Preacherman is the magnum opus of Albert T. Viola, a
fella who went down to North Carolina to write and direct the movie, as well as
star in it under the name Amos Huxley, which also happens to be the name of his
character in the film too. Ol’ Amos is a
phoney circuit preacher who is out to fill his pockets with the money of other
men, and fill his bed with the wives and daughters of other men, all the while
pretending to preach the word of the lord.
When we first meet Ol’ Amos, he already in the process of doing somebody
wrong, by making out with the Sheriff’s daughter in a hayloft. For that bit of loving Amos gets run out of
town and beaten up by the no good Sheriff Zero Bull, and his dim witted deputy
Leon. Amos is down but not out, and
lands back on his feet when he is picked up at the side of the road by Judd
Crabtree, a simple farmer, who lives with his daughter Mary Lou, a little hussy
whose nympho tendencies make her an awfully popular gal with the local
boys. She’s the type of fallen angel
that Amos Huxley is only too happy to take under his amorous wings. Masquerading as ‘The Angel Leroy’, Amos gets
to have his wicked way with Mary Lou on a nightly basis, while sending her
father out to stand in a field yelling ‘Leroy...Leroy...Leroy’ all night. Pretty
soon, Amos has the entire community wrapped around his little finger, and
running moonshine for him, under the pretext of raising money to build a
church.
Albert T. Viola in Preacherman is a perfect example of
what Bill Landis talks about in the Sleazoid Express book, when he points out
that exploitation films can often surprise you with performances by ‘relatively
unknown but brilliant actors’. Viola is
a force of nature in this film, an extremely confident, born performer. You can well believe Viola could have
successfully pulled off this phoney preacher routine in real life, possibly
travelling around the South both swindling and seducing was a fantasy of his,
but when push came to shove he chickened out, and went for the safer option of
playing it out in a movie instead.
Another important character in the creation of the film was W. Henry
Smith, who also plays the one-armed Brother Henry in the film. Smith had met Albert T. Viola in New York,
where Viola had been involved in stage plays and directing skin flicks. Between them they cooked up the ambitious idea
to create a film industry in North Carolina, and formed the Preacherman Corporation,
with an idea of making movies that would play to the good ol’ boy sensibilities
of the Southern Drive-In circuit. The
cast of Preacherman did include a few out of towners, including Brooklyn born Ilene
Kristen, who plays Mary Lou and is the big success of Preacherman in terms of having
had a lengthy acting career. There’s
some confusion over whether Viola himself was from Brooklyn or San
Antonio. In early publicity for the film
it was announced that a New York actor called Patrick McDermott, who’d played
the junkie boyfriend in ‘Joe’, had been cast in Preacherman. Evidentially, that didn’t work out as McDermott
isn’t in the film, and stayed in NYC to appear in an obscure, little known film
called The French Connection (saying that, he didn’t do much else). For the
most part however what you are seeing are local stage actors, technicians and
musicians, the financing was also kept local, with the moneymen for the film mostly
being people who owned movie theatres and drive-ins. An aspect to the production that generated
allot of good publicity in the North Carolina press, and snowballed into
goodwill for the Preacherman Corporation to succeed. In true regional filmmaking fashion,
Preacherman was mainly shot at a pig farm in Monroe, the Grover C. Baucom
farm...should you ever want to go on a Preacherman themed pilgrimage. It was made in sixteen days, and reportedly didn’t
come without its fair share of off-screen drama. It’s said to have rained continually for nine
days of the shoot, necessitating that several scenes be moved indoors. There was also an incident when a car full of
drunken guys showed up on set and demanded to play roles in the film. As they had guns and weren’t going to take
‘no’ for an answer, the quick thinking Viola pretended to turn the camera on
them for several minutes, which apparently pacified them. The rain and the hassle all turned out to be
worth it however, as Preacherman was a phenomenon at the Southern
Drive-Ins. I’ve seen the budget for the
film quoted at around 50 to 200 thousand, and it’s said to have made around 7
million in its first year of release.
Preacherman played the Drive-Ins with a re-issue of Cottonpickin’
Chickenpickers (1967), a wacky comedy starring country music stars. It also headlined a double-bill with ‘The
Body Shop’ (1973) another North Carolina production, written and directed by
J.G. ‘Pat’ Patterson, who was also the production manager on Preacherman, the
world of low-budget North Carolina filmmaking being a small one indeed. The Body Shop also featured actor Bill
Simpson, who played Sheriff Zero Bull in Preacherman, as a Sheriff who is
chasing down moonshiners, providing a case for The Body Shop and Preacherman
being part of a shared cinematic universe.
Such was the popularity of Preacherman, that it
created a demand for a family friendly version of the film. As there have been uncut and cut versions of
the film in circulation over the years.
Unfortunately when Preacherman was committed to videotape, it was the
censored version...which removes all of the nudity and the swearing...that was
released on VHS in America by Paragon.
The cut version was also the one released on video in the UK, and it
doesn’t look like the full version made it to tape until the mid-1990s, when
Troma released it on video.
Given the runaway success of Preacherman, its
surprising that the 1973 sequel ‘Preacherman Meets Widderwoman’ didn’t have the
same staying power, and has all but dropped off the face of the earth...because
if you do manage to track down the sequel, it really is just more of the same,
and doesn’t divert from the formula, they even do the ‘Angel Leroy’ routine
again. The only difference between
Preacherman meets Widderwoman and its predecessor is that the sequel is a PG, with
one of the producers making a point of mentioning that it didn’t contain any
nudity, violence or profanity. Which may
have caused some damage at the box-office.
Such is the obscurity of Preacherman meets Widderwoman, that for years
people speculated that the sequel was never made, never released or was simply
a re-titling of the first film. The only
place in the world that Preacherman meets Widderwoman was released on video was
in the UK, by a company called A.T.A. It’s
one of those cases where you do have to wonder just where those UK video
companies were getting hold of these movies.
Preacherman meets Widderwoman only had a limited release in the Southern
states of America, so how did a copy of the film end up in Surrey, which is
where A.T.A were based, and sure is a long way from North Carolina.
Viola jumped ship after Preacherman meets Widderwoman,
but W. Henry Smith kept the dream alive of creating a film industry in North
Carolina for many years. Following on
the two Preacherman films with likeminded Southern Drive-In fare ....Hot Summer
in Barefoot County (1974), Trucker’s Woman (1975), and Redneck Miller (1976). The first Preacherman and Hot Summer in
Barefoot County eventually made it out of the South when Troma picked up the
rights to those two. Preacherman
belatedly showed up on 42nd Street in January 1982, where it played
at the New Amsterdam as the co-feature to Troma’s sex comedy ‘Squeeze
Play’. A Double-bill that Troma simultaneously
rolled out at theatres and drive-ins in the New York area. It also played in Jersey City for a time as
the bottom half of a double-bill with Russ Meyer’s Beneath the Valley of the
Ultravixens.
In the Sleazoid Express book, Bill Landis talked about
how the tropical locations of Blind Rage (1978) worked a treat on an audience
watching it at a chilly grindhouse during a New York winter, and I suspect the
North Carolina locations of Preacherman may have had a similar appeal to a 42nd
street audience. If you’re living
cramped up, New York style, drowning in sleaze, and surrounded by miserable
junkies, homeless people and streetwalkers, then the allure of the simpler
life, wide open spaces and fresh country air of North Carolina must have felt
like a world you’d be happy to get lost in for 90 minutes or so.
Although it is dominated by horndog humour and Southern
stereotypes, there is a real personality and heart to Preacherman. The irony of Amos Huxley is that he does inadvertently
enrich the lives of the people he’d set out to scam. He gives Judd back a purpose in life, the
community prospers by his restarting of the moonshine operation. Despite his best efforts he leads Mary Lou in
the direction of monogamy and true love, and he also deters men from having
unnatural relations with chickens...cottonpickin’ chickenfuckers. Amos Huxley does accidentally do allot of
good, and that combined with Viola’s extremely likeable performances, generally
succeeds in winning over the audience, and has them rooting for Amos to get
away from the law at the end.
In the Sleazoid Express book, Bill did enter a few
pieces of bad information into circulation.
He claimed the film came out of Long Island, and credits it with
featuring a ‘sizzling, slutty cameo’ from Jeramie Rain, who doesn’t show up
until the sequel Preacherman meets Widderwoman, and its more than just a cameo.
She plays the Widderwoman’s daughter, the sequels’ equivalent to Mary Lou. Bill also thought the film features a last
minute appearance from Roxanne Brewer, a famous big bust model, of Russ Meyer
worthy proportions, as the mysterious ‘Lady in Red’ who helps Amos out at the
end. A role that is actually credited to
an actress called Colleen McGee. I can
see where Bill was coming from, there is a resemblance between Brewer and
McGee. What leads me down the path of thinking
that they weren’t one in the same is that Roxy Brewer’s acting career was
entirely played out in LA skinflicks.
Would they have flown her out to North Carolina on two separate occasions,
because the lady in red also appears in Preacherman meets Widderwoman, which
resumes the Amos Huxley story literally seconds after the first film ends. Roxy Brewer was also a famous nude model, and
surely a horny, red blooded production like Preacherman would have capitalised
on this by getting her neekid in these films, whereas the Lady in Red gets to
keep her clothes on in both Preacherman movies.
I suspect the idea of Roxy Brewer being in Preacherman, was just wishful
thinking on Bill’s part.
As tends to be the case with any form of successful
low-budget cinema, be it kung-fu, blaxploitation or slasher movies, the major
studios eventually took notice and cashed in.
There’s a convincing case that the likes of Preacherman and Hot Summer
in Barefoot County laid the railroad for Smokey and the Bandit and The Dukes of
Hazzard. It’s always surprised me that
the success of Preacherman didn’t open doors for Albert T. Viola acting wise,
you could imagine him bringing his Preacherman shtick to The Dukes of Hazzard
or Burt Reynolds movies. Instead he took
a different path, and went into teaching.
By the end of the 1970s Viola was teaching drama at Fort Worth Country
Day School, where rumours have it that he got into hot water for hitting on
female students and may have been quested by the po-lice over allegations that
he was embezzling funds from the school. Saying that, Viola did spend over
twenty years in the independent school network, while you’d think that a
scandal would have curtailed that career... so maybe it was the Angel Leroy who
did all those bad things...and never question the habits of angels, brothers
and sisters. Personally, I would be disappointed
if there wasn’t a little bit of Amos Huxley in Albert T. Viola. The impression you get from Preacherman, was
that he was the guy you could trust for some good time, down-home entertainment,
but perhaps not the guy you’d trust with your womenfolk and life savings. “Spread the word, and spread the liquor”.
