2001 Maniacs (2005)

I probably could list 2001 reasons not to watch this movie but that would be exhausting.This is the second Eli Roth directed movie I've seen with the first being Cabin Fever. To this point I'm not impressed. The only thing 2001 Maniacs had going for it was Robert Englund and even he didn't do much to eliminate the B rating of this film.A group of young people get stuck in a little hick town and are killed one by one in horrific fashion. Even with that, the movie was more of a horror comedy (or comedy horror, not sure which is first). Much of the movie takes place in the day time which always has less of a horror feel to it. Furthermore, the way some of the unwilling hosts were killed was so absurd it had to be for laughs. I was working the night shift, I needed to stay awake, this was on. That's all I can say.

If you haven't seen the original Two Thousand Maniacs, you won't miss anything. I saw it way back when, and thought it was good. But, the sequel, 2001 Maniacs buried it so deep it may never rise again. They are similar, but still unrelated works.The general plot is the same for both films. A small town of Pleasant Valley is holding a celebration, and looking for some Yanks to attend as the guests of honor. And, like the original, its set in 'modern day' America. But that is about as far as the similarities go. The cast is more faithful to modern people, young and old, and have much more fun with things.This film has all the things missing from the original film, such as nudity, racism, gore, violence, and so on. And, they also throw in some twists as well. Even the music is more enjoyable this time around, which is a blessing I think. But, if you are easily offended, no matter where you sit, this film will likely have you upset, even if you do laugh at some of it.All in all, I've seen this more than two dozen times, and still laugh at it. No matter which side you favor, they poke fun at all of them, and leave you with a final cut that will bleed whenever you see something in real life that reminds you of this film. My pick has to be the local Sheriff who hears the report, toward the end of the film. Living in the South, I wonder who they picked to be the model for his role, as it is 100% accurate, right down to the issue of the horror magazine he's reading. That may be the scariest thing about this whole film.

I had the… fun of watching a very campy movie known as "2001 Maniacs," which I guess was a remake of the '64 movie "Ten Thousand Maniacs." It's really about a group of college kids that travel to a small southern town for spring break only to find out that everybody that inhabits this town are psychopathic cannibals. I don't know where to begin with this review.First off, there were a lot of bloody effects and it was pretty gory. I enjoyed this, and some of the strategies used to 'off' the characters were pretty gruesome. The main problem that I had with this movie was that the horror and gore aspect of the film is overshadowed by the slapstick comedy, the crude redneck humor the terrible puns. Most people would find some of the puns funny but I found them campy and unnecessary and it was so over the top.What I found a little displeasing was how they viewed Southerners: there is a retarded kid that likes to kill cats, a young man who wants to have sex with a sheep, inbred sisters, a dumbfounded black man and everybody seems talks in stereotypical southern lingo. I am from the south so I am a little iffy on that but I can overlook it.This movie wants to be a horror comedy but it failed as a horror movie and I can only consider it as a comedy. Sure there is gore, some scares and a lot of deaths and cannibalism but I found myself laughing over ridiculous actions. The movie, of course for sex appeal, it littered with gorgeous girls who serve no purpose but as eye candy. I have not seen the original one, I might have to so that I can compare them… but I could still watch this movie again and find it appealing as a dark comedy, but I cannot say that this is everything a horror is. If you like "Dead Alive," "The Frighteners" or even "Shaun of the Dead" then you might like this movie.

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