Two Thousand Maniacs!

''Two Thousand Maniacs!'' is a 1964 American horror film written and directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis and starring 1963 ''Playboy'' Playmate Connie Mason. It follows a group of Northern tourists who are savagely tortured and murdered during a Confederate celebration of a small Southern community's centennial.

The film has been noted by critics as an early example of hicksploitation in grindhouse films, as well as for its sensationalizing of national perceptions between the North and South. The film was remade in 2005 as '' 2001 Maniacs''. The story of the film was inspired by the 1947 Lerner and Loewe musical ''Brigadoon''.

Plot

In 1965, outside the rural Georgia town of Pleasant Valley, two local rednecks named Rufus and Lester use detour signs to lure six motorists from Northern states - Terry Adams, Tom White, and married couples John and Bea Miller and David and Beverly Wells - into town. On the main street, they are greeted by a bluegrass trio and crowds of townsfolk cheering and waving Confederate army flags. They meet Rufus, Lester, town mayor Earl Buckman, local shop owner Harper and his girlfriend, Betsy, who coerce them into staying for the weekend to be the "guests of honor" for their centennial celebration. The six are hesitant to stay, especially Tom, who had been on his way to a convention in Atlanta before his car broke down and he was picked up by Terry. The mayor is reluctant to give details about the centennial, but he offers to put them up in complimentary hotel rooms and promises them free food and entertainment throughout the celebration, and the visitors eventually give in.

That afternoon, John receives a phone call in his hotel room from Betsy, who offers to show him around town. Bea is leery of John when he tells her that Mayor Buckman was calling to see him, since they are both prone to extramarital affairs. After John leaves, Bea gets a call from Harper, who invites her to take a walk with him. She accepts the invitation and he leads her into the woods nearby, where he shows her his pocket knife and uses it to slice off her right thumb. Harper then takes an hysterical Bea to the mayor's office where she is accosted by Rufus, Lester, and Mayor Buckman. As the other three hold her down on a desk, Rufus chops off her right arm with an axe while they laugh maniacally.

Meanwhile, Tom meets with Terry to discuss the strange goings on in town. He tries to make a long distance call to the convention from Terry's room, but the hotel's phone operator tells him that the outside lines are down. He then tries to use a payphone outside and leaves a message for one of his colleagues, not realizing that the person on the other end of the line is Mayor Buckman.

At a barbecue that evening, Bea's arm is slowly roasted to ashes on a spit. Although the guests are unaware of what is being cooked, Terry has her suspicions. Mayor Buckman also grows suspicious when Tom is nowhere to be found, so he takes Rufus and Lester to search for him. When they leave, Tom sneaks back to the gathering and quietly draws Terry away to a plaque he found in the woods. It marks the spot where, at the end of the Civil War in 1865, a group of renegade Union soldiers laid waste to the town of Pleasant Valley. The plaque goes on to state that it stands in memoriam to the townspeople killed in the attack and as a "testament to the vengeance pledged in their memory." They realize that this "centennial" is really an act of revenge for the destruction of the town one hundred years ago, and that they are the intended victims. Mayor Buckman, Rufus, and Lester spot the two from a distance and run after them, but Terry and Tom make it back to town and shake the pursuit in an alley.

Back at the festivities, Betsy gets John drunk on moonshine while David and Beverly watch from across the barbecue pit. After Harper escorts the couple back to the hotel, the townspeople surround John and make him participate in the "horse race." Too inebriated to resist, John has his arms and legs each roped to four horses that are sent running in different directions, dismembering him. The crowd goes silent and looks on in apparent regret, until Lester has the bluegrass band strike up a rousing chorus of ''Dixie.''

The next morning, the Wells' are awakened by the band playing outside their window. They begin to suspect that they are being separated from the others and David tries to call John, but is told by the operator that he has already gone out with Bea. Meanwhile, in the mayor's office, Buckman learns from Rufus and Lester that Tom returned to his room after he and Terry escaped the night before. The mayor tells them to keep an eye on Tom and make sure that he stays in his room for the time being. Outside the hotel, the Wells' are greeted by Harper and Betsy, who tell them that the Miller's have gone on a "boat ride." Elsewhere, two local teenagers take Bea and John's remains on a boat and dispose of them in a lake.

Betsy takes David to a gathering on a hill near the lake for first event of the day, the "barrel roll." Rufus and another man force David into a barrel, and Mayor Buckman embeds it with nails and rolls it down the hill, killing David. Rufus exclaims that this is the best centennial anyone ever had, and David's body is also dumped in the lake.

At the hotel, Tom tries to leave his room but is met by a man sitting outside his door. He climbs out the window and gets into Terry's room. She calls the guard outside Tom's door into her room and Tom knocks him out. They sneak out of a back door, but Harper sees them and gives chase. They run through a nearby swamp, where Harper get stuck in a pool of quicksand and sinks.

Lester brings Beverly to the town square to be the judge for the next event, "Ol' Teeterin' Rock." Another cheering crowd is gathered around a wooden platform raised in the middle of the square, over which a large boulder is precariously balanced on a smaller platform tied to a dunk tank target. Beverly grows increasingly upset as it dawns on her what will happen, and Lester explains that Beverly must judge when the boulder will fall. She is tied down to the platform and the crowd take turns throwing rocks at the target, and Mayor Buckman tells Beverly to say "it ain't fallin' yet" every time the townsfolk miss. Lester finally takes a softball and hits the target, causing the boulder to topple and crush Beverly while the crowd silently nods in approval.

Meanwhile, Tom and Terry return to town to locate Terry's car. With the help of a little boy named Billy, they find the car in a garage. As Mayor Buckman and a horde of townsmen approach, they take Billy hostage and speed away. They are chased by a truck, but Terry and Tom make it to the main road, where they release Billy and escape. They drive to the nearest police station and tell the chief their bizarre tale, but the sheriff is skeptical.

Returning to town, Rufus and Lester lament the fact that they only managed to kill four of the six Yankees, but Mayor Buckman deems the centennial a success anyway. He orders his people to take down the centennial banner and declares the celebration over.

Tom and Terry return to Pleasant Valley with the police chief, only to find that the town has vanished. The chief continues to doubt their story about the murderous townspeople, and Terry begins to question her sanity. The chief then recalls a local legend: a hundred years ago, as the Civil War was drawing to an end, a group of rogue Union troops raided a small town called Pleasant Valley, massacring the entire population and burning the town to the ground. It was said that the spirits of those killed in the attack still haunted the woods and clearing where the town once stood, waiting for the day when they could exact their revenge. They drive away, and as Terry and Tom reach the state line, Terry still wonders whether it was all just a nightmare, until Tom finds a small noose left in the backseat by Billy.

The film ends with the ghosts of Rufus and Lester sitting by the roadside, reminiscing about their centennial and looking forward to the next one in 2065. They call out to Harper, who emerges from the quicksand pit, and the three head for the woods and disappear into a gathering mist.

Cast

* Connie Mason as Terry Adams
* Shelby Livingston as Bea Miller
* William Kerwin as Tom White (credited as "Thomas Wood")
* Jeffrey Allen as Mayor Buckman
* Gary Bakeman as Rufus Tate
* Ben Moore as Lester MacDonald
* Jerome Eden as John Miller
* Stanley Dyrector as Harper Alexander (credited as "Mark Douglas")
* Linda Cochran as Betsy
* Michael Korb as David Wells
* Yvonne Gilbert as Beverly Wells
* Vincent Santo as Billy

Production

''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.

The film was the feature film debut of a nonprofessional Illinois stage actor named Taalkeus Blank (1910-1991; nicknamed "Talky" his entire life) who played Pleasant Valley Mayor Buckman. He used the pseudonym "Jeffery Allen" in all of his film appearances because he was never a member of the Screen Actors Guild. Director Lewis was so impressed by Blank's ability to perfectly mimic any type of Southern accent that he hired Blank to appear in many of his later films, among them ''Moonshine Mountain'' (1964), ''This Stuff'll Kill Ya!'' (1971) and ''Year of the Yahoo!'' (1972), playing various Southern-accented characters under the Jeffrey Allen pseudonym.

The film's budget was considerably larger than what the filmmakers had previously had to work with, and afforded the film a more polished production.

Release

''Two Thousand Maniacs!'' was heavily cut by the MPAA before its release, which resulted in the film being scantily screened across the country. The film mostly played at drive-in theaters, especially in the Southern United States, where it did considerably well. Among its earliest releases was on October 1, 1964 in Denver, Colorado.

Critical reception

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, ''Two Thousand Maniacs!'' holds an approval rating of 41%, based on 22 reviews, and an average rating of 4.33/10. Its consensus reads, "It didn't take much to thrill early splatter fans, and ''Two Thousand Maniacs!'' proves it with its shrill soundtrack, basement-level theatrics, and goofy flesh-tearing gore."

Allmovie wrote, "drive-in gore king Herschell Gordon Lewis reached a creative peak with this darkly comic slaughterfest". In a retrospective, Marjorie Baumgarten of the ''Austin Chronicle'' called the film "remarkably durable" and referred to it as "one of the sickest movies ever made."

Critical analysis

''Two Thousand Maniacs!'' was one of the early films to introduce audiences to the formulaic plot of Southern gore films: Northern outsiders who are stranded in the rural South are horrifically murdered by virulent, backwoods Southerners. This subgenre of grindhouse peaked with the release of Tobe Hooper's ''The Texas Chain Saw Massacre'' (1974), and ''Two Thousand Maniacs!'' has been credited as being influential on Hooper's film.

During the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, television and mainstream narrative films used the "rednecks" caricature rather than a realistic depiction of white Southerners like the televised news of the era. However, Lewis' plotline in ''Two Thousand Maniacs!'' focused on the ghosts of a violent, vengeful Confederacy, and acknowledged the region's violent history and place in the anxiety of the rest of the United States. The film has been noted by scholars as sensationalizing historical anxieties that the rest of the nation held toward the South's history (and that of its white inhabitants) of extra-legal violence, perceived primitivism, and unresolved regional conflict.

In his essay "Remapping Southern Hospitality", Anthony Szczesiul explained 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.

Legacy

"An all-time great because of all the sadism", enthused Cramps singer and horror aficionado Lux Interior. "The people who act in the movie actually live in the town where it was filmed—they look very inbred. There's a wonderful scene where they take this sexy girl and drop this 2,000lb. rock on her from 20 feet, and the whole town's out there watching. Old ladies all looking, like, 'What are ''we'' doing here?'"

In popular culture

The 1980s alternative rock band 10,000 Maniacs took their name in homage to the film as a way of making them stand out from other bands on the college rock scene.
The John Waters film ''Multiple Maniacs'' is named in homage to the film, as well.

See also

* List of American films of 1964
*List of ghost films

References

Notes

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External links

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{{Herschell Gordon Lewis

1964 horror films
1964 films
American Civil War films
American films about revenge
Films directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis
Films set in Florida
Films shot in Florida
Films set in 1965
American ghost films
Southern Gothic films
American splatter films
American exploitation films
1960s exploitation films
1960s English-language films
1960s American films