Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964)

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Starring: Hayseeds

More Info: IMDB

Tagline: An Entire Town Bathed In Pulsing Human Blood! Madmen Crazed For Carnage!

Plot: Six people are lured into a small Deep South town for a Centennial celebration where the residents proceed to kill them one by one as revenge for the town's destruction during the Civil War.

My Rating: 6/10

Would I watch it again? Yeah, I think I could


So what is there to like about a low budget movie with bad acting and pacing issues? Plenty...well, sort of. I'd heard about this film since the 80s but never got around to it until recently. Was it worth the wait? Not really but it does have some really cool things going for it despite the stretches of boring bits.

Nice legs, lady.

It opens with a bang with a 4 1/2 minute banjo pickin', hootin' & hollerin' song that kind of sets up the story, while the stereotypical southern yokels get ready for their 100 year "celebration" as they detour tourists with Yankee license plates to their town. The song is fun, infectious and overly repetitive.


Now the performances are pretty fucking bad. It's like Tarantino's acting on a bad day kind of bad. Lots of "yee hah's" and "darn tootin's". Hideous. I realize this is far from high art but jesus it's bad.


It's almost 25 minutes of boredom until one of the yokels takes one of the female "guests" out in the woods to cozy up and get himself some sugar. He pulls out his knife and tells her to feel how sharp it is. She complies and he cuts her thumb causing her to freak out. Does she try and leave? Nope. Why? Because she needs to stick around for the first kicksass scene of the picture. While she's screaming she yells for him to do something about it so he cuts her thumb off. NICE! I'm not squeamish but this grisly little scene had me squirming.


Then Cletus or whatever his hayseed name is takes her to the mayor and the boys where they pin her down on a table and hack her arm off which finds its way to being BBQ'd later that night. Nice.


As part of the celebration, one of the guests is drawn and quartered. And then the coolest death I've seen in a long time. The barrel roll like you've never seen it before. A guest is forced to get into this barrel, see, and once he's in it they hammer some long-ass nails through it. See where this is going? The he's rolled down the hill as the townspeople cheer on.





Of all six of the guests, two of them make a mad dash for escape. They trudge through a muddy field ending at a pond where there's a WTF moment. Tom & Terry stop for a moment for Terry to clean herself up!?!?! We're treated to some nice flowery interlude music as Terry splashes water on her Playboy Playmate of the Month June '63 legs.


Meanwhile, back at the festivities, they're about to play everyone's favorite carnival game. The baseball-dunk-resulting-in-the-giant-boulder-squashing-a-pretty-girl game.




Tom & Terry finally get the hell out of Dodge and make their way to the sheriff's office. He takes them to the site where the town once was but isn't there any longer. He tells them that that town hasn't existed in a hundred years and how the Yankees came through during the Civil War, killed everyone and destroyed the town. At this point we're supposed to go "ooooooooh". Yeah, it's just a ghost town getting revenge by killing Northerners every 100 years. It's Brigadoon with blood.

As you can see, there's very little that's really worth watching. While it is fun to watch in spots, taking it all in with the bad makes it drab and stupid. If it hadn't been so silly and over the top I would have enjoyed it much, much more. It's barely a 6/10 and only because of the interesting plot and fantastically cool kills. I hear the Robert Englund remake, titled 2001 MANIACS (2005) is better. I'll check it out at some point. Apparently it features something the original severely lacked, nudity. It certainly would have helped.