THE GRIM REAPER (1976) ** ½

 

A preacher (Greg Pirkle, son of Estus Pirkle, star of Ron Ormond’s Christian Scare movies) refuses to give a sermon at a funeral for a man who has not accepted Jesus as his Lord and savior because he believes he went to Hell.  The family puts pressure on him, and he eventually relents.  While he’s preaching, the dead guy’s mother flashes back to all the warning signs that her son was a sinning heathen.  Months pass, and the man’s parents have a feeling their son’s soul is restless.  They then turn to a spiritualist who holds a séance to contact their dead son’s soul.  

The Grim Reaper contains a little bit of everything Ron Ormond was known for.  There’s stock car race footage in the spirit of White Lightnin’ Road, spiritualism like in Please Don’t Touch Me, and of course, that old time religion.  Although Estus Pirkle sat out this time around, his son looks enough like him to get the job done.  Not leaving anything to chance, Ormond called in some heavy hitters such as Jack Van Impe and Jerry Falwell as guest preachers. 

There are a few moments of pure Ormond nuttiness here.  The séance scenes and nightmare sequences run the gamut of simply effective to overly corny to laugh-out-loud funny.  The shots of the devil's face superimposed over the medium work well enough, but the shots of him dragging the guy’s soul back to Hell are good for a chuckle. 

While the set-up is promising, the film flounders in the second act when it begins to heavily rely on biblical reenactments.  At least one of the scenes features June Ormond as a witch whose costume looks like it came off the Halloween sale rack.  With her heavily made-up wrinkles and cliched cackling, her scene is the sole bright spot in the otherwise dreary biblical sequences. 

As with The Burning Hell and The Believer’s Heaven, the film concludes with the usual fiery images of Hell.  They are reasonably effective too.  I'm sure they were enough to scare their intended audience. 

Compared to Ormond’s previous religious films, The Grim Reaper is the most straightforward.  While it is consistently entertaining/weird, it noticeably lacks the highs that made If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do? and The Burning Hell so bonkers.  Still, the séance scenes and Hell sequences are wacky enough for me to give this a marginal recommendation.