Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964)

Directed by: Hershell Gordon Lewis | 84 minutes | horror | Actors: William Kerwin, Connie Mason, Jeffrey Allen, Ben Moore, Gary Bakeman, Jerome Eden, Shelby Livingston, Michael Korb, Yvonne Gilbert, Mark Douglas, Linda Cochran, Vincent Santo, Andy Wilson, Candi Conder, The Pleasant Valley Boys

After the success of ‘Blood Feast’, released in 1963, Hershell Gordon Lewis quickly came up with a sequel: ‘Two Thousand Maniacs!’. Although the two films had nothing to do with each other except for the bad-acting-but-great-looking Connie Mason, they have come to be known as the blood trilogy, along with ‘Color Me Blood Red’. A trilogy that is not connected by a storyline or even by characters, but by the large amounts of blood that are wasted in it. After the misdeeds of Fuad Ramses in ‘Blood Feast’, it’s the turn of the inhabitants of a southern American village to make life miserable for the cast of immoral teenagers. All this while the limbs are flying around you.

While it’s clear from the start that this is never going to look as spectacular as it sounds, it’s still a promise that arouses curiosity. The concept of bloodshed squared quickly becomes the entire concept of the film, because Lewis doesn’t know how to finish his 84 minutes. This results in the stretching of each scene as far as possible and many musical interludes from the Pleasant Valley Boys – the men responsible for the whining banjos in the background. An excellent pace of storytelling for young people in the drive-ins who were busy with things completely different than watching the film. However, if the scenes still go too fast, there are always the explicit and self-repeating dialogues to make everything clear again.

When it’s time for average American teen Beverly to take the umpteenth torture device, the viewer can first listen to a five-minute yes-no battle between Beverly and the evil mayor. Not that Lewis wasn’t aware of the concept of ‘tension’, but there are a lot of minutes to fill and the majority of those minutes are in ‘Two Thousand Maniacs!’ filled with superficial dialogue. It is therefore interesting to see how the film implicitly tries to convey a moral message by punishing the drinking (!) and cheating (!!!) teenagers for their behavior. A spark of theme in an otherwise very, very flat film. Ex-playmate Connie Mason also has a hard time in this film, because she still can’t act.

Yet Lewis knows how to use his untalented cast better this time by taking his characters less seriously than in ‘Blood Feast’. The actors make the film transparent like a glass of water, but by magnifying this overacting, Lewis puts the disfigured quality of his film into perspective. Certainly with the addition of the repetitive organ tunes in the background, the film starts to show a reasonable self-awareness. However, it never comes to a full-fledged parody and ‘Two Thousand Maniacs’ remains mainly the movie that you didn’t believe existed.

Movies like ‘Two Thousand Maniacs!’ are always problematic. On the one hand, one cannot believe that they were created, and on the other, one cannot deny the sadistic, yet innocent, fun they have. Can one blame Hershell Gordon Lewis for reducing film to its most banal form, when it yields such a pleasant one and a half hours? Perhaps when we view the film as a product, but not when we view film as a viewing experience. A drink that ends with the credits.