Ron Ormond teamed up with Reverend Estus Pirkle for a follow-up to their WTF Christian Scare film, If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do? In that flick, Pirkle showed us what would happen if the Communists took over America. This time, he’s out to give you a glimpse of what’s waiting for you if you go to Hell.
I don’t think The Burning Hell is quite as entertaining as If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do?, but I can easily say this is the only movie I’ve seen that has a credit in the opening title sequence for “Original Story and Preacher”.
That credit belongs to none other than Estus Pirkle. Not only did Pirkle provide the story and preach, he also stars. Early in the film, he is visited in his home by two traveling salesmen trying to get him to buy a book promoting a new religion. He urges them to stop following their phony baloney religion at the risk of going to Hell. One guy gets in his face and says, “If I do go to Hell, there will be a lot of my friends waiting on me!”
They then take off on motorcycles and the loudmouth runs his bike off the road and is decapitated! His pal (Tim Ormond) tearfully goes to church where Pirkle is preaching and asks him if his friend went to Hell, and without missing a beat, he says, “Chances are, he’s likely burning in the flames of Hell right now!”
What’s great about this scene isn’t the way Pirkle flippantly (and somewhat joyfully) announces to Ormond that his friend is burning in Hell, but the fact that Tim doesn’t go to the police to report the accident… he goes right to church!
Tim basically has the same role as the wayward girl in If Footmen… He just sits there in church and thinks about all the wrong he did as the preacher preaches away. It’s not the best use of his talents to be sure.
The biblical dramatizations are probably the exact same thing you’d picture in your head when you think of a Christian Scare film, namely poor production values, shitty costumes, and even worse fake beards. You know, just like the shit they used to show us in Sunday School.
The Hell sequences are something else though and help redeem those pokey passages. The shots of the bloody, screaming faces of the lost souls running around a flaming black void are rather effective, as are the close-ups of maggots crawling on the faces of the damned. Too bad the preachy scenes and biblical reenactments get in the way of the fun.
Still, this is pretty good for a Christian Scare film. It’s a lot more demented than the typical Sunday School fare, that’s for sure. It just lacks the demented flee of its predecessor.
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