If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?
At a glance...
- Directed by Ron Ormond
- Released in 1971
- Runtime 52 minutes
- Watched at home
- Final feelings: I would 100% trade evangelical christianity for communism in this country, easiest deal of my life
I literally picked this movie because of the runtime. I will say, obviously the original intent of this is to be a kind of propaganda/exploitation type deal, which makes it the perfect kind of movie to be really funny in retrospect, but for me personally, it just brings up a lot of the vibes that I got from the pastor at the megachurch that my mom would drag me to growing up. A deep, dark seriousness about the necessity of the word of Christ, while at the same time demonstrating a complete willingness to manipulate and contradict those values to get closer to pretty women. The son of the pastor back home was in my grade in school, and by graduation the church gossip was that he was having to make child support payments to 2 different families. Better get your tithes in!
If there's anything intellectually interesting here, it's mostly just to watch a documented voice-over of exactly what kinds of reactionary thinking were in vogue at the time. Everything in that first 20-ish minutes, where it's really about the signs of impending communism, is completely indistinguishable from the things conservatives/evangelicals say now. We just say Tik Tok instead of TV, dating/hookup apps instead of dancing, "woke" and DEI instead of communism, and, well, the public school thing is literally exactly the same. Another fun exercise for me was to not get too wrapped up in rebutting a lot of these random claims because like, they don't care about the truthfulness of anything they say, which was true then and is true now. I'm sorry but suggesting that before the cultural revolution there were over 500 million Christians in China is the kind of statement that makes me want to hand you a blank map and make you point to me where you think China is. And all of the feared punishments from the communists are very funny to me, since some analog of almost everything they described exists today, usually just not affecting white people.
I guess it really goes to show that the people most obsessed with violent extermination truly are the fundies. This movie was like a refresher for me for that one time in my twenties that I went to the Chinese evangelical megachurch with my mom (she was making it a Problem if I insisted on not going with her). I sat in the english language auditorium and the title of the service was "How to defeat Satan in spiritual combat". After watching this, I'm just sad that preacher hadn't seen this movie, or didn't have a new, updated second edition of this that was about the Chinese government's Tik Tok plan to teach your kids to hate America. I sat through this whole movie and walked out of that guy's sermon after 5 minutes, where I then sat in the women's bathroom and texted a friend while reading and re-reading the totally-not-conversion-therapy poster they had stuck to the stall door. You truly never know what you'll experience in the name of Jesus Christ.