Two Thousand Maniacs

After taking a detour two carloads of Yankees find themselves in Pleasant Valley amidst some 100th anniversary celebrations amongst the Confederate flag waving townsfolk.

What the dumb Yankees don't realise, however, is that they are there not so much as guests of honour but as sacrifical victims for the Johnny Rebs, who wish to avenge themselves for the destruction wrought by some renegade Union soldiers 100 years before…

Though boasting marginally better production values and direction than its immediate predecessor, Blood Feast, the second part of the so-called Blood Trilogy produced by David Friedman and directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis is again a fundamentally awful film by conventional standards of good cinema, its primary raison d'etre a willingness to push the boundaries of graphic gore.

There are four sequences of note, each signalling the demise of one Yankee dog:

A woman has her thumb sliced off, then her arm. Later, it is put on the barbecue.
A man has his limbs tied to four horses which are then sent off in different directions.
A man is rolled down the hill in a barrel lined with nails; there are actually some decent POV shots from inside the rolling barrel here.
A woman is tied beneath a precariously balanced boulder as the locals throw baseballs at the target mechanism to make it fall.

Well, maybe that isn't quite true: the bluegrass style theme tune, with lyrics by Lewis is quite catchy – in part admittedly down to its repeated use – in the manner of an O Brother, Where Art Thou? number.

Perhaps the strangest thing about Two Thousand Maniacs is how it must have played to above and below the Mason-Dixon line. Ever-knowing how to exploit their material. Lewis and Friedman look to have delivered a film that could appeal to the baser instincts of both groups, presenting and perpetuating Northern stereotypes of a backwards South while also letting those same stereotypes extract a vicarious revenge on their old enemies.

Presented on Region 2 DVD by Something Weird, Two Thousand Maniacs looks reasonably good, with vibrant colours – predominantly red, of course – but is less satisfactory in the audio department, with the sound often somewhat muffled and crackly. Still, this is probaby how it always was, so one can't really complain.

The extras package comprises eight minutes of silent outtakes; a hyperbolic trailer and a pointless 45 second bondage piece that has nothing to do with the rest of the contents as far as I can see – all things that you might watch once, but no more.

Disappointingly, the commentary track with Lewis and Friedman featured on the US Something Weird DVD is absent.