Rating: NR
Genre:
Horror
Release Date: 02/22/2000
Dubbed: English/French
Sound: 1/5.1
Run Time: 83 min
Flags: Not For Children, Gore
Distributor/Studio: Image Entertainment
Drive-in gore king
Herschell Gordon Lewis reached a creative peak with this darkly comic slaughterfest about six vacationing Yanks who fall victim to the cheerfully violent Southern hospitality of Pleasant Valley. Made the guests of honor in the town's centennial celebration, the hapless visitors soon discover that the obligations of their title include being used for the locals' bloody amusements -- which include being rolled downhill in a barrel full of sharp spikes and strapped down beneath a boulder for a hideous variation on the dunking booth -- and eventually ending up on the spit for the evening's barbecue. It turns out the bloodthirsty rednecks have come back from the dead after 100 years to exact symbolic revenge for the slaughter of the entire town by the Union Army. Filming on a shoestring in St. Cloud, FL,
Lewis even contributed his talents to some of the songs (credited to the
Pleasant Valley Boys), including
"Rebel Yell" (not to be confused with the
Billy Idol tune) and a rousing rendition of
"Rollin' in My Sweet Baby's Arms," which accompanies a shot of a severed arm rotating on a barbecue spit.
~ Cavett Binion, All Movie Guide
After the unprecedented success of their earlier gore
epic Blood Feast, director
Herschell Gordon Lewis and producer
David Friedman started planning their next move. If a plotless, no-budget splatter film written and shot in a week could do such boffo business, it stands to reason that the same gore in a well-made film will double the take, right? Well, despite their best intentions, the subsequent feature,
2000 Maniacs, was successful but not the blockbuster that
Blood Feast was, and
Lewis went back to not trying so hard. Of course, by no means was
2000 Maniacs a technical triumph. The actors are as amateurish as any of
Lewis' films and the direction is still fairly slapdash. However, the story of a crazed Southern town's revenge against a group of traveling Yankees is a lot more colorful than
Blood Feast's simple-minded lone-slasher plot.
Lewis has claimed that this was the first of any of his films to be thoroughly scripted, and it's stuffed with overwrought, down-home "cracker" language. The gore set pieces are graphic but not as cruel as before; the filmmakers instead opt to create mayhem with elaborate contraptions and bizarre executions. There's even a car chase -- usually not a noteworthy event in your average film -- but compared to
Blood Feast's climactic (and long-winded) foot chase, it's an extremely special effect. For fans of
horror,
2000 Maniacs and
Blood Feast are certainly worth watching to see sacred ground get broken; for fans of grade-Z
trash films, his entire canon is indispensable.
~ Fred Beldin, All Movie Guide
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