2001 Maniacs

2001 Maniacs (2005) is a remake of the 1964 film 2000 Maniacs, once a cult classic because of violence and gore but now largely and fortunately forgotten. Why the remake? I don't have an answer. Neither the original nor the remake has any value, but they are still accessible for public viewing. Both are available on video, and the remake recently played on a cable channel. It follows the same basic plot as the original, and uses low-budget but more up-to-date technology to depict various acts of torture and violence and various body parts. The Plot: College students from the North who are headed to the beaches of Florida become lost in rural Georgia and accidentally wander into the lost village of Pleasant Valley, where a celebration is in progress which the students are invited to join. Citizens of the town systematically frighten, torture, maim, and kill the students, with cannibalism as the ultimate goal.

The film does place more emphasis on the revenge that the ghoulish citizens of Pleasant Valley are seeking against Yankee college students for atrocities allegedly committed against the town by rogue Union forces near the end of the Civil War. The town comes back to life once every year on the anniversary of the massacre. The desire of the townspeople for revenge will drive them, we're told, to torture, maim, and kill Yankee tourists until they have matched the death toll of the original massacre. Confederate flags are evident everywhere. Townspeople openly discuss their desire for revenge against the Yankees. The mayor wears an eye-patch with a Confederate flag on it. In one scene, as the townspeople prepare to slaughter and consume the last two surviving Yankee students, they stand around their intended victims and chant "The South will rise! The South will rise!"

A key early scene informs us of what this film is really up to: one of the college students plays his guitar and tries to keep up with the banjo-picking of a demented looking Pleasant Valley citizen. The scene recalls the famous dueling banjo sequence from Deliverance (1971). It enforces the notion that the South is full of genetic throwbacks and demented low-lifes, something the movie proceeds to confirm in numerous ways. The women are quick to doff their clothes and engage in sex that usually end in genital mutilation or acid drinking or other horrific events for the male participants. In another scene (taken from the original film) a young woman's arms and legs are tied to mules that her tormentor then swats with a branch, so that her limbs are torn from her body.

The South in 2001 Maniacs is a place of Gothic horror, supernatural terrors, demented goons, perverted and violent sex, and general ":Never Fergit" dimwittedness. The filmmakers count on the audience regarding this film as a joke, and that it is—but a sick joke. Even though only someone as limited in intelligence as the citizens of Pleasant Valley would take the film's depiction of the South seriously, it is easy enough for viewers willing to sit through the film to suspend disbelief and temporarily accept this depiction of an alien Other—a place that encourage the viewer's own sense of his or her civilized and refined superiority because it is not the viewer's place. It is the South, which by definition (at least this film's definition) accommodates the horrors of Pleasant Valley.

Why anyone would want to watch this film is beyond me. I fast-forwarded through most of it.