Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964)

two-thousand-maniacs-crop-2A northener’s nightmare of the deep south and an all-time splatter classic. Georgia hayseeds keep an eye open for anyone who passes through with a northern license plate so they can trap and murder them in creative ways over an old Civil War grudge. Director Herschell Gordon Lewis did the psycho slasher thing in Blood Feast the previous year. Here, he gives us a WHOLE TOWN of crazies (population 2,000) who cheer as Yankee blood and guts spill all over the grass. To a soundtrack of hillbilly banjo music we get an axe dismemberment, a guy who gets drawn and quartered, a poor fella forced into a barrel lined with nails and then rolled down a hill and the classic “Teeterin’ Rock” boulder crushing.

Herschell Gordon Lewis’s best movie and his own favorite of his films.