In the search for his next moneymaker in the world of exploitation movies in the 1960s, Herschell Gordon Lewis directed this zippy hillbilly flick aimed square at the drive-ins of the Deep South.
It’s got everything.
Homemade moonshine galore. Loud guys who wear overalls and casually wield shotguns. Pretty hillbilly girls. Missing front teeth. A sheriff who doesn’t hesitate to draw his pistol at the mere sight of a stranger in town. Guitar pickin’. Folk song singin’. Violence and just a little dib-dab of rape.
While this is not one of his signature gore films (though it has its harsh moments), it’s still pure Lewis in its amateur acting and its clumsy staging and its strange sense of humor. Right up to its violent climax, I’m comfortable calling this one a flat-out comedy. The over-the-top country bumpkin stuff is played for laughs. Even the credits are funny.
While watching it, I kept thinking about how this feels like the B-side of Lewis’s splatter classic Two Thousand Maniacs! from that same year. Both share a few cast members. Both are also strong examples of the genre that’s come to be called hixploitation, but this one is about a rich country music star who leaves his home in New York to spend two weeks in the smallest, most removed town he can find down in Robert E. Lee country. He thinks it will be inspiring somehow. He doesn’t tell anyone who he is and nobody knows who he is (they don’t have TVs or read magazines). Along the way, he gets shot at, sings at gunpoint at a barn dance, falls in love, pisses off his leggy fiance back home, and stumbles across a series of murders when Lewis and writer/lead actor Charles Glore realize over halfway into the movie that they forgot to come up with a plot. It’s entertaining stuff.
In interviews, Herschell Gordon Lewis was always very forthcoming about how he never had any interest in filmmaking as an art. He never considered himself an artist. It was all about the money. Once his films ran their course in the drive-ins and grindhouses, he fully expected them to never be seen again and he was fine with that.
So, it’s always fascinating to me how his films, nevertheless, still have a real snap to them. That goes for even something like this. It isn’t one of his best, but it still moves fast and holds up several decades later as a weird good time.