Four-thousand and Two Maniacs

By June Pulliam

08/21/2006

Two Thousand Maniacs! Herschell Gordon Lewis, Dir. 1964.

2001 Maniacs.  Tim Sullivan, Dir. 2005.

Tim Sullivan’s 2001 Maniacs, a remake of the quirky cult 1964 film Two Thousand Maniacs!, is a butchering of the original. One could say that Lewis’s film suffers a fate more severe than those meted out to the hapless Yankees in either version. Consequently, Mr. Sullivan has ended up on my infamous “Directors Who Owe Me Money List.”

Herschell Gordon Lewis’ campy classic is a southern version of Brigadoon. In the centennial month of the conclusion of the Civil War, two carloads of Northerners find themselves detoured from the main highway, heading into the small town of Pleasant Valley (the film was made in Florida, but the setting could be Florida or Georgia). There they are enthusiastically greeted by a crowd of boisterous southerners, grinning and waving Confederate flags. The mayor of Pleasant Valley announces to the occupants of the vehicles that they have arrived just in time for the town’s centennial celebration, and in fact, they are to be the guests of honor, enjoying the best food, best entertainment, and best accommodations that are to be had in their humble burg.

Unbeknownst to the Northerners, their hosts are actually ghosts, revenging revenants who, similar to the inhabitants of Brigadoon, have been permitted to take corporeal form every 100 years. But these ghosts, who suffered their terrible deaths at the hands of Union soldiers, will now have their vengeance on the countrymen of their killers, and the killings themselves are unique in that they are made part of the state fair-like festivities. I won’t spoil your fun by revealing too much if you choose to rent this version. In fact, if you are a fan of the genre you should.

What makes this film work is that the victims don’t suspect what is in store for them until the last minute—as their killers are attired in contemporary dress and are familiar with modern technology, such as it was in a small southern town in 1964, so they can’t possibly be mistaken for angry ghosts. But perhaps one of the most charming features of this genuinely disturbing film is the country music, written by Lewis and performed by the Pleasant Valley Boys. The banjo-heavy country music is not just part of the background, but an integral part of the film, functioning in the same way as the Scottish folk music used in the original version of The Wicker Man. True, Two Thousand Maniacs! trades on negative stereotypes of Southerners as being crazed savages eternally living in the past, as if they still haven’t heard that Lee surrendered, but the originality of Lewis’s film permits me to overlook that.

Alas, Sullivan’s remake lacks any of this originality, not only depending too heavily on Lewis’ story, but also stealing liberally, and worse still, illogically, from other contemporary films. The first ten minutes of the film were promising. The story opens somewhere in the north in a darkened college lecture hall. The professor is talking to his students about the bloodshed of the Civil War, with particular emphasis on the suffering of southerners. On the screen behind him are some of Matthew Brady’s gritty daguerreotypes of battlefield aftermath and of soldiers being embalmed for their final journeys home. Naturally, the students are unimpressed and can only think about their upcoming spring break in Daytona Beach, and one wisenheimer manages to hack into the professor’s PowerPoint lecture and insert his own photos of mildly raunchy spring break sexual hi-jinks.

Of course, we the viewers know that the students are headed for trouble: those who refuse to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. The boys head to Florida for spring break, and on the way meet up with a carload of floozies. All end up in Pleasant Valley, Georgia, as the honored guests for the town festival (which takes place annually in this version, rather than once every hundred years). From this point on, everything in this remake is just a mixture of raunchy and predictable sex, followed by some very unimaginative violence.

Sullivan’s remake also attempts to add another dimension lacking in the original: race. This is the two ton elephant that sat in the living room of Lewis’s version, but which no one apparently noticed (the residents of Pleasant Valley and their guests in Lewis’s version are all white). In the remake, an interracial couple—a black man and an Asian woman—also arrive, challenging the sensibilities of their Civil War-era hosts. And the residents of Pleasant Valley include some slaves who remain loyal to their masters. But alas, Sullivan never really follows up on the theme of race. A few mild racial epithets are exchanged between the interracial couple and their hosts, but that’s as far as anything goes, and in the end, the black man‘s and Asian woman’s deaths are no more horrible than anyone else’s. 

Also lacking is the wonderful soundtrack of the original. Country music star Travis Tritt has a cameo role as a psychotically prescient gas station attendant who attempts to warn the travelers of what’s to come, but he is not allowed to actually use the magnificent steel guitar he passes the time with in between customers to play anything memorable. Instead, the soundtrack consists of forgettable metal and pop music interspersed by the occasional twanging of a banjo. Every now and then a couple of country crooners perform for the Yankee guests, a la Lewis’s film, but their songs are inane, with absolutely stupid lyrics such as “he misses his bitch,” rather than atmospheric and eerie, as the songs performed by the Pleasant Valley Boys

What is particularly disheartening is that the original film begged for a well conceived and expertly directed remake. This was not it. Sullivan’s remake of Lewis’s campy and fun original wasted approximately two hours of my life. Mr. Sullivan is, in fact, the 4002^th maniac of the title of this review. His mangling of this story is nothing less than unforgivable. Perhaps the ghosts of movie reviewers should take their revenge on such directors annually, on Oscar Night—I myself can think of a few choice tortures. Perhaps Sullivan should attempt an H. G. Wells remake next. That way he can build a time machine and give viewers back those two wasted hours. Or perhaps he could simply refund the price of renting this awful DVD.