculars, and they were surely headed for me too, a lowly reviewer of physical media tasked with wading through a frankly awe-inspiring array of insanity.

The unusual story of the Nashville filmmaking family behind this eclectic body of work is the real lure of this Indicator box-set. And ‘eclectic’ is putting it mildly. The Ormond Organization – consisting of Ron and June Ormond, and later their son Tim – began churning out low-budget westerns in the 1950s after promoting live appearances by well-known cowboy film stars, but soon wandered into wilder realms. Hicksploitation, stripper-horror mash-ups, swamp-dwelling creature features, country music movies, and sword-and-sandal micro-epics: they tried anything, as long as it had a gimmick that might turn a buck. UFOs, mesmerism, hucksters, grim reapers, go-go dancers: the family were like magnets dredging up the murk of American weirdness.

In his excellent new biography of the Ormonds, The Exotic Ones, published to coincide with the box-set, Jimmy McDonough presents their story as a “secret history of American entertainment” and you soon see why. Enmeshed in the cut-throat world of showbusiness for most of their lives, the Ormonds worked in vaudeville, magic and the circus before they started making films for the drive-in crowd.

But a near-death experience when their private plane crashed on the way to a film premiere prompted them to see the light and turn their hand to religious education films – or straight-up Christian propaganda, depending on where you’re standing. That some of their resolutely underfunded independent films, made without studio assistance or indeed much in the way of technical expertise, actually made money is one of the many miracles on display here.

The height of their religious period is marked by a spectacular trio of films made with the unusually charmless Baptist preacher Estus W. Pirkle. Recently restored by Nicolas Winding Refn – psychotronic cinema’s answer to Martin Scorsese – these films were shown on byNWR, the Danish director’s irregular streaming service, and form part of his valiant project to fund restorations of relics from the neglected backwaters of American cinema.

The commie-bashing diatribe If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (1971) has Pirkle on excellent, mouth-foaming form as he rages against the Red Threat invading America. Sin, Pirkle fears, is bringing down the country, and he must spread his message far and wide; film becomes the vehicle for publicising the lessons of his sermons. Merging rather limp religious instruction, presented by Pirkle direct-to-camera in the manner of a late-night infomercial, with surreal tableaux using a cast of local nonprofessionals drawn from Pirkle’s own congregation, these films come perilously close to being underground masterpieces.

The other two films in the trio, The Burning Hell (1974) and The Believer’s Heaven (1977), both personal favourites, prove that nine times out of ten, hell will look like the better option. In the former, a jester-faced demon and a wayward Christian fight the flames of damnation in netherworld sequences that more closely resemble early hours at your local S&M club, or the underground films of Kenneth Anger and Jack Smith – not sure what Pirkle would make of either comparison – than they do your average Bible school educational film. With their DIY, spit-and-polish approach to making the best of what’s around them, these fire-and-brimstone visions manage to create moments of genuine transcendence, where the tackiness of the face paint and the bedsheet costumes fades away, transporting us somewhere else entirely and as surely as any big-budget studio production.

Much of the rich storehouse of pleasure in cheapo exploitation cinema, at least as far as I’m concerned, comes from that tawdry, make-shift allure of dreamworlds shaped from practically nothing: a fantasia of Hollywood glamour on a dime. The Exotic Ones (1968), another highlight of the box-set, has this in spades. A perplexing, colour-saturated amalgam of the striptease-heavy variety revue, a King Kong-influenced creature feature, a sleazy crime drama and a Louisiana travelogue, the film has a narrative held together as flimsily as some of those burlesque costumes. Little of it actually works, but you can still expect some great dialogue (“She’s class. With a capital K”), luridly coloured sets and a plucky performance with flaming nipple tassels by superstar burlesque dancer Georgette Dante.

The box-set brings together 13 of the Ormonds’ features alongside a host of additional material, including documentaries by Tim Ormond, a rare Pirkle sermon and fascinating audio commentaries: you could get lost (or saved) in the extras alone. A great deal of painstaking work has gone into their restoration and cataloguing; the original camera elements for many of the films were lost in a flood in Tim’s house in 2010 and have been pieced back together using the best master materials possible. As a result, the quality is sometimes poor (though I’d be hard-pressed to say it impinged on my appreciation of the thunderously awful Untamed Mistress, 1956).

McDonough’s biography is the real star of this twin release, though. Centred on interviews with the formidable June, whose commentary on her career and marital relationship can be painfully poignant, McDonough captures the true spirit of the films and their idiosyncratic creators. And even he admits most of the films aren’t very good. Make no bones about it, there is a lot here that is bad: bad as in lazy, xenophobic and with almost no redeeming features beyond an amusing gorilla suit or nifty special effects sequence. But here we are, in a golden age of film restoration, and I for one am grateful for the love and attention given to what once was left behind. Just please, God, don’t make me watch these films again.