THE BELIEVER'S HEAVEN

d. Ron Ormond (1977)

I'm a tolerant person. I don't mind what other people do as long as it enhances their lives and doesn't fuck others over. I've never had a religion, and never missed the absence, but I am fascinated with the mechanics of belief and, particularly, the mechanism by which it is delivered. 

The Believers Heaven is pure propaganda, overseen by the director, Ron Ormond, a fringe film maker and writer who turned to God after surviving a plane crash, and Estus W. Pirkle, a fire and brimstone preacher with steel hair, stone eyes, an unwavering voice, an immobile face, and rigid ideals. Pirkle has two modes: angry and furious. He reserves his greatest ire for us, the viewer, staring at us down the camera, confronting and challenging us, baiting us about how we’re never going to get into his heaven with the sort of shitty attitudes he knows we possess.  

Pirkle talks without interruption and without discernible respiration. He is clearly learned in the sense of having read The Bible enough times to recite large chunks of it, but this does not wisdom make. In fact, it’s genuinely hard to get any sense of what he's actually saying, apart from a list of the various precious stones and other minerals that Heaven’s walls are apparently made of. 

Pirkle’s monologue is intercut with interviews with other ‘experts’, all cut from the same sack cloth, and all with the strange habit of darting out their tongue to lick their bottom lips like some sort of pontificating toad, presumably a trick of the preacher trade. These talking heads are further supplemented by DIY historical pageant recreations featuring tea towel head scarfs and a multitude of stick on beards. The acting is abysmal but then the material they have to work with is terrible – The Bible may hold all the answers, but it’s scant on detail and very poor on dialogue.

To bring it up to date, the film uses news footage of a recent earthquake in 'Central America' spliced with fake re-enactments of the disaster that are both in poor taste and very badly done. To give an example, there is a seemingly interminable shot of a burial trench filled with blacked / browned up corpses, one of which winces when another body is dropped onto her legs.

The overall message of this mad melange is that the afterlife is only available to the saved and, as Jesus could be back at any minute and the Rapture takes no prisoners, you’d better be saved or get saved right now. It's not enough to live a blameless life spent helping others, by the way, and it’s not enough to just believe, no matter how fervently, and to quietly worship in your own way – you must be saved, presumably by Estus W. Pirkle, and you have to tell everyone or it doesn’t count. 

The consequences of not doing so are laid out in merciless detail: you will join the liars, cheaters, criminals, Jews and Buddhists (!) in Hell, a place which resembles a burning landfill site populated by people with sad, dirty faces wandering around moaning about how utterly miserable and wrong they are and how they should have listened while they were still alive. Oh, and this goes on forever.

The film is fun for a while in a stiff, arch, totally ridiculous way, but the oxen cart wheels finally come off when it introduces a 32 inch tall woman who is lifted onto a table and sings with almost unbearable sincerity about how she will be whole in the afterlife and won’t need a wheelchair anymore, and three badly burned teenagers, looking utterly broken, who sing half-heartedly while clutching a hymn book in their melted, fingerless hands. Unsurprisingly, this breaks the campy spell immediately and permanently and only serves to underline what a terrible confidence trick it all is.

A THIEF IN THE NIGHT

d. Donald W. Thompson (1972)

There's no time to change your mind / 

                        The Son has come and you've been left behind...

I’m not a religious person (far too cynical), but I am fascinated by the odd and occasionally disturbing things people of faith so fervently believe in. A classic example  is The Rapture, which is the subject of A Thief In The Night, the first of four Evangelical films made in the 70s and 80s that examine this phenomena in unprecedented detail.

As you may know (and if you read this), The Rapture is the moment when true believers (dead and living) will be raised into the heavens to join Jesus Christ. This is usually interpreted as an instantaneous event, i.e. one moment they will be there, the next they will be gone, forever. In typical style, true believers are those are only those who have accepted Jesus Christ as their personal saviour, and nobody else, no matter how much they believe in God or how nice they are will be accepted. It's the Christian church,  the selection criteria is not kindness, but compliance. This miracle will, of course, cause widespread social unrest, and will lead to the formation of a fascistic world government who will brand the remaining population with 666. Jesus will then come back to save the day, but it will mean the end of the world. There, now you know as much as I do.

This film, which is carefully and professionally presented, has lots of great moments: a fairground conversion to religion; a cobra snake attack; the realisation that loved ones have vanished; sinister broadcasts from the head of the emergency world government, The Imperium; a look at the stuffy bureaucracy of fascism; a helicopter chase, and a dream within a dream framework that almost manages to avoid cliché. Astonishingly, it is claimed that this film has been seen by 300 million people across the world – and it’s really, really weird. Result!

My favourite part of the film is its opening, in which an amateur band of teenagers sing Larry Norman’s song about The Rapture, I Wish We’d All Been Ready (later covered by Cliff Richard). It’s very earnest and intense, occasionally off key and sets the scene perfectly for the madness to come.