This lurid and captivating film about a family besieged by demons after attempting to contact their deceased loved one via an occultist could only have been produced from the singular vision of the Ormonds. To us at Boys' Bible Study, writer/director Ron Ormond, his wife June and their son Tim are the "first family" of Christian movies. Some of the Ormonds' most famous films, such as IF FOOTMEN TIRE YOU, WHAT WILL HORSES DO? (1971) and THE BURNING HELL (1974) are still considered Christian genre classics decades later, known for their gripping exploitation-style treatment of Christian messaging that likely emerged from the family's shared background in vaudeville performance. This same showbiz charisma could also explain why the Ormonds' films were financially successful, widely distributed through church tours that were sometimes accompanied by a live presentation by Tim Ormond saving the souls in the audience who had just been moved by a shocking film experience. THE GRIM REAPER is plenty shocking; the Ormonds are skilled at DIY costuming and special effects to depict the supernatural horror of the world of demons, making Satan come to life for viewers to effectively demonstrate why tampering in the occult could doom their souls forever. Celebrity guest preachers Jerry Falwell (!) and Jack Van Impe (!!) also stop by the Ormonds' set to deliver sermons addressed directly to the camera, hammering down the central theme of THE GRIM REAPER: hell, Satan, and his demons are very real. If you don't believe in demons, you may as well not be a Christian.

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Merry Christmas in July! We love Christmas movies for their tedious pleas for a return to small town values despite clearly being written by effete big city media types. CHRISTMAS WITH A CAPITAL C is one of the most glaring examples of this we've ever encountered, which makes it extremely charming. Dan Reed (Ted McGinley) is the affable mayor of a small Alaskan town with the seemingly perfect life, until his former high school rival Mitch Bright (Daniel Baldwin, who sounds almost exactly like his brother Alec) returns to Alaska after making it big in the city with a plan to dethrone Dan as mayor and finally separate church and state by removing the Nativity display from city hall. It's pretty obvious that this is a stupid idea and our hero Dan is going to prevail, which he quickly does, humiliating Mitch by revealing that his "rich and successful" act is a total lie. What's more interesting here is how CHRISTMAS WITH A CAPITAL C reveals that many adults are perpetually stuck repeating their high school humiliations, living their lives according to whether they were designated a "winner" or a "loser" at age 15. Also, the film is notable for a show stealing performance by Christian stand up comedian and film producer Brad Stine, who wrote the song that inspired the story of this film and who doesn't let a scene of his go by without completely chewing up the scenery. Don't believe in CHRISTMAS WITH A CAPITAL C? Get on the mic at your local city council meeting and let them have it.

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This DIY surf thriller about the son of a military spy superstar is way more than meets the eye, revealing its intense Christian and poly-spiritual themes in an audacious 45 minute long opening monologue. SURFER: TEEN CONFRONTS FEAR is the first feature film by writer and director Douglas Burke, a physics professor at USC with a lifelong passion for surfing and theater. Burke seems interested in the ways the physical and metaphysical intertwine; most of the dialogue of SURFER attempts to explain the unseen cosmic forces that guide our observable physical reality. In the film, a young surfer played by Mr. Burke's real life son Sage experiences a near death experience while surfing that causes him to abandon the sport. He is visited by the reanimated spirit of his dead father, played by Douglas Burke himself, who warns Sage that the new physical body which has been crafted for him by God using "squid and electricity" will only survive for a short enough time to reignite Sage's passion for surfing. This scene between Douglas and Sage is truly astounding — it lasts for 45 minutes (nearly half of the film's total runtime) and constantly escalates in emotion. After this transformative exchange, Sage finds a top secret military hospital, where a doctor called Banks (Gerald James) has information that could change the way Sage understands his world forever. We at Boys' Bible Study were lucky enough to catch the Los Angeles premiere of SURFER back in 2018 before we ever had a podcast. We're excited to share this bizarre and wonderful film with our listeners while also diving deep within its fascinating spiritual worldview. It's your whale, boy!

Visit the SURFER: TEEN CONFRONTS FEAR official website

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Billing itself as a light-hearted Christian family film, MOMS' NIGHT OUT is accidentally a chilling indictment of millennial parenting. Allyson is a busy full-time stay-at-home mom with aspirations to run a famous mommy blog. Feeling unfulfilled in her role as a mother, she decides to decompress with a night on the town accompanied by her two best friends Sondra and Izzy. Despite the full support each mom gets from her family for a well-deserved break, the act of the moms leaving their respective houses triggers a series of chaotic and traumatic events that are supposed to be funny but are actually extremely stressful. Every character is a terrible communicator, and you get the sense that moms having fun disrupts some kind of ancient social order to the point of severe consequences for everyone involved. Directed by the Erwin brothers (I STILL BELIEVE), MOMS' NIGHT OUT is a competently-produced and commercially successful film, drawing appeal from its relatively star-studded cast including Sarah Drew (GREY'S ANATOMY) Sean Astin (LORD OF THE RINGS), Patricia Heaton (EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND) and country singer Trace Adkins. Even more important to us at Boys' Bible Study are featured performances by Christian film scene veterans Andrea Logan and also Alex Kendrick, one of the famous Kendrick Brothers, who have created and starred in some of the highest grossing Christian movies of all time. We were excited to watch MOMS' NIGHT OUT for Mothers' Day, but forgot, so we watched it for "Mothers' Day In July" and ended up being horrified by the film's grating millennial humor and depiction of each character as simultaneously whiny and helpless yet obsessively self-important. Bible Boy Julian calls the depcition of family in MOMS' NIGHT OUT "scarier than THE HANDMAID'S TALE" and we think our gentle listeners will agree.

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The ominously named Wallbuilders organization, founded by David Barton, have a mission to "[help] Americans remember and preserve the true history of our great nation." That's great I guess, but what exactly is it that they… do? One of their main cultural outputs seems to be a documentary series affirming the Christian history of the United States, so we at Boys' Bible Study couldn't think of a more fun and enlightening way to celebrate Fourth of July than spending two hours absorbing THE SPIRITUAL HERITAGE OF THE UNITED STATES CAPITOL. Basically, someone let David Barton in the Capitol Building in Washington D.C., and he spent his night there filming a guided tour of the art and artifacts within the space, showing how each piece proves that the mission of the Founding Fathers was explicitly Christian. We learned a ton about the Christian habits and exploits of the greatest guys of all time, and we see fun art objects such as a painting of the baptism of Pocahontas, and a cool statue of an astronaut (not Christian.) Curiously, David Barton and the Wallbuilders never say in the documentary what the conclusion is that they draw from poring over all of this evidence. It seems like they want to say that the idea of a separation between church and state should be abolished, but they don't ever actually say that — instead, they just kind of drone on about how it's sad that public schools don't teach that John Quincy Adams read the Bible once per year. Despite there being some genuinely interesting facts dispensed, and they filmed fun historical reenactments of guys in powdered wigs talking about stuff, we can't help but conclude that if the Founding Fathers thought Christianity should be the explicit law of the United States, they would have written it in the damn Constitution. No one was stopping them. Next!

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We continue our study of the great Kenya Cagle's filmography with this psychological thriller about the most dysfunctional family to ever live… and die. Stacy's family is haunted by tragic violence, from the disappearance of her mother to the imprisonment of her brother Leroy in a mental institution after he killed their father. Stacy now hides with her grandma "Momma" in a remote cabin in Long Island, but their plans to lay low are thwarted one dark and stormy night when Leroy shockingly turns up at their door, having escaped the institution. Leroy fixes himself a sandwich in an excruciatingly long scene as Stacy and Momma plan their escape. Guns are drawn, tires are slashed, and a helpful policemen is stabbed as the grandma/daughter duo attempt to reason with Leroy, who they're worried could kill them in a confused rage. But is Leroy really the danger here? Food related memories, from Leroy's bologna sandwich to Stacy and Leroy's favorite gumbo as a child, could unlock the secret to twisted family history. This "Caglevision" film is barely a Christian movie, but it's worth a watch to experience yet another one of Cagle's overwrought family dramas where a mother figure is painted as the ultimate evil. Kenya Cagle is a truly inventive storyteller who directs compelling performances out of amateur actors, and even though he has a tendency to "lose the plot" and focus on story details we as viewers really don't care about at all, it's always impressive and entertaining to see what he can accomplish on a shoestring budget.

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To celebrate Father Dads' day, we watched another film by the genius Kenya Cagle, the auteur behind the extremely watchable faith-based films THE BOY WHO SAW CHRIST and MY KING. We've noticed that all of Mr. Cagle's films have in common that they are not afraid to show edgy adult themes in the context of presenting a faith-based message. FATHER DAD is no exception — it's the first Christian film we can ever remember watching with an extensive rape scene. In the film, Madge has remarried a kindly man her kids call "Father Dad" after healing from her previous relationship with the evil Lucius, who until recently has been in prison for attempted murder. Lucius is out now and will do anything in his power to destroy Madge's new life to get his kids back. Lucius's evil schemes reveal dark truths about the prison system, mainly that many inmates are having gay sex with each other behind bars and becoming infected with HIV, endangering the women they pursue once they are free men. It's a thrilling tale about sex, lies, and intrigue that never lets up its breakneck pace for the entire 2 hour runtime, a very rare quality in Christian films, so we can't recommend FATHER DAD enough. Show it to your father who stepped up on this special Sunday.

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Happy NBA Finals! Helmut Brink is a little German boy who wants nothing more than to play the brand new sport called "basketball". I know what you're thinking. Didn't we just fight a World War against the Germans? Why would we let them enjoy our (second) national pastime? But Helmut is a special little boy — he and his sister Brigitte were adopted as war refugees by a kindly Reverend of a little farming town in Washington, USA. They do their chores and say the Pledge of Allegiance like any other American schoolchildren, so they are allowed to have a little basketball as a treat. That's the philosophy of school teacher Martin Conlon (played by Peter Coyote) in THE BASKET, a feature film for families released theatrically in the year 2000. Martin sees the men of his town struggling to pool their finances together to buy a new harvester machine, so he hatches the crazy scheme of putting together an amateur basketball team to compete for a tournament's cash prize, having been trained in the exotic art by none other than basketball inventor James Naismith himself. Christians seem to love movie plots about people playing old timey sports — we're reminded of SPIRIT OF THE GAME, a more recent Kevin Sorbo-fronted film about an early basketball tournament set in Australia. But THE BASKET goes beyond sportsmanship to weave a surprisingly complex plot with themes of war and immigration, set around the story of a fictitious opera DER KORB that was actually originally written and composed for this film. It's still hard to imagine a film like this would ever have broad enough popular appeal to be released in theaters — it's slow, goofy, pastoral, and much of the dialogue is delivered in a fake German accent. It speaks to a bygone pop cultural era where Christian stories were accepted in secular contexts because people appreciated their overt wholesomeness. Although THE BASKET may not be the most exciting sports film, it does feature one of the most shocking endings to a basketball game ever imagined. We can only hope James Naismith is smiling down at this film from heaven — in between teaching Jesus how to land the perfect free throw.

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Since the beginning of recorded history, it has never been possible for people with opposing viewpoints to agree on anything — until now. Los Angeles-based media company Jubilee Media describes their extremely popular MIDDLE GROUND YouTube series as a "social experiment" bringing together individuals with opposing identities or viewpoints for some civilized discussion (for a change.) Some of these matchups that were viewed millions of times include "Flat Earthers vs. Scientists", "Men's Rights vs. Feminism", and "Millionaires vs. Minimum Wage Workers". These are all juicy concepts, but this week Ash and Julian choose to review MIDDLE GROUND's format by discussing their episode "Progressive Christians vs. Conservative Christians", where Biblical literalists and deconstructionists smack down over discussion topics like abortion, LGBT rights, Black Lives Matter, and more. We notice that MIDDLE GROUND's flawed format is actually a great way for both sides to reveal their own classic biases and fallacies. Conservative Christians tend to claim their favorite Bible passages are literally true while blatantly ignoring others; meanwhile, progressive Christians love to just make stuff up that sounds nice and claim Jesus would support it. We spin our wheels about this for a while before moving on to a debate between Polyamorists vs. Monogamists, for no reason other than to gawk at its participants. We conclude that Jubilee Media, like Dhar Mann (another popular YouTube media production company who we have studied in multiple Boys' Bible Study episodes), thrives on creating emotionally exploitative content that disguises itself as wholesome and balanced. No matter who wins on MIDDLE GROUND, we lose!

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God wants you to be kidnapped! Or at the very least, Christians are particularly equipped to endure a kidnapping because their faith in God keeps them patient and strong. This is the experience of Ruth Peterman, an ordinary Minnesotan woman whose life was turned upside down when she was kidnapped by two incompetent thugs who used her as bait to try to procure money from her husband, who works at a bank. We can't find a lot of information on Ruth and her alleged kidnapping, nor can we find much of any info about the production of the film HELD FOR RANSOM, which is loosely based on her story. Her character has been renamed Eunice for some reason. Eunice is abducted from her own driveway in broad daylight and held for days by two criminals she names "Bill" and "Jerry", who are continually stunned by her calmness and strength while being kept prisoner in a farmhouse in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She engages her kidnappers in lively conversation, attempts to convert them to Christ, and listens to hymns on the radio, while her faithful husband works with the FBI to ensure her safe return. Most of the dialogue in the film appears to be improvised for some reason, lending a weird gonzo tone to an eerily calm crime film set in the ultra-polite northern midwest region of the USA. There is a 20 minute section of the film that seems to be barely connected shots of cars driving around Minneapolis at night. It would be an otherwise straightforward crime film with an inspirational message, but bizarre production choices such as these and a luridly saturated color correction that make HELD FOR RANSOM a strange artifact of faith-based filmmaking. The message of the film is that faithful Christians need do no more than sit back, relax, and pray through the toughest moments in their life. Apparently Ruth's faith was so inspiring it caused her real life kidnappers to write to her from prison, begging for her forgiveness; you'll be begging Ruth for forgiveness too if you don't add HELD FOR RANSOM to your watchlist!

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