Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat (2002), by H.G. Lewis


While Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat was Herschell Gordon Lewis' third-to-last film, it is nonetheless a fitting finale to his career. I wish I had been the age I am now in 2002 so I could properly bask in the hype that surely arose when a sequel to Blood Feast was announced, and yet I think it's just as fun to look at this movie fourteen years later. How long-ago and embarrassing the early 2000s seem. Yes, they're largely embarrassing because that was when I was a kid, but a lot of people say that the 20th Century had a particular hold on trash that our present time has yet to duplicate. If you cruise the "21st Century" tag here on the A-List, you'll find movies that range from Noah to Five Across the Eyes. We've managed to do strange just fine--just not nearly as frequently, it seems.

But what about the mega-terror of the embarrassment that is the self-aware super-late sequel? There's nothing but cringing in movies like Hobgoblins 2--if the first movie was bad, in ways that both killed it (as in Hobgoblins) or let it thrive (such as Blood Feast), self-awareness is never, ever, ever, ever the answer. Shitty self-awareness is why people hate postmodernism. And yet, it's an inevitable product of postmodernism itself--we really are moving into so-called "transmodernism" as postmodernism itself becomes a joke. We are reacting to and building upon an art movement that has become popular. As you might expect by the fact that I'm even talking about postmodernism or transmodernism in the first place, I enjoy good postmodern works. And going into this movie, I tried to put faith in Lewis as an intelligent and ambitious but occasionally clumsy and wrong-headed director--someone who would make good use of the lateness of his sequel. I like to think that my faith was well-placed.

After an extremely bizarre Beast of Yucca Flats-style opening, involving two roadkill-eating hillbillies murdering each other for no discernible reason, we cut to a young man moving into his new catering shop. He is Fuad Ramses III, grandson of the killer from the first Blood Feast. He seems to be an ordinary fellow at first, even if he's warned by the local police detective that the locals probably won't trust him for what his grandfather did--inside the very halls of Fuad's new digs, even! However, Fuad III discovers his predecessor's old statue to Ishtar, though it clearly isn't the same spraypainted mall mannequin from the first movie. The statue seems to possess him, and he begins to transform into a copy of his grandfather, adopting his speech patterns and tendency to arrange "Egyptian feasts." This seems to be an act of fate, as an injury incurred by one of his victims gives him Fuad I's Torgo-esque limp! From there history repeats itself, as Fuad tracks down the guests of the wedding party he is to cater to, removing their body parts and turning them into food as a sacrifice to his goddess. That's it, really, until it reaches a relatively straightforward--albeit pretty hilarious--climax.

Blood Feast 2 has the primary fault of being overly repetitive. Like A Taste of Blood, BF2AUCE is a long film and not merely by H.G.'s standards. Most of this time is spent with builds up to and executions of either gory murder sequences (often featuring by-now familiar Goofy H.G. Lewis Songs) or scenes of women acting dumb and taking their clothes off. Fine. Blood Feast had that too, albeit to a more minimized extent--Blood Feast 2 has more nudity and is generally gorier. And certainly anyone who is a diehard Blood Feast fan is going to want to see more of the same. It's played with creatively at points. Lewis lampshades his own hammy dialogue, and has managed to get enough of the main cast to replicate the strange combination of wooden clunkiness and community-theatre scenery-chewing that his original cast insisted on, in a way that is clearly tongue-in-cheek. (It was probably tongue-in-cheek back then, too.) And yet self-awareness is not always salvation. Blood Feast was barely over an hour. To essentially do what that first film did for an extra hundred minutes stretches my ability to use pastiche as a defense...which I should say is saying something. Yet, it is good to see the master behind the wheel here--for indeed, there were Blood Feast knockoffs here and there, which generally lacked Lewis' panache (Bloodsucking Pharaohs from Pittsburgh, anybody?). Lewis does a good job of preserving the spirit he had in '63, though he does so perhaps a bit too strictly. (Weirdly, the best metaphor I came up with while watching it was that it was like a porn. Everything was meant to set up the actors to Go At It, whether that was stripping or killing, in the place of fucking. I've heard of that sort of accusation being leveled at gore films before, that they structurally resemble sexual material and that that adds to their supposed depravity. I don't really think I'm in a position to judge one way or the other, but after seeing many gore films in my life, including a depressing number of [bad] torture porn films, none struck me so much as being like porn than Blood Feast 2.)

All U Can Eat is much more directly a comedy than Blood Feast, which made me dread watching it a little bit. As a rule, I hate, hate, hate horror comedies, and I was worried that Lewis was going to go all Poultrygeist on me. I like to think that the good stuff in this movie makes up for the bad. This movie is pretty sexist--I expected it. "Women are dumb and bitchy but they look good nekkid and scream well" is the general maxim here, and it is usually played for laughs or general sleaze-rooted humor. Plus, it gets old fast when we keep seeing that Detectives Myers and Loomis (HAW HAW HAW GEDIT) are, respectively, prone to vomiting around corpses and being obsessed with food. Because Loomis is FAT, and fat people are simply OBSESSED with food. As the Traflamadorians say, so it goes. I enjoy these movies, love them even, and will return to them repeatedly, and yet I hate the idea that I'm supposed to turn off my brain while watching them when it comes to sexism and stupid jokes. There is no happy medium for me, and this is why nobody watches horror comedies with me. That having been said, I will still laugh at offensive jokes. John Waters has a cameo in this movie, and it's great. Maybe it's just that I love seeing John Waters in things, especially when his character is just Waters-as-himself in costume. I also laughed when Fuad started arguing about Detective Myers' use of the phrase "turn up missing"--after all, someone can't "turn up" if they're missing, right? It is, as one should expect from a 21st Century horror comedy, far from perfect. And there's that paradox again. You really can't expect something even close to perfect, can you...?

So it goes, so it goes. I really, really liked this movie, even if I won't judge anyone who cuts out twenty minutes or so from their personal viewing. I'm glad I'm not disappointed. 2016 wasn't a great year, let's just say. I don't know what comes up after here. I'm glad, however, that H.G. Lewis was a man who existed. He and others like him deserve to be remembered, because even if their movies were trash, they're another way out of the horrors of our horrible world. And they remind us it's not horrible at all. We have...entertainment. We have people striving to make people laugh or scream or just be happy, and we have the times when those people marvelously succeed. I hope I've joined Mr. Lewis and others in helping to keep your spirits up a little. Because in all likelihood, you deserve it.

We'll see you in 2017! Thank you so much, all of you, for stopping by. None of this would be possible without you. You are the true A-Listers. Or just generally awesome. Have a happy New Year. OR ELSE.

Tuesday, December 20, 2016

A Taste of Blood (1967), by H.G. Lewis



There's a curse that happens often to creators. The things we make that we love the most are often viewed by others as our worst crap; and the stuff we churn out just to pay the bills is usually seen as our classics. Conan Doyle hated Sherlock Holmes, but he covered the rent--meanwhile, M. Night Shyamalan seems to consistently believe he's onto something big with each new project and yet everyone harkens for the days of The Sixth Sense. That brings us to this entry in our H.G. Lewis retrospective: the one he hoped everyone would remember for. Herschell Gordon adamantly believed that A Taste of Blood was his magnum opus, which is why the thing runs for nigh-on two hours. I suppose I'd be cheating with that curse if I applied a more critical lens than usual to this film, but if a movie is proclaimed to be one's personal best, and if it's going to make me sit still for 120 fucking minutes, I'm going to study the holy hell out its every bad inch. Of course, when that movie is ostensibly an adaptation of Dracula, I have to go full Academe™, 'cause Dracula, after all, is "High Art!" Even if it is honestly remembered more because of its adaptations, rather than literary merit--one need look no further than The Lair of the White Worm, with its twisted syphilitic misogyny, to see the prose failings of Bram Stoker, brimming with hate for the same wife who would viciously defend his copyrights after his death, nearly resulting in the complete destruction of all prints of Nosferatu. But I digress. We're here to talk about H.G., and study him in what he viewed as his greatest triumph. Does A Taste of Blood stand up? Well...we'll just have to see!

John Stone is a wealthy businessman with a devil-may-care attitude towards his wife Helene and his business partner/flirt-buddy Hester. He receives a large package from London, and it is the first large package that John has probably received because he is a sexist pig, even by H.G. Lewis standards. "Maybe my friends in London sent me Anne Boleyn's chopping block!" he jokes. His wife replies, "I hope her head isn't still attached." He shoots back: "If it is, at least she'll have learned to keep her mouth shut!" HAW HAW HAW. Of course, he's hardly the biggest idiot in the early parts of the movie, as both Hester and the deliveryman don't seem to notice that the mysterious box is smeared with blood. John, Helene, and Hester learn that the box contains brandy from John's ancestor "Baron Khron," with a deed to the Khron family estate in London, and instructions to drink a toast to the Baron. When John does so he slowly becomes a different person: literally. It turns out that Baron Khron's wicked brandy is transforming John into the reincarnation of Count Dracula. He becomes distant and cold to his wife, and moves to England to begin killing descendants of Jonathan and Mina Harker, Quincey Morris, and Lord Godalming, the members of the group that struck down Dracula in the 1890s. Of course, when Helene's friend Hank gets involved, he finds a Dr. Howard Helsing at his side. Will they be able to stop the vampiric Stone? Or will Helene be his next (neck's) victim?

A Taste of Blood is interesting because while it is a Lewis movie through and through, it is also, in its own way, two films. The way the characters interact, and the many--too many--scenes of characters in rooms talking to each other, which are often used as the only manner of character development, are very much Lewis' work. This includes the sexism, which I'll get to in a moment. These scenes often contain some truly strange dialogue; believable dialogue to be sure, but somewhat off in a way that could have been fixed with some editing. First John is talking to Hester about a trip to Hawaii, where if she drinks too much coconut rum, she'll end up "dancing the Hawaiian war-dance." (Ah, so he's racist, too.) But Hester's response is, "Ah, a man who likes efficient women." Are we supposed to correlate a war-dance with efficiency somehow? Is she being sarcastic about the inverse relationship between efficiency and getting sloshed off your ass? She's one to talk--were it not for off-ass-sloshing, many of her costars wouldn't have their careers!

But once John becomes a vampire, there are some notable departures from the Lewis mold. There is little blood in this movie, much less people getting their tongues ripped out or arms hacked off. There's definitely a Universal vibe here, especially in the interactions between Dr. Helsing and John/Dracula, even if there's still some trademark Lewis silliness as far as choices characters make--and he plays with shadows and muted images in a way that contrasts the Batman '66 approach of the pop-gore Blood Feast. My experience with Lewis' films after this one are that they do not reattempt the Gothic shadow spookiness--the ever-tedious Wizard of Gore, for example, is like Yellow Submarine in my memory. If Lewis doesn't succeed here with atmosphere, it's because he employs it scarcely. While it was admirable for him to try for subtle creeps, Lewis worked best with a cudgel. That's how he made the stuff he did as audacious as it was. Loudness was never a second point on the list for him. And mercifully, the film's divide is never as extreme as it was in Lewis' earlier effort, Monster a-Go Go, which was completed by Bill "The Giant Spider Invasion" Rebane, which never resembles either a Rebane film or a Lewis one.

And yet there are still some interesting thematic tidbits I want to crack open. The movie, as I said, is sexist, but there is an interesting subversion in the fact that it is patrilineage that dooms John to vampirism. John remarks on how his mother was Baron Khron's descendant, and yet she was not the recipient of the brandy, nor was her mother. Hester replies that John is Khron's "only heir," as contrasted from heiress. If John had been Joan, then presumably she would have been spared. (But then, if you think about it, Dracula's awfully exclusionary for not wanting to reincarnate into a woman...) What's more is that John's vampirism makes him abusive to his wife in a particular way: he becomes cold to her. No lusty vampire is he, it seems--the problem with vampirism, Lewis seems to say, is that it creates barriers between the sexes. The love they have for each should save each other, but the evil that has come upon them turns John away from that love. It's telling that Hank and Helene develop feelings for each other, though that may be a small victory for Helene, as Hank has a tendency to be as irksome as John. Nonetheless, masculinity is not wholly the heart of the triumph here. It's the men who are the true monsters of the film.

Speaking of Hank, there is an interesting part where he jokes about how he get during "a full moon." Man, imagine if it turned out that there was a werewolf in this movie, too! Then H.G. might have crossed the threshold from what is ultimately an overlong and over-padded film into an Al Adamson wonderland a la Dracula vs. Frankenstein. I can see that H.G. wanted to aim for the artistic rather than the schlocky this time, but sometimes, if you're really good at knocking haymakers into people's face, you don't end up any good at taekwondo. If you want to see the man's wackiness at work it's still a good watch, but Lewis' true artistic-aesthetic powerhouse was Jimmy, the Boy Wonder. Not only does Lewis voice Baron Khron, doing a reasonable Russian-type accent, but he also plays a character known only as "Limey Sailor." Trust me, I tried to analyze these scenes to figure out why exactly Lewis chose these roles in the movie he considered to be his diamond. But all I could come up with was another question, a parallel: why did Jess Franco play a piano player in all of his movies?

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Jimmy, the Boy Wonder (1966), by H.G. Lewis



There are a lot of things that make being a critic worth it, and I have to admit, to be able to force my readers to make the jump from Two Thousands Maniacs! to Jimmy, the Boy Wonder fills my stuttering, emaciated heart with some sort of sick joy. Any H.G. Lewis fan familiar with his filmography will know how weird is to think that the same man who brought us the first explicit tongue-ripping scene in cinematic history also made a goddamn kids movie. What's more, that kids movie is bizarrely imaginative--far from an unsung classic for the genre, but a breakout effort nonetheless. Of course, you already know I have a bias! This movie is weird as fuck, so of course I'm going to praise it!

Jimmy J. is a kid with a grown-up's schedule. His mom wants him to eat breakfast, take a shower, get on the bus, all at the same time! It's enough to make him wish that time would stop, and unfortunately this is a kids movie, so wishes can warp time and space. To be specific: every 1,000 years there is a single moment where the heart of the Great Clock, which rules all of time, is exposed to the sun, and as such, is vulnerable to wishes. Jimmy's words make time stop, as shown in a series of segments where clearly not all the actors got the same cue to "freeze." Fortunately, Aurora, the daughter of an astronomer-wizard, decides to help Jimmy on his quest to undo his wish by restoring the Great Clock. The two are stopped along the way by Mr. Fig, a checkered-jacket, Dan-Dare-eyebrowed motherfucker who wants to stop time permanently, because statistically there would be at least one individual who would want that. Mr. Fig is a legitimately creepy bastard, grabbing Jimmy, shoving his face up near his, and barely disguising the fact that he hates everything good in the cosmos. But Jimmy is no idiot (the whole time-freezing thing wasn't done out of malice or even misunderstanding, just a lack of awareness that it was a possibility) and throughout this entire movie Mr. Fig's plans fall flat one after another.

The quest takes Jimmy and Aurora to Slow-Motion Land, which is a great way to show off the fact that your editor is familiar with film-speed effects that were wowing audiences six decades prior; to the land of the Green Indians, which ends with Aurora pelting people with hard candy; and to a public domain cartoon that was redubbed by Lewis and Friends to fill out another twenty minutes of the movie. Yes, before you ask, there are musical numbers, and frankly, the songs are not horrible--those with bad lyrics are usually sung well, and those that are sung poorly at least have fun words to them. When we aren't breaking into song the soundtrack is pelted with generic cartoon library cues, and an astonishing number of these cues appear in a lot of the exploitation movies that Lewis' contemporaries were working on. It's a kids movie so there's not much more to it than that: singing, random goofy events, moving towards a general quest conclusion. Jimmy and Aurora don't really go through character development, but we at least learn who they are, and as a team, the two actors work well together.

Overall, the acting is pretty solid. When people fail they are catastrophically awful. But for a kids movie, this is acceptable. You get an impression of earnestness throughout the whole thing, a dedication to the director if not the concept, which is prioritized over the sense of a paycheck. In a kids movie, this is everything. While kids movies have always been decadent and money-hungry, it's hard not to want to give up on a world that will turn out commercialized garbage like The Oogieloves. These movies need heart more than they need economic focus--I mean, they're for kids, after all! H.G. Lewis had nothing, and yet he still made something that's better than even a lot of the recent Dreamworks productions.

It's interesting because as it turns out, kids movies really depend on comedy, or at least a sense of fun, even if they should be allowed and encouraged to go into dark places. The general wackiness of the movie gives it a good atmosphere, and guess what, there are actual jokes that sell in this thing! That's something it's got over me, that's for sure. In a last-ditch effort to stop Jimmy, Mr. Fig tries to say he's turned good and wants to offer him food after his long journey: "Hot dogs...peanuts...popcorn...soda... handcuffs...oh, whoops!" Man, that's a joke that was probably way more innocent in '66...

Actually, that same scene offers a little tidbit that my brain wanted to use to transform the whole scope of the film. Mr. Fig barks at Jimmy, after he refuses again and again, "C'mon, kid! It's not an apple, it's a hot dog!" I had already been joking to myself about Mr. Fig being Satan in Jimmy's Christly Temptation, but there is something symbolic about a villain offering his hero food...in a jungle, no less! Of course, Mr. Fig is simply promising bodily nourishment, not knowledge of Good and Evil or the ability to turn stones to bread. But to view Mr. Fig in the Satanic tempter sense, perhaps literally, gives him an added depth, and indeed depth in the first place--he's not human, we know that much, as he fades away all creepy-like just like Charlie Evans from Star Trek when he's beaten. Plus, whoever he is, he's immune to time itself halting in its tracks. There are probably some Lovecraftian tentacles hiding behind that Robbie Rotten-esque face.

There's some other creepy stuff about the movie besides the slimy Fig. How do you account for the weird half-second close-ups of the strange faces the Green Indians keep making? It jars me every time. Oh, the Green Indians are exactly what you think they are, by the way, and they're racist to be sure, but there's something about being gawked at by a white man in greenface dressed as a Native American stereotype that is visceral even outside of racism. Weirder still is the fact that the Green Indians wear purple pants. This was four years after Marvel Comics started publishing the adventures of a certain green-skinned fellow. Coincidence?

The Green Indians of course represent the main fault in the film, the main thing that's aged poorly. I feel like it's doubly offensive for a kids movie to be racist, because racist media, of course, makes people feel excluded and encourages that exclusion; to exclude kids, and encourage kids of differing races to reduce their peers to stereotypes, is particularly foul. They're not around for long, though, and the good nonsense comes back again.

H.G. Lewis was a filmmaker who cared when he could, which was often, and had luck where he lacked talent. Jimmy, the Boy Wonder is an artifact of what happens when underground or outsider artists aim for something a bit more socially acceptable. As long as they don't compromise their personality, there's bound to be a spark of something in it. And I don't think Lewis could compromise his personality if he tried.

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), by H.G. Lewis


We lost Herschell Gordon Lewis earlier this year, and in the wake of Bookvember and Spookyween I promised a look back at four films made by the Godfather of Gore. In 1963, Lewis' Blood Feast cracked open a new sort of filmmaking--gore-trash was born, and things would never be the same. Blood Feast was only the beginning, and it served as the opening part of what would become Lewis' "Blood Trilogy," consisting of Blood Feast, Two Thousands Maniacs!, and 1965's Color Me Blood Red and it's that second film we'll be looking at today. (We probably won't be looking at Color Me Blood Red because I think Lewis lost some steam on that one.) And before we start, I want to clarify something: when I started planning this month, realizing that Two Thousand Maniacs was a given (as it is on my A-List), I wasn't anticipating a Trump victory. In the wake of this election, a movie about a town full of right-wing Southerners trapping and killing Northerners to avenge the Confederate loss of the Civil War will be...interesting, to say the least. So break out yer finest moonshine, and pluck a song on the banjo. We're goin' down under the Mason-Dixon line.

We open with a song sung by none other than Lewis itself, recounting the defeat of the major Confederate generals during the Civil War, done in the style of a stereotypical "hick" ballad--like many things in Lewis' horror movies this is played for laughs. As this song plays we see a group of yokels move signs and tree branches to divert a pair of cars into the town of Pleasant Valley. The entire town comes out to greet these Northerners, proclaiming that they are holding their centennial celebration and they've been looking for outsiders to make into their guests of honor. Despite the oddness of such a proposal--and despite the fact that they've been invited to stay two whole days--the travelers agree to such "Southern hospitality." Almost immediately the audience is shown that there is something sinister about this town, aside from the fact that it is literally plastered with Confederate flags. And the characters only notice this when it is far too late: for the name of the game here, essentially, fucked up carnival games, like a "horse race" that turns out to be drawing-and-quartering, or going down a hill in a barrel...lined with nails! That's to say nothing of the "emergency surgery" they get ready for a woman who "accidentally" loses her thumb...or the cannibalism. Yes, this is all to make up for an incident a hundred years ago where the Union Army decided not only to butcher the Confederate forces they were facing, but the inhabitants of Pleasant Valley as well. Of course, there is a twist ending which reveals that these new folk in Pleasant Valley may not quite be the original victims' descendants.

Two Thousand Maniacs! is a movie that thrives on being high concept. A town of vengeful Southerners kill Northerners in wacky and gruesome ways, behind the guise of Southern kindness. That is your one-sentence premise; nuance is not what Lewis aims for, and I think that shows in that I can't tell you the name of a single character from this movie (though the movie certainly establishes its characters, even in a thin way--there are familiar faces). But what makes high concept, single-sentence stories interesting to talk about is that we get to fill in the nuance ourselves, in contrast to the didactic style of the complicated, experimental works which I will equally defend. Like I said, a movie like this is gonna say some weird things in the wake of a Trump victory. So let's get into my reaction.

When I first saw Two Thousand Maniacs, I found it as amusing and wonderful as the other Lewis movies I saw. I will not hide from the fact that now, today (I write this back on November 10th), Two Thousand Maniacs is actually pretty chilling if you are a minority concerned about the future, as I am. Never mind the fact that my new copy of the movie doesn't have the psychedelic Technicolor of the first print I saw, which highlighted that the blood was the too-bright red paint that Lewis employed to save money. Never mind the lack of realism concerning the violence, or how the characters handle it. What has happened in America in 2016 is a result of a lack of understanding of the dynamics of power and privilege, and that lack of understanding was carried by rural, non-college whites. For better or worse, the murderous Confederates in this film are part of the liberal narrative of who we should be afraid of, and even if I recognize that neither the liberal or conservative ways of things are absolutely correct, it's scary, having grown up with the liberal side of things, to be faced with the prospect of bands of regression-worshiping idiots (for remember, stupid people are scary 'cause they're immune to logic) who use their majority to torture and murder people. Of course, I'm of the mind that it's more complicated than both Lewis and the modern media let on: the people who support Trump, along with the people who supported the Confederacy, were victimized by Republicans (or Democrats, in the 1860s) who wanted to make them into their pawns, and shaped the media and education systems to this end. The xenophobia and intolerance shared by both Trump supporters and the slave-owning South are inherently unnatural, and culture can be changed to help people understand the intersectional function of power in our society--but I majorly digress. I am viscerally scared of the events of Two Thousand Maniacs if I understand that things are more complicated than my feelings let on.

Moving away from my own feelings, we have the movie itself. There's an interesting distinction I noticed. While 1964 was definitely in the middle of the Civil Rights movement, being fifty years closer to the Civil War has made a lot of difference. Even a lot of whites these days get on edge in the presence of the Stars and Bars, and yet the protagonists of Maniacs never seem to worry about being Yankees in a town that has spent millions of dollars on flag orders. Again, they are white--think of how different the movie would be if there was a single person of color in the cast--but we so readily assign that flag status as a symbol of hate today.

And that leads me to my next point: even beyond that detail, the protagonists are pretty naive. While I get that people might be more generally trusting, even outside the flag issue, in 1964, it takes a little bit of stupidity for someone to choose to derail their trip for two days to participate in a small town festival. The male lead of the story is even supposed to be headed for a teachers' conference, and his car has already broken at this point--only through hitchhiking with the female lead did he make it this far. And it's interesting to focus in on the fact that Lewis chose his male lead to be a teacher, of all things. He's played by the same guy who played the manly police detective in Blood Feast, so maybe his masculine charms are supposed to represent a self-assurance that things will turn out okay, but it's hard to write off the fact that the movie ends with our teacher friend telling the female lead that the best thing to do about discovering this patch of murderous, past-obsessed hatred...is to forget about it. What's that? The white middle-class educator wants to ignore a crime committed by his fellow whites? One which, because this is the Confederate South we're talking about here, is inevitably and irrevocably tied up in racism? Shocking.

I don't know if this style of filmmaking is what's needed for what's ahead in politics--and yes, that's a serious question I asked myself. I say that because I helped publish a book called The Fires of '16: Reign of Emperor Tromble. It was published before the election, and it's one of those things where it takes an offensive group and wallows in their awfulness, out of anger, out of a complete inability to digest their worldview. I'm sure it was written with good intentions, but wallowing is stagnation. It doesn't help anyone, because it doesn't move forward. Two Thousand Maniacs wasn't intended at all, probably, to be a progressive film in any way, but I'll interpret it with that lens, because even if the Godfather were still alive today, I will claim Death of the Author. (And I celebrate it for his intended goal for it, a gory, silly horror movie.) Were it not for the fact that it implicitly calls out its Northern characters alongside its reactionary ones, Two Thousands Maniacs would be simply a slate for the anger its creator had over the crimes of the South, both in the past and the present, representing only how disgusting and low humanity can sink. (And the ending very directly says that this way of life is literally dead.) By adding in a degree of care to his plotting, Lewis has asked us to look at the bigger picture, and to understand where us "do-gooders" fall into the scheme of things when it comes to violence and hatred.