Two Thousand Maniacs!(as known as 2000 Maniacs!) is a 1964 splatter film written and directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis. It is the second part of what the director's fans have dubbed "The Blood Trilogy", a trio of films starting with 1963's Blood Feast and ending with 1965's Color Me Blood Red. The film stars 1963 Playboy Playmate Connie Mason.
Six Yankee tourists are lured into the fictional small Southern town Pleasant Valley by "redneck" citizens to be the guests of honor for the centennial celebration of the day Union troops destroyed the town. The tourists are separated and forced to participate in various sick games which lead to their gory deaths. After discovering the nefarious plans of the townspeople, the two remaining tourists manage to escape. They then return with a local sheriff, only to discover that the town has disappeared. The film ends with two of the townspeople revealing that the townspeople are really vengeful spirits looking forward to the next centennial in 2065, when Pleasant Valley will rise again to resume its vendetta against the Yankees. They walk into the fog and disappear.
Deaths
- Dismembering a woman with an axe, and thereafter roasting her in a barbecue pit;
- Staging a "horse race" in which a man is ripped limb from limb;
- Rolling a man downhill in a barrel embedded with nails
- Crushing a woman with a boulder held aloft in a contraption resembling a carnival-style dunk tank.
Production[]
Two Thousand Maniacs! was filmed in 15 days, early in 1964, in the town of St. Cloud, Florida. According to a contemporary report, the entire town participated in the film.[2] The film was the feature film debut of a nonprofessional Illinois stage actor named Taalkeus Blank (nicknamed "Talky" his entire life) (b. 1910 - d. 1991) who played Pleasant Valley Mayor Buckman. He used the pseudonym "Jeffery Allen" in all of his film appearances because he was never a member of the Screen Actors Guild. Director Lewis was so impressed by Blank's ability to perfectly mimic any type of Deep South accent that he hired Blank to appear in many of his later films, among them Moonshine Mountain (1964), This Stuff'll Kill Ya! (1971) and Year of the Yahoo! (1972), playing various Southern-accented characters under the Jeffrey Allen pseudonym. You Can Watch The Full Movie Below
Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964) - Full Movie , classic exploitation
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