This is a story about a simple man with a simple message and the simple filmmaker who helped him spread it. The simple man was Estus Pirkle, leader of Locust Grove Baptist Church in New Albany, Mississippi. The simple message was an attempt to rouse the patriotism of Americans by proclaiming that most of us are pure evil. The simple filmmaker was Ron Ormond, who got his big break collaborating with Lash La Rue in the 40s and spent the next 30 years working his way to the bottom. These two simpletons made three movies together in the 70s. The first, and most famous, is inscrutably entitled If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? It focuses on the insidious communist menace that is always threatening to crawl up our sacred American buttholes and drag us all to that hot gulag in the ground. To say that Estus demonizes communists and American culture is to make an understatement of Pinteresque proportions. Here are Mr. Pirkle’s thoughts on a number of important
A celebration of crap.