The Ugliest Movie Ads

Sleepy LaBeef’s Swamp Thing: The Exotic Ones aka Monster and the Stripper (1968)

The Ormond Clan Spawned Swamp Thing!

Before DC’s Swamp Thing, There Was Sleepy’s Swamp Thing!!!

I can’t go on today as I’d like to about Ron and June Ormond — take my word for it, the Ormonds were amazing. Ron Ormond’s 1950s writings alone — on flying saucers, meditation, Eastern religious belief systems and increasingly bizarre fusions of Christian and Eastern faiths, etc. — should have earned him some status as one of his generation’s most adventurous and prolific eccentrics. But add to that the Ormonds‘ cinematic legacy and you’ve got a bedrock American visionary clan whose antics (and films) outstrip the Ed Wood legend and ouevre (I don’t think I’ve ever used that much-abused term in Myrant; it’s about time!).

The Ormonds produced almost 40 singularly cheapjack outré oddities in three decades, and those that I’ve managed to track down and screen were transcendentally atrocious. These aren’t by any stretch of the imagination ‘good’ films, but they are unique, memorable and unlike any I’ve ever seen. Ron Ormond himself directed over half of them, beginning with King of the Bullwhip (1950) and ending with the Christian fundamentalist cult classic 39 Stripes (1979), dramatizing the life of Ed Martin, the former chain gang convict who found Christ while in prison in the ’40s, founder of the HopeAglow Prison Ministries.

Between those two titles, the Ormonds ground out all manner of impoverished exploitation, from the almost indescribable Mesa of Lost Women (1953, their best-known and most widely-seen curio) and gorilla-bride jungle opus Untamed Mistress (1956) to sexploitation (Please Don’t Touch Me, 1963), hillbilly (Forty Acre Feud, 1965) and moonshiner melodramas (White Lightnin’ Road, 1967), and finally Bible-belt hellfire-and-brimstone roadshowers like If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (1971). 

While driving with my family (first wife Marlene, our 6-month-old daughter Maia Rose, and my parents) across the Florida panhandle in 1984, during my Saga of the Swamp Thing tenure, we followed a capped pickup truck adorned with outrageous hand-painted promotional art for the Ormond Christian horror flick The Burning Hell (1974). “See Souls Burn in Hell!” was emblazoned atop a crude depiction of screaming souls reaching up from a sea of flames. I was driving at the time, and ached to see more; as we made our way around the truck in the passing lane, more lurid depictions of the agonies of hell decorated the side of the wooden pickup bed cap, and the driver was as straight-laced looking as you can imagine. His white shirt looked starched, his hair was slicked back, and he was intent on his driving, never looking over to our vehicle. “Must be driving to his next church showing,” my Dad said, and I’m sure he was.

Had we seen one of the Ormond clan roadshowing their indy Christian epics en route from one southern venue to another? Who can say.

Among the many claims to fame the Ormonds deserve is the fact that they beat Len Wein, Berni Wrightson and DC Comics to the creation of Swamp Thing by at least a couple of years. The self-distributed, self-’X‘-rated (in the newspaper ads that appeared after the emergence of the MPAA ratings) The Exotic Ones starred rockabilly star Thomas LaBeff aka Sleepy LaBeef in his only feature film role as Swamp Thing, a towering bayou bigfoot hauled out of the Louisiana swamps to mainline as a new feature in a backwater stripclub; sort of a Cajun King Kong, if you will.

Needless to say, Sleepy’s Swamp Thing doesn’t sit still for such shenanigans, and bloody mayhem follows (“See the Monster Beat a Man to Death With His Own Arm!”).

Sleepy LaBeef as the first Swamp Thing; The Exotic Ones (1968); image from The Uranium Cafe

Kicking off with a tacky procession of strippers (many of whom were inadvertantly hilarious), The Exotic Ones boasted all the characteristics of the Ormond 1960s films: hideous color, stereotypical characters, stilted performances, nonsensical scripting, etc. But it was shot in part on Bourbon Street in the venerable French Quarter of New Orleans, pre-Katrina, and that makes this a treasure, too. It also featured a great LaBeef monster and is probably the first American bigfoot movie, predating the 1970s flood (not counting the 1950s yeti movies, natch, which weren’t homegrown monsters).

If you want to see it today (recommended!), its video title was The Monster and the Stripper. The Ormonds supervised the release of their core 1960s films to videocassette in the late 1990s under the ‘Midnite Mania Drive-In‘ masthead, and these are well worth seeking out while you still can. I actually met June Ormond at one of the VSDA (Video Software Dealer Association) trade shows when I co-managed First Run Video. It didn’t go well. She was tired, surly and unhappy with the reception they’d received on the trade floor show; in the context of the market, the trade shows were on the decline (as the major studios cut bait and abandoned the VSDA shows, beginning their move to taking over the San Diego Comicon), average retailers weren’t getting much traction out of anything but new release contemporary titles, and DVD was already the new kid on the block, meaning the Ormond titles had three strikes agin ‘em before they were even on the trade show floor. I felt bad for June, but at least I got to meet her and wished her well in the launch. We carried the line at First Run, and I bought a set for myself, natch.

The Exotic Ones also sported one of the most lurid one-sheets of the Ormond legacy, and that’s saying something. It earns its status here in the Ugliest Movie Ad Art lineup for its tacky graphics, akimbo combo of bad line drawings and cut-and-paste gore photos, ‘regurgitative’ ballyhoo and vomitous color scheme. It really is an ugly exploitation poster — what a gem!

Still, most of all, I had to share with you all the fact that the Ormond clan created the — well, OK, a — first ‘Swamp Thing.’

You can take that to the bank.

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