| Two Thousand Maniacs! | |
|---|---|
Promotional poster for 2000 Maniacs |
|
| Directed by | Herschell Gordon Lewis |
| Produced by | David F. Friedman |
| Written by | Herschell Gordon Lewis |
| Starring | William Kerwin Connie Mason Jeffrey Allen |
| Music by | Larry Wellington |
| Cinematography | Herschell Gordon Lewis |
| Editing by | Robert Sinise |
| Distributed by | Box Office Spectaculars |
| Release date(s) | March 20, 1964 |
| Running time | 87 min. |
| Country | USA |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $65,000 (estimated) |
Two Thousand Maniacs! is a low budget 1964 splatter film directed and written by Herschell Gordon Lewis. It is the second part of what the director's fans have dubbed "The Blood Trilogy", including Blood Feast (1963) and Color Me Blood Red (1965). The film has since become known as a classic of the drive-in theater era.
The film is known for its scenes of full color gore and torture, as well as for B-movie type direction and acting. The film and its director attracted a following, largely due to the over-the-top quality of the violence and the villains. The film starred 1963 Playboy Playmate Connie Mason. It was remade in 2005 as 2001 Maniacs, starring Robert Englund.
The film's title song was written and sung by director Lewis. The movie would later inspire the name of the band 10,000 Maniacs.
In the restrospective of Lewis' films, A Taste of Blood: The Films of Herschell Gordon Lewis, by Christopher Wayne Curry, the author notes the particular fondness the director had for Two Thousand Maniacs!: "The prop plaque, bearing "Pleasant Valley's Epitaph", hung for years in Lewis' Chicago home in remembrance of one of his finest film achievements. Released in 1964, Two Thousand Maniacs "was one of my favorites," [1]
Contents |
The story of the film is inspired by the 1947 Lerner and Loewe musical Brigadoon.[2] Six Yankee tourists are lured into the small southern town of Pleasant Valley by the redneck citizens to be the guests of honor for the centennial celebration of the day Union troops destroyed the town. The tourists are separated and forced to participate in various sick games which lead to their gory deaths. The methods employed by the festive townspeople include:
After discovering the nefarious plans of the townspeople, the two remaining tourists manage to escape; they then return with a local sheriff, only to discover that the town has disappeared. The film ends with two of the townspeople looking forward to the next centennial in 2065, when Pleasant Valley will rise again to resume its vendetta against the Yankees.
Two Thousand Maniacs! was filmed in 15 days, early in 1964, in the town of St. Cloud, Florida. According to a contemporary report, the entire town participated in the film.[3]
Two Thousand Maniacs! introduced drive-in theater audiences to the formulaic plot-line of southern gore films: northern outsiders who are stranded in the rural South are horrifically murdered by virulent, backwoods southerners [4] This subgenre of Grindhouse peaked with the release of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) ten years after 2000! Maniacs.
During the Civil Rights Movement, television and mainstream narrative films opted for a less realistic depiction of redneck than the televised news of the era. Films that tried to comment on the issue of race relations were commercial failures [5] . However, Herschell Gordon Lewis’ plotline in Two Thousand Maniacs! focuses on the ghost of a violent, vengeful Confederacy, and is aware of the region’s violent history and place in the anxiety of the rest of the United States [6] Although the film was released in 1964, in the midst of the Civil Rights movement, issues of race relations and segregation are never interrogated in the film. Despite the lack of African American characters, the racial element of the violent South does not lurk far beneath the surface. By returning to celebrate the centennial destruction of Pleasant Valley by Union troops, the redneck ghouls take part in ritualistic acts of revenge that is indicative of the South obstinate refusal of desegregation and Civil Rights in the 1960s. The film dictates the anxieties the rest of the nation held towards the South’s, and its white inhabitants, history of extra-legal violence, perceived primitivism, and unresolved regional conflict [7]. The 2005 remake, 2001 Maniacs, explores some of these same themes. While the original film’s “Yankees" were strictly white, the remake focuses on the race relations, Gender equality, and Sexuality and gender identity-based cultures of the outsiders as they are slaughtered and turned into barbecue by the residents of Pleasant Valley. This suggests that while the original parodied the images of the virulent, rural Southerner, or redneck, the remake posits the nation’s anxieties towards the reactionary backlashes against race and sexuality in the new millenium on, and working through, motifs of Southern redneck.
The film is also an ironic commentary on the myth of Southern hospitality, and how it elides some of the ethical dimensions and historical atrocities imbedded in its discourse. In his essay entitled "Remapping Southern Hospitality", Anthony Szczesiul explains the film’s use of Southern hospitality and other Southern stereotypes: “The film’s ironic parody of southern hospitality highlights the performative nature of the discourse. When Mayor Buckman delivers his promise of southern hospitality in his thick, cartoonish accent, the reference is immediately recognizable to all – the characters in the film, its actors and director, its original audience, and by us today – but here the possibility of southern hospitality is transformed into a cruel joke: the visitor becomes victim [8]. ” Throughout the film, the "Yankee" victims are simultaneously celebrated as “guests of honor” while being tortured. Together, with the theme song The South’s Gonna Rise Again and other twists on Southern tropes, like the cannibalistic communal barbecue of the northern outsiders, the film alludes that region’s historical conflict and intractability towards modernization are still unresolved.
|
|||||