Now, I can appreciate a healthy horror of the Civil War-obsessed racist inbred Deep South like anyone else, but like any stereotype, the fear says about as much about the culture it's applied to as to the culture that applied it--if not more. In this case, the stereotypes went way beyond far and ended up making a perverse and absurd portrait of the filmmakers as people who have absolutely no clue as to what they're film-making except that they've seen Gone with the Wind and Deliverance. They can't even keep their own stereotypes right, resulting in a completely confusing amalgam of Southern gentile, inbred hillbilly, and racist hack in ways that show absolutely no actual knowledge on how those stereotypes came to be (not to mention a complete lack of knowledge as to the role of class in the pre-Civil War South, meaning the relationships between the townsfolk are completely unbelievable as well).
So the basic deal is that a bunch of Yanks heading to Florida for Spring Break get side-tracked into a small town of Pleasant Valley, a seemingly innocuous re-enactment village that invites them to join in the festivities. But actually they are being led into a ghost town where the vengeful corpses of Civil War past want to kill as many Yanks as townspeople were massacred in the Civil War, that is, 2001 of them. However, instead of getting right to it or really making short work of it, the movie must absolutely be feature length, and so it stretches out the horror, usually with more than just the usual amount of sex. Thus we get the trifecta of awful horror movie approaches: characters driven entirely by their reproductive organs; bad Southern accents; and the old Fantastic Tales cliché of "Something bad happened! Oh wait, that can't be, those people are actually dead!"
With DVD making it easier than ever to distribute pretty much any movie in existence and fanboys like Tarantino and Eli Roth (the latter who co-produced this monstrosity) bringing grindhouse back into its niche, remakes of Herschell Gordon Lewis movies are becoming popular, especially recently. I can't speak to how this movie compares to the original, but I do know that HGL made up for poor production design and bad acting by usually stunning and always inventive arrays of lo-fi gore effects. This movie, however, is pretty "been there, done that", and really only resides for the sole purpose of saying "Hey! Hey! Hey guys! Southerners, right! Crazy, right! Hillbillies, y'know! Crazy!" This comes complete with an entirely arbitrary take-off of the infamous Battling Banjos scene and a terrible industrial update of the "The South Will Rise Again!" song.
It's obvious that the filmmakers cared little for actually doing much but making a funny, campy horror movie with a lot of boobs and blood. Unfortunately, 2001 Maniacs had nothing to add to any of those topics except a confusion between a stereotypical hillbilly and a stereotypical redneck--and everything in between. The gore was unoriginal, the sex ranged from ludicrous to obnoxious via the path of gratuitous, and the humor basically boiled down to a single joke: Southerners are weird. That's really ironic when the repeated theme in this movie is "respect" for the dead, for the memorializing of the Civil War, and for the contrast of cultures between the North and South. This movie doesn't really have respect for anything, it just wants to have slack-jawed yokels chasing sheep named Jezebel while horny college kids get off on lesbian incest.
At least Robert Englund is fun to watch. He plays the best gleefully demoniacal serial killer ever. It's in the face.
--PolarisDiB
So the basic deal is that a bunch of Yanks heading to Florida for Spring Break get side-tracked into a small town of Pleasant Valley, a seemingly innocuous re-enactment village that invites them to join in the festivities. But actually they are being led into a ghost town where the vengeful corpses of Civil War past want to kill as many Yanks as townspeople were massacred in the Civil War, that is, 2001 of them. However, instead of getting right to it or really making short work of it, the movie must absolutely be feature length, and so it stretches out the horror, usually with more than just the usual amount of sex. Thus we get the trifecta of awful horror movie approaches: characters driven entirely by their reproductive organs; bad Southern accents; and the old Fantastic Tales cliché of "Something bad happened! Oh wait, that can't be, those people are actually dead!"
With DVD making it easier than ever to distribute pretty much any movie in existence and fanboys like Tarantino and Eli Roth (the latter who co-produced this monstrosity) bringing grindhouse back into its niche, remakes of Herschell Gordon Lewis movies are becoming popular, especially recently. I can't speak to how this movie compares to the original, but I do know that HGL made up for poor production design and bad acting by usually stunning and always inventive arrays of lo-fi gore effects. This movie, however, is pretty "been there, done that", and really only resides for the sole purpose of saying "Hey! Hey! Hey guys! Southerners, right! Crazy, right! Hillbillies, y'know! Crazy!" This comes complete with an entirely arbitrary take-off of the infamous Battling Banjos scene and a terrible industrial update of the "The South Will Rise Again!" song.
It's obvious that the filmmakers cared little for actually doing much but making a funny, campy horror movie with a lot of boobs and blood. Unfortunately, 2001 Maniacs had nothing to add to any of those topics except a confusion between a stereotypical hillbilly and a stereotypical redneck--and everything in between. The gore was unoriginal, the sex ranged from ludicrous to obnoxious via the path of gratuitous, and the humor basically boiled down to a single joke: Southerners are weird. That's really ironic when the repeated theme in this movie is "respect" for the dead, for the memorializing of the Civil War, and for the contrast of cultures between the North and South. This movie doesn't really have respect for anything, it just wants to have slack-jawed yokels chasing sheep named Jezebel while horny college kids get off on lesbian incest.
At least Robert Englund is fun to watch. He plays the best gleefully demoniacal serial killer ever. It's in the face.
--PolarisDiB