One of my favorite things about Ron Ormond’s movies is that he brings back old western stars — often to my surprise — and gives them work long after Hollywood stopped hiring them. The congregation in this movie is led by Reverend E.F. Bolton, who is played by Tex Ritter, a singing cowboy who was the father of John Ritter and the Oscar-winning writer of “The Ballad of High Noon” from High Noon.

Bolton’s ministry is about to be tested, because a convict named Earl “Snake” Richards — played by Earl “Snake” Richards — is looking for some stolen cash in town before being taken in by the preacher’s son Tim (Tim Ormond, always a welcome sight) and falling for his daughter Nadine* (Rachel Romen, Maggie from Run, Angel, Run!). Also, his wife Rita is played by Rita Fey, who also is in Ormond’s The Burning Hell.

Country DJ and one-time The Nashville Network staple Ralph Emery shows up as a hit man, as Snake is being watched by the mob. He has a vision that he’s going to die surrounded by money and, well, he gets what he wants. If you’re wondering, who is that Vic Naro who plays the crime boss, well it’s Ron Ormond.

For a movie that promises, “A girl wilder than a peach orchard hog!” this is all pretty innocent. But it’s also crazy, because it somehow goes from preaching to country music to crime, sometimes all in the same moment.

*Nadine has some serious daddy issues, lusting after older men by literally screaming, “When you see snow on the mountaintop, there’s always fire in the furnace!”

This would be the last secular movie that Ron Ormond would ever make and what a movie to end that era of his career on. He also plays the mob boss Nemo, the man who rules the strip clubs of New Orleans — this movie is also known as The Monster and the Stripper — and decides to book a creature three men found in the marshes known only as Swamp Thing to be menacing next to his array of beehived go-go girls who are absolutely astounding in their inventiveness, twirling flaring tassels off their pasties.

The movie plays like a sketch comedy show, except that the Swamp Thing — played by Ormond’s next-door neighbor, a hulking rockabilly singer with the marvelous name of Sleepy LaBeef — is absolutely horrific, biting the necks off chickens to drink their blood and bearing men to death with their own arms. He’s like a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie character inserted into this wanna-be Russ Meyer film made by a Southern family who would soon almost die ina plane crash — and then Roger would have to nearly die again — and then find God and make movies with none of this sin.

This movie has something for everyone. You want a creature feature? It has that. How about some mob drama? Yes. And how about something for daddy? This movie is filled with dancing of the most prurient kind. The Swamp Thing falls for the new girl who is too shy to strip nude — someone needs to make a Letterboxd list of strippers in movies who never get unclothed — and when she’s attacked by the queen of the club, well, you’ve seen every monster movie ever made. Human beings are gonna pay.

This is the kind of movie that describes Bourbon Street as “sleepy by day, psychedelic by night,” which is pretty much the best thing ever written in a film. The world needs more movies that have 60s exotic dancing mixed with surprising torrents of gore.

Right before Ron Ormond’s road to Damascus moment, he was making movies like this, which feel like a mondo crossed with a sex ed movie and yet have all of the best things of both genres.

Using his real name Vittorio Di Naro, Ormond directed this film (and wrote it, too). It starts with Vicky (Vicki Caron, her only role; she’s a buxom redhead who seems like someone I would have pined over in my twenties. Who am I lying, if I were single, I’d be putting her through trade school) being assaulted as a teen.

Before we can reflect on what has happened, the movie goes into mondo territory and begins showing us the history of hypnotism, which is really an excuses to show us primitive cultures who still do things like rolling in glass and walking across fire. Yes, this film will have the theme of hypnosis in it, but there’s no reason for this footage and by that, I mean that I love that this footage is in this film.

Then, without any warning, we go from a drawing of a man with a one hundred pound plus tumor in his scrotum to watch an actual open heart surgery procedure. Some horror films use Val Lewton’s blueprint for suspense. Ron Ormond just lures you in with the promise that this is a sex movie and then punches you in the stomach with some of the sickest surgical footage possible.

Now, the movie can really begin.

Vicky is supposedly a real person and this story really happened, which is also the kind of thing that I demand in nearly everything I watch. She has some hang-ups because of the aforementioned assault which lead to her never allowing her new husband to touch her. Or maybe it’s because her mother (Ruth Blair, who unfortunately only did this movie) wants her daughter to keep on being her wingwoman.

This all leads Vicky to a therapist named Bill, who is played by Lash La Rue of all people. Yes, the very same cowboy actor who starred in eleven films from 1948 to 1951 in which he dressed all in black and used a bullwhip to stop bad guys. In 1952, Lash’s comic book adventures sold nearly 12 million copies, but a decade later and we have our hero appearing as a kindly doctor instead of a man in black battling bad guys.

La Rue is the perfect person for the Ron Ormond orbit, as he became born again and did church ministry after being a movie star. He also disappeared for most of the 70s, as he took the role of teh villain in the movie Hard on the Trail without realizing that it was an adult movie. To repent, he was a missionary for ten years before showing up in movies like The Dark Power and Alien Outlaw.

Lash appears on the back cover of the Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings album “Heroes.”

In order to determine exactly why Vickie won’t let her husband near her, he brings in real-life hypnotist Ormond McGill to figure out the answers.  At some point in the 50s, Ormond had spent  in Asia with McGill in Asia researching and writing the book Religious Mysteries of the Orient/Into the Strange Unknown. They also wrote The Master Method of Hypnosis, The Art of Meditation and The Magical Pendulum of the Orient together; one wonders whether Ron gave it all up once he found God. McGill was such a mentor to Ron that he took his stage name from the man.

Despite the title, this film really does care about its subjects and how Vickie is damaged because of how she feels for her husband but can’t bring herself to care for him sexually. It’s a surprisingly deep topic for when this movie was made (shot in 1959, released in 1963).

There are also musical numbers by the Mulcay Brothers.

This movie plays like a mixtape for the mentally disturbed. I loved every single moment of it.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Man, in 39 Stripes, Tim Ormond nearly makes a roundtrip, going from the young kid protecting a convict in Girl from Tobacco Road to playing a criminal himself, portraying Ed Martin, former chain gang convict who converted to Christianity in prison in 1944 and formed the HopeAglow Prison Ministries.

A life of petty crime led Ed into prison, a place where they whip you 39 times — there’s an old Jewish tradition that if you get hit 40 times, you die — when you screw up. But a letter from Ed’s sister’s friend Alfreda Enders saves Ed’s soul.

This is sadly the last film that Ron Ormond would make. He directed the film and co-wrote it with Tim. It isn’t berserk like his early work and is very settled down versus the excesses of movies like The Believer’s Heaven. But man, I love Tim as an actor. He’s like a bad Jerry Mathers, sounding like the Beav while speaking about how heavy Christ’s cross was as the music gets way too loud over him.

The poster for this is great, but I think Ron was getting tired. But when you succeeded in making movies that non-stop blow minds, from your time making quasi-mondo movies about hypnotism to films where swamp monsters, the mob and strippers all live in the same swamp, you get a last movie pass.

Then again, Tim pretty much makes this movie. The film sets him up to be a major preacher and when he gets the mic, he kind of warbles his way through it. But again, the Ormond family has so much good will in my life that I would make dinner for them and give them a room in my house and they wouldn’t even have to ask.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Ron Ormond’s journey — from Southern deep-fried drive-in fare to religious grindhouse filmmaker — is the kind of thing that obsesses me. Usually working with Rev. Estus Pirkle, his films reach a level of ecstatic mania that I could only dream of discovering in a snake church revival, yet can do it in the comfort of my basement.

There’s a line we can follow from Ormond’s Mesa of Lost Women to these films, because at its heart, exploitation is exploitation. It’s getting you to not just want to watch something but need to watch it. Just look at the poster for this, which uses the same language and cues as a horror film, which is what this really is.

Verne (Cecil Scaife, who was in nearly all of Ormond’s religious movies, plus Girl from Tobacco Road; as well as producing and starring in The Hollywood Beach Murders) and Ruby Pierce (Viola Warden, who was also in The Burning Hell) have a son named Frankie (Eddie King, who was in The Burning Hell after a career in small Hollywood roles; he also worked with Ron’s son Tim to start the first video firm that was allowed to videotape legal depositions for showing at trials in Tennessee courtrooms) who is a wild man, racing cars and says, “Religion? Not fos this dude.”

When Frankie dies in a car crash, he goes straight to hell and the Pierce’s pastor refuses to preach at his funeral. So while Ruby clings to God, her husband goes into the occult to try and save his son from the left hand path, working with Dr. Kumran to speak directly to the dead. Yet this is putting him on the same way to the flames of the abyss, so his other son Tim (Tim Ormond, who I love in everything he appears in) tries to save his father.

Finally, the family gets to hear the words of Jerry Falwell and heed the altar call. But it’s too late for Frankie, who we see as a ghost and watch burn in hell, surrounded by masks that Ben Cooper would shun.

Best of all, the film uses church parishioners to recreate Acts 16:16-40 and 1 Samuel 28 with wigs and basic makeup instead of the special effects that were possible in 1976. Then, we see Moses in the desert before going back to hell again, which is populated by witches and even Dracula. Let me be as clear as possible: this movie is the kind of thing that I devour like a cool lemonade on a balmy day.

At one point, this comic book poster was up on church walls and people gathered to watch this movie in basements and rec halls. We’ll never have a time like that again, when movies like this were sermons, unless you come to my house, where beer will be our communion.

You can watch this on YouTube.

The basics of this movie: Fire-and-brimstone preacher Estus W. Pirkle gives a sermon to his followers, explaining what Heaven looks like.

Yeah, that’s kind of what it’s about, but that’s like me saying Edwige Fenech is a girl. The Believer’s Heaven is the kind of insane cinema that secular filmmakers could only dream of conceiving.

Pirkle made three movies — If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? and The Burning Hell are the first two parts of the trilogy — and all three of them have stuck in my mind way longer than any blockbuster I will see this year. Or any other year.

To get his gospel into the world, he relied on a former sinner. Ron Ormond started his entertainment career as stage magician Rahn Ormond, married a vaudeville dancer named June Carr, wrote books about psychic surgery and then made a string of movies that are just as odd as these movies, including Please Don’t Touch Me, Girl from Tobacco Road and the astoundingly unhinged The Exotic Ones, which is also known as The Monster and the Stripper. It took multiple near death experiences for Ron to find the Lord, but once he did, he started making the same kind of grab you by the balls cinema that he did for weirdos like you and me, but now he was doing it to save our souls.

This film isn’t filled with the brutality of the first two films but is just as odd and that’s a blessing. From views of a decidely science fiction heaven to moments where Pirkle’s congregation and Ormond’s family act out psychodrama to an ending where those not whole on Earth — like three children with leprosy — are brought Tod Browning style center screen to sing.

“Don’t you get so tired and worn out sometimes? The work hours are so long and the night’s rest is so short, the labor is so strenuous that you don’t feel like you can take it much longer. Or perhaps sickness and suffering have so weakened your body that you even long to die. Have you not wrestled with sin and temptation so long that you welcomed relief? Thank God that there is a place where the Saints of God shall rest from their labors.” So says this film, but man, when you have Pirkle basically berate you for an hour, do you worry that maybe you might spend eternity with him? Man, I hope so. That would be my Heaven, getting to make a fourth movie with Ormond and the reverend.

I’m beaten down by life some days, but when nothing else would do, this movie lifted me.

You can watch this on byNWR.

Based on “The Rival Dummy” by Ben Hecht, The Great Gaboo was released as an “all-dialog singing, dancing and dramatic spectacle” with huge musical numbers that stand in stark contrast to the plot and often stop the film’s pace cold. There was even a scene shot in color, “The Ga Ga Bird”, which is missing from nearly all prints of the movie today. The musical sequences are so big — “Web of Love” was used for years in other films and dance sequences was re-used with different music in 1932’s The Girl from Calgary — that you may forget that this is kind of a horror movie.

Predating Dead of Night, The Twilight Zone episodes “The Dummy” and “Caesar and Me,” Magic, Devil Doll and even The Simpsons episode “Krusty Gets Kancelled,”  this is the tale of an artist — ventriloquist Gabbo (Erich von Stroheim, who in addition to being an actor — known as “the man you love to hate” — was also one of the first auteur directors, beloved by Surrealists and a man banned from Hollywood — he was unwilling to compromise his art for commercial cinema, while also being obsessed with the finest of details and more than willing to spend as much money as possible on his films despite scenes that were too shocking to ever be shown; yeah this is a run-on sentence but he’s a personal hero) — who only speaks through his dummy Otto*.

Gabbo is amazing — he can make Otto talk and sing while he smokes, drinks and eats, which wows audiences — but he’s a complete maniac who can only relate to the outside world through the dummy. His girlfriend and assistant Mary (Betty Compson) leaves him after years of suffering through his tics and complete hatred of the world.

Two years pass and Gabbo has become a star while Mary has moved on to a relationship with a dancer. The Gabbo she meets now is a complete man, one who relates to her with thought and romance. He confesses that without her, he realized his failings and worked to improve himself. She tells him that she is now married and they cannot be together, saying goodbye to Otto and not him. His life ruined, he explodes, punching the doll in the face before holding it, taking Otto to the stage where he ruins the show and loses his career.

Director James Cruze acted in, directed and or produced over 100 films in the silent era. Not much is known about his life before Hollywood as he told a different story to every interviewer. However, he sadly never was able to make the move from silents to talkies and after moving to work in Poverty Row studios like Republic, he killed himself in 1942.

I can’t imagine how audiences reacted to this. It really is a horror film, with a deranged protagonist who can’t relate to humanity that wants to desperately retain the two people who keep him sane — a woman in love with another man and his partner who is not even real. And then the music numbers! I love this movie for every odd thing it throws at me.

Newly restored by the Library of Congress — public domain versions have been out for years in much worse quality — The Great Gaboo is now available on blu ray from Kino Lorber.

*Otto was hand-carved by Frank Marshall, the same artist who made Edgar Bergen’s dummies.