Holy Smoke
A tough deprogrammer is sent to rescue a young woman from a charismatic guru in India, only to find himself outmatched by her intelligence and conviction.
“He had only one thing on his mind... but so did she!”
Synopsis
While on a journey of discovery in exotic India, young Ruth Barron becomes influenced by a charismatic religious guru. Concerned, her parents hire PJ Waters, a macho cult deprogrammer, to confront Ruth at a remote desert hideaway. However, PJ soon discovers that Ruth, who is sexy, intelligent, and determined, proves to be a formidable challenge.
Credits
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How many hands made this film
The scale of the collaboration
Principal cast & crew: 19
These are the principals we have on file — the full crew ran to the hundreds. Every film this size was made by far more hands than any credits list ever names.
Why a floor?
This is a minimum, not a total. We only count the credits we’ve captured so far, and coverage is uneven — a blockbuster might show a few hundred names while another of the same size shows a couple dozen. The real crews all ran into the thousands. The number here only grows as full credits are enriched — so we frame it as a floor, never a headcount.
Craft leads on file
Edited by Veronika JenetShot by Dion BeebeScored by Angelo BadalamentiDesigned by Janet Patterson
Box Office
1999 · Box office
📉 Underperformed — grossed 0.1× its budget
Why 2.5×?
Cinemas keep roughly half of every ticket sold, and a wide release’s marketing often costs about as much again as the film — so a movie needs to gross around 2.5× its production budget just to break even theatrically. It’s a rule of thumb, not the studio’s ledger (home video and streaming come later).
Worldwide gross
$1.8M
Opening weekend: $33K — 2% of its US run. It had legs — it kept earning long after opening weekend.
Peak 2 theaters
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Cast & Crew
19 unique people credited
Top billed cast
Directors
1Writers
2Producers
1Other crew
6Parents Guide
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