In Pleasant Valley (The Valley of Pleasure), a "ghost" town located in the in the American South, six -Yankee- North American tourists arrive...
The group's destination is established by a hijacking carried out, to their detriment, by two shady figures intent on appropriately repositioning road signs.
As soon as they arrive in the town, tourists are lovingly welcomed by the residents and invited (forced) to celebrate the town's centennial as honored guests.
Too bad that all the inhabitants are, in reality, ghostly presences, victims of the "war of secession," and that, in a nemesis-like manner, they turn their -understandable- thirst for revenge against the occasional host, "Northern" descendants."....
Compared to his debut, consisting of Blood Feast, Lewis here aims more for an "ironic," comedy-style type of storytelling, while still infusing various moments of the film with (for the time) very strong and explicit sequences.
Reviewed in our day, the film looks, essentially, like a comedy: partly because of the dated special effects. But given the theme (even today there are strong frictions between North and South America) and the way it was approached, at the time the film constituted a real "punch in the gut"...
Two Thousand Maniacs distances itself, right from the start, from conventional, appeasing cinema: beginning with the "moral" reversal of coeval Hammer or AIP. Here it is innocent tourists who pay, guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time....
Technically inferior to the already "low" level of its predecessor, Lewis's film appears superficially developed; both in terms of narrative (with the final twist of the "ghostly" inhabitants) and execution. To all this must be added less than amateur acting and a lesser visual impact of the effects: on which predominate the scene of a huge boulder shattering a victim's head and a quartering -preliminary stretching of limbs- by four horses....
As a glue between the first and second films is the presence of playmate Connie Mason as the (skimpy) sensual beauty-one of the other ingredients, besides splatter, that distinguish the director's films.
This is Lewis and, with his second work, the director reinforces that iconoclastic and anti-moralist type of cinema. A type of cinema that, a few years later, would be characteristic of Lloyd Kaufman, but which would influence, unlike Troma, the entire world cinematic landscape.
In these times of a total lack of ideas and narrative "innovations" for the horror genre, in contrast to a strong trend of revival, there has also been a focus on the remake (actually a kind of present-day revival) of this film: 2001 Maniacs (2005) directed by Tim Sullivan includes, in the cast, in addition to star Robert Englund (Nightmare's Freddy) two other celebrities in the horror field: Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, Hostel) and Scott Spiegel (director of the very violent Intruder).
Two Thousand Maniacs was released in Italy, on the now extinct T+, in the second half of the 1990s: in a subtitled version and in the cumulative package (including Blood Feast, Gore Gore Girls and A Taste of Blood) dedicated to H.G. Lewis...
Review by Undying1
