2001 Maniacs (2005) / 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams (2010)

 

Director: Tim Sullivan

Screenplay: Tim Sullivan and Chris Kobin [and Christopher Tuffin for 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams]

Cast:

2001 Maniacs:

Robert Englund as Mayor George W. Buckman, Lin Shaye as Granny Boone, Giuseppe Andrews as Harper Alexander, Jay Gillespie as Anderson Lee, Matthew Carey as Cory Jones, Peter Stormare as Professor Ackerman, Marla Malcolm as Joey, Gina Marie Heekin as Kat, Brian Gross as Ricky, Mushond Lee as Malcolm

2001 Maniacs - Field of Screams:

Bill Moseley as Mayor George W. Buckman, Trevor Wright as Falcon, Lin Shaye as Granny Boone, Christa Campbell as Milk Maiden, Ahmed Best as Crow, Adam Robitel as Lester, Nivek Ogre as Harper Alexander, Andrea Leon as Val Turner

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

You’re boning your cousin, and I’m a pig?

Full Spoilers Ahead

I want to return to a lot of films I once hated with a more positive outlook on them, but the 2000s remakes of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Two Thousand Maniacs (1964) sadly belongs to that category of those where I had my initial issues with grow, cultivating into a clear and understood view of why I cannot vibe with them. More so as this time I saw the 2010 sequel, which also establishes that these films belonging to an era of cinema I grew up with which is now old, not inherently a criticism in itself, but with these unfortunately belonging to the side I glad is less common nowadays. The edgy opening of the original, splicing real Civil War photos with creepy music and slashes in the soundtrack, alongside immediately raising the concerns of how the remake series tackles the Civil War, fully shows the mid-2000s aesthetic of horror is now old after I grew up with it. The first film was produced by Raw Nerve, Eli Roth's company with Scott Spiegel, and Boaz Yakin which produced his two Hostel films, marking this particular aesthetical era, even in a more overtly comedic case here, of a grungy and more explicit type of American horror. There are also, unfortunately, obnoxious frat boys as the leads, who after being very bad in their Civil War classes thus end up ironically in the past whilst trying to get to a party Florida. They end up, as in Lewis’ version, in Pleasant Valley, a Southern Confederate throwback which openly wants to get revenge on the North for the Civil War by luring and killing Northern Yankees.

The obnoxiousness is there, as no one is likable even if you are eventually meant to sympathize with them, to the point I cared more for Eli Roth in a cameo as a guy who throws dead armadillos at passing cars, claims they ran over his pet, and guilts them into free car rides with his dog Dr. Mambo. The sequel has the same issue, even if parodying the Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie reality TV show, The Simple Life, which lasted from 2003 to 2007 with its obnoxious reality TV blonde stand ins and its small crew. Only the two films having male characters who are gay or embrace it is a nickel of empathy, and this tellingly comes from Tim Sullivan, as a LGBTQ horror filmmaker, whose entry for the anthology film Chillarama (2011) having the evocatively named I was a Teenage Werebear which plays to the slang version of “bear”, not just the mythological idea of bear men. I wish this was the direction we went more with, alongside the streaks of camp as these are horror comedies, as all my problems with both films begin and end with them attempting to play to taboos with these Southern hick stereotypes, with racism and various taboos, which comes off as a terrible strain of ironically nudging to these for discomfort humour whilst still having the stereotypes and racism.

The Pleasant Valley locals are evil, indiscriminating killing and eating Northerners, but they are mean to be anti-heroes which you whoop for despite the fact the first film plays to their more overt racism unlike the original film, especially as Robert Englund as Mayor George W. Buckman, the head of the community, is a really good casting choice as a lead. Herschell Gordon Lewis’ original film never addressed the uncomfortable issues of how the Southern Confederacy, whilst only lasting from 1861 to 1865, fought the Civil War for an idealized view of the South based on plantations and slavery, yet he managed to find the right balance and even melancholia for the film made after Blood Feast (1963), where he invented the splatter genre, that had a great high concept premise. It had a playful goofiness which undercut the premise's moral implications, but fully took advantage of the themes as it was set hundred years after the Civil War with the literal ghosts of the South against the North. Whilst out of context the song he wrote is a problematic earworm, and becomes more so in the grungy metalish version in the remake films, The South's Gonna Rise Again, in context it is a perfect opening song for the tone in context and fully informed the themes of his lurid little drive-in production with the right sick humored tone. That being a Southern town in the past, random bystanders in the war, who were destroyed and had become the hate driven killers against a cast, including Blood Feast’s William Kerwin, who are actual adults and actually sympathetic. Whilst never dealing with the truly problematic nature of the Confederate, even for a wacky sixties gore film which is deeply silly and made by a filmmaker who even laughed at the notion of artist pretense of artistry in cinema, the film managed somehow to get the idea that these Southerners, once tragic side casualties in a war which killed both sides, became these gleeful limb lopping psychopathic ghosts but with the Northern Yankees figures you want to see survive. You can challenge that sentence, and the film, for glossing over the South's history of plantations and slavery, and you are absolutely right too dear reader, but there is no sense of the film being pro-Confederate either, or worse smudging the tone, just an exploitation film perfectly tapping into a history moment like an old wound in a good example of bad taste.

Here, playing these Southern stereotypes’ more overt racism in the 2005 film, with an African American character with his Asian girlfriend the stick of this, the ironic humour around tackling this becomes as problematic for me for that attempted irony, which gets worse in the sequel and is attempting a detachment which cannot past muster when it falls into an un-PC attitude we challenge nowadays. This is not just even morally but, with respect for Tim Sullivan and the co-screenwriters for both films, that for me, trying to be edgy deliberately in ways like this comes off as the wet fart of humour. There is a scene of Englund, part of a group of cannibalistic ghosts, with a pair of chopsticks talking about having Chinese food which, as a British lad with awareness of his culture, evokes the worse of the lame British comedies of the seventies and so. Forgetting just the political correctness, this type of un-PC humour, for deliberately provocation nowadays against the "woke" or here in irony, is a deuce chill culturally evoking a lame uncle ruining the mood with an off-colour joke, or a bad comedian in an old English pub. This especially amplifies for the sequel, but it is found in the prequel to, which is juggling this with gory set pieces undercut by the humour.

The stereotyping of the Southerners is an issue too, as there is a precise difference in criticizing the Confederacy, with the Confederate flags on display in these films more uncomfortable for me as time passes, as a viewer not even from the United States, to falling to a stereotype as bad as the racist lines played for ironic humour. There is a sheep shagging joke that continues into the sequel, where they probably could not afford an actual sheep, and it felt like the obvious joke to have whilst we have these stereotypes. The ones in the original sixties film were stereotypes, but not as heavy handed, and they were even felt to have more period accurate costumes; whilst the sequel has a shift in budget, to the point they decide to move and have a touring Pleasant Valley, rather than using a set, the costumes especially on the women of the town, who tempt the men folk from the North, feels like sexy Southern belle costumes from a party shop. This is neither a criticism as I do not punch down on budgets and production design, especially for the sequel, but it unfortunately emphasizes the sarcasm and broadness for the first film, with a larger budget, to exaggerate in questionable ways, that this is a horror comedy in how broad and eye rolling it is on the premise, than with Lewis' entire career even with his more nastier films where the premise is taken seriously, but the one liners and pity sense of dialogue made them funny.

The aesthetic has aged in funny ways – there is music from what sounds like Smash Mouth and I wish was, and there is a 2000s horniness which, whilst with copious nudity and that interesting subplot with a gay male character, never really gets sexy in the truest sense. There is all that nudity, a lot of gore, and acid moonshine that burns through a bed used, alongside a guy getting a poker through the arse, but what is meant with a sick humour as the original film becomes broader than Herschell Gordon Lewis’ original, which is said loving his films as a viewer but admitting they were never subtle. That ironic detachment, alongside the ending where the melancholic epilogue of the original is rushed and the survivors die, letting the Southerners win, really was what I was not a fan of this film originally, and stuck out now as a much older guy. The same set up happens in the second film, with the villains winning and even less an attempt at sympathetic leads as a pretense, and magnifies the issues of the previous film more greatly.

2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams opens with a comic book prologue, but raises the issue that this is more overt in tackling the maniacs’ origins even as a horror comedy, the details that Herschell Gordon Lewis avoided where, yes, the Civil War likely led to innocents on both sides dying, but the Confederates becoming a problematic lynchpin that ignores slavery as a concept. Even if you ignore this, I have with Field of Screams a film that even with brief moments, and someone like Bill Moseley replacing Englund as Major Buckman doing his hardest to raise my spirits, a charismatic actor even in the most dire of viewing experiences, where I found myself miserable viewing the film. This is considerably rare nowadays as my concept of taste and pleasure with cinema is sometimes likely to baffle others.

There is a definite shift in the tone just in terms of the cameras used. We have gone from the 2000s to the straight to video late 2000s/early 2010s, a huge shift in horror cinema where, as mentioned, the Maniacs have completed disregarded being ghosts tied to one locations and go on tour, by bus, to a new location to get to more Northerners. A huge shift is felt too in how, whilst both of them are horror comedies, the prequel has a foot in the time of Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) and other extremer horror films, whilst the sequel even with its own gore, with a buzz saw going through a woman in a deliberately ghoulish way, is at a time when the post-Grindhouse (2007) and more pastiche nature of gore movies came to be. Repo: The Genetic Opera (2008) is notable to name check from this period, as Moseley came from that film, as did Nivek Ogre, member of the industrial band Skinny Puppy. This is parodying the then-finished reality TV show as two stereotypes of blonde airheads filming a reality show only to end up at the new travelling Pleasant Valley, one of them in the one weird joke that vaguely worked for me having a pet dog named Biscuit who already died and is kept taxidermied, talked to by the owner as if still alive. By this point, this is not even trying to have serious moments, with the leads all deliberately obnoxious, the sheep one of the maniacs is having a relationship fake, and shenanigans with Mayor George W. Buckman more of a horny old dog than a threat.

And yet there is also a Jewish stereotype, and whilst the maniacs have a more diverse cast, with a Chinese woman and African American proudly among their cannibalistic peers, it leads to the former, China Rose, speaking with a stereotypical voice, and an ongoing joke about a returning maniac, Granny Boone (Lin Shaye), having a relationship with the latter, alongside a fantasy sequence of Buckman's with a black female Northerner, which play off uncomfortable themes of plantation sexual relationships with an obvious end credits punch line that has aged like a fine murder. The post-ironic humour had aged badly from the 2000s onwards, and arguably it is worse as this is trying to be sarcastic and edgy on these types of stereotypes, but slipped into a pretense to even have. This even starts to slip into being wacky in a way that does not work, like an abrupt Southern aerobics joke, and at that point I realize that I find ways to appreciate most films but I have my limited. Even those with wavering acting performances, lack of budget or production quality, tangents away from plots or lack of plots, and all the half marks seen as "bad" cinema are things I now do not care for, and can love films for, but I still find both questionable jokes and forced wackiness like this are a toxic combination for me.

I can now enjoy silly, messy horror films many would dismiss as terrible or even the worst films, but Field of Screams, even with some fun and Bill Moseley on top of his game, was pointless and painful in the way I used to hate films of the past. There is no hate nowadays, only numbness, and it is not the curse of wokeness, but feeling like this type of humour is the equivalent of smearing your own feces on yourself as a protest, next to the fact that next to the original film, there is none of the camp fun, only this sense of sarcasm which I cannot vibe with well. Even as lurid horror comedies, the first has a generic plot pace for me as a viewer, and the latter is neither a plot with a point nor a weird tangent fest like horror cinema at its weirdest, so I find myself a fan of neither for countless reasons.