If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (1971)

Is this an exploitation movie? Is it a Christian propaganda movie? Or, friends, is it a peak into a horrifying future to come???....

If Footmen Tire you, What Will Horses Do? shows what will happen when the Communists take over the United States (on horseback) and start killing all of the Christians. Hideous tortures ensue, people are gunned down in the streets, children are confronted with the fact that their Jesus has not brought them candy, Russian troops break into people's homes to violate their wives, one boy is even decapitated for refusing to step on a picture of Jesus... and all of this is supposed to happen because of American cultural decadence. Rev. Estus W. Pirkle informs the audience throughout the film that this is what we're going to get within the next 24 months for watching cartoons and dancing ("the front door to adultery!") Given the fact that the Russians did not invade in 1973, and I'm pretty sure there was no 'cartoons & dancing boycott', the US must have just been too crappy to invade, thanks to all the cartoons and dancing. Maybe the Russian horses drowned during the attempted invasion. Pirkle and Ron Ormond made The Burning Hell in 1974, and they never explained why the US didn't end up in the soup. Did anyone ask for their money back?

The film was directed by Ron Ormond, a vaudeville magician turned director of Westerns, then turned director of exploitation films like Untamed Mistress and Mesa of Lost Women, then writer of books on the mysteries of the Orient; then, he was in a plane crash (possibly two plane crashes), was born again, made religious films (including this one), and finally televised roller derby. In other words, he was a genius of a man.

Ormond used all of his exploitation tricks in If Horses Tire You, What will Footmen do? and The Burning Hell- they're Christian splatter movies really. The high body count works well with Pirkle's fire and brimstone preaching, which inspires more with the stick than the carrot. We're all going to die, most of us will go to hell, the Communists will kill us all, and so forth. Sure, Pirkle; because of the dancing. All gonna die. Got it. If you have any religious background, you'll feel pretty guilty for laughing at these movies. But laugh you will, friends! Will you laugh when you're in Hell???....