2,000 Maniacs (1964)

After 1963’s gore spectacular Blood Feast, one approached 2000 Maniacs with more than a little trepidation, fearing another blood-drenched catalogue of atrocities. The first twenty minutes are therefore spent in a state of nervous anticipation, rather like waiting for the inevitable explosion of a Jack-in-the-Box.

Blood Feast wasted no time whatsoever getting down to business. Within minutes, eyes were being gouged out, limbs hacked off and entrails enthusiastically displayed. This time, however, director H.G. Lewis leaves his audience squirming with anticipation, delaying the mayhem far longer than expected.

The film opens with a pair of mischievous Southern bumpkins dragging a detour sign onto a lonely country road, diverting unsuspecting motorists bearing Northern licence plates. Three carloads of travellers duly fall into the trap and stumble upon the sleepy little town of Pleasant Valley, where preparations are underway for the town’s centennial celebrations. Their arrival is greeted with extraordinary enthusiasm as they are welcomed as the honoured guests of the festivities.

Flattered by the hospitality, the bewildered visitors decide to postpone their journey and join the celebrations. For nearly half an hour very little happens and, just as one begins to suspect Lewis has mellowed after only his second excursion into gore, all hell breaks loose.

One of the more flirtatious girls slips away with a local country boy for a romantic interlude. After a kiss or two, her suitor calmly produces a knife and begins carving her up for the entertainment of the delighted townsfolk. First a finger is sliced open, then chopped clean off, before an axe removes her entire arm to the jubilant approval of the celebrating hillbillies. Lewis had merely lulled his audience into a false sense of security before delivering one of the most outrageous splatter scenes yet committed to film.

The deaths become increasingly grotesque. One unfortunate is tied to four horses and torn limb from limb in a gleeful recreation of medieval execution. Another is forced into a barrel lined with enormous spikes before being rolled down a rocky hillside, the results proving every bit as unpleasant as one might imagine. Yet another victim is simply crushed beneath an enormous boulder with satisfying finality.

Eventually two survivors escape the clutches of the murderous townsfolk and stagger into the local sheriff’s office to recount their incredible story. The sheriff listens in baffled disbelief before explaining that Pleasant Valley ceased to exist many decades earlier, having been annihilated during the Civil War. Like the ghostly galleon in Armando de Ossorio’s Horror of the Zombies, the town now materialises only occasionally, its vengeful inhabitants returning from beyond the grave to exact revenge upon unsuspecting Northerners who stray onto their haunted patch of countryside.

After the astonishing ineptitude of Blood Feast, this almost resembles a coherent motion picture. The characters are marginally more developed, the pacing more assured and Lewis even hints at a tongue-in-cheek Civil War allegory buried beneath the gallons of fake blood. That’s not to say it’s remotely good—it most certainly isn’t—but compared with Blood Feast, it looks positively Oscar-worthy, which says rather more about the earlier film than this one.

Surprisingly, 2000 Maniacs is an entertaining slice of drive-in excess. The gore effects are gleefully outrageous and must have delighted Lewis’s rapidly growing cult audience. Connie Mason, the Playboy Playmate who also appeared in Blood Feast, remains painfully wooden, although she does improve—if only by comparison with one of the least convincing performances ever committed to celluloid. The remainder of the cast ranges from merely awkward to gloriously embarrassing.

The true horror, however, isn’t the dismemberments, the barrels of spikes or the enthusiastic hillbillies. It’s H.G. Lewis’s own collection of country songs, which assault the ears throughout the film with almost sadistic determination. The relentlessly repeated title song alone is enough to make one long for another session inside the spike barrel.