2001 Maniacs (2006) – DVD

*½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Robert Englund, Lin Shaye, Giuseppe Andrews, Travis Tritt
screenplay by Chris Kobin and Tim Sullivan
directed by Tim Sullivan

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Carol Clover has a lot to answer for. Prior to the advent of her Men, Women, and Chain Saws, slasher films were unambiguously misogynist, and hillbilly horror was unambiguously anti-South. Now the converse is stridently true, failing to take into account the infinitesimal cross-identifications that make both readings possible. 2001 Maniacs is interesting as a film that simultaneously mocks and sympathizes with ruthless killers from the destroyed South–it at once punishes and identifies with its Yankee victims, thwarting a straight-ahead reading. Its genre is rather like Daniel Auteuil in Caché: aware that there might be some crime in the past, but unable to deal with it once confronted with it. Alas, 2001 Maniacs is not interesting on any other level. The film is an 87-minute issue of FANGORIA, complete with bad puns and hard-R violence and distended by some smarmy shots at the characters who might be expected to want revenge.

As if taking its cues from Clover, the film opens with a college class on the North's crimes during the Civil War, a lesson pointedly hijacked by the insertion of party photos in the digital slideshow. Professor Ackerman (Peter Stormare) then has to chew out Anderson Lee (Jay Gillespie) and his buddies Nelson (Dylan Edrington) and Cory (Matthew Carey) for their lousy papers, ordering them to rewrite them over spring break. They naturally choose otherwise by taking a reading-week pilgrimage to Daytona Beach–but as their screw-the-South attitude is due for punishment, they take a detour to the town of Pleasant Valley. There they encounter hot women in bustiers, leering degenerates with permanent grins, and Mayor Buckman (Robert Englund), who welcomes the trio (and a raft of other suckers) without mentioning that they're about to be brutally killed and eaten.

Unfortunately, director Tim Sullivan and co-writer Chris Kobin haven't made up their minds on who's zoomin' who. The kids are clearly out of line with their mockery of their hosts, but they're not the ones dressed in Frederick's of Hollywood getup: the townspeople are half-remembered memories of degenerate Southerners with bad accents and, for the women, thoroughly ludicrous costumes that are like some PLAYBOY spread on Girls of the Sociopathic South. It's clear that the Disney-porn milieu is largely for the facilitation of violence and bare breasts, which the film serves up in heaping portions. But though there are jolting scenes of carnage, it's still not enough to make up for the faux-cornpone dialogue and total lack of detail. Nothing has much punch because you know everybody's kidding, and everybody has a part to play in what doesn't mean much at all.

The film is based on H.G. Lewis's gore exemplar Two Thousand Maniacs!, and while I haven't seen that particular film, I know of Lewis's gruesome temperament and casual dismissal of human values. His movies are potent because he's invested in his charnel-house view of life–a matter compounded by his lackadaisical mise-en-scène and disregard for craft. 2001 Maniacs doesn't have a lot of craft to it, either, mostly because it refuses to play ball: faced with an opportunity to map a position pro-or-con, it decides to pretend that there's nothing at stake. It's a purely functional exercise in which it doesn't matter who's on which side, since you can't have one without the other: you need your sympathetic victims AND your guilt trip, with the zero-sum game adding up to nothing at all. If the genre itself is confused, the jokey and imprecise approach of the filmmakers only intensifies the effect–and the results are, unsurprisingly, a fizzle.

THE DVD
2001 Maniacs comes to DVD on identically-configured platters from Lionsgate in the U.S. and Maple in Canada. The 1.78:1, 16×9-enhanced image is a little wonky in the colour department: skin tones can glow or be similarly discoloured, while a pallid sheen takes over certain shots. The Dolby Digital 5.1 sound, meanwhile, is sharp and rings like crystal. Though the mix itself is not exactly complicated in the surround department, it still manages to put threatening music and ominous hum through the surround channels.

Extras begin with a commentary track featuring Sullivan and Englund, who prove bright and cheery about the old saws, chiefly: a) our devalued reference points (Forrest J. Ackerman, drive-in movies, Hammer horror); b) our pretentious escape hatches (Bruno Bettelheim, Joseph Campbell); and c) our celebrity cameos (Eli Roth, Travis Tritt, Johnny Legend). A second commentary teaming Sullivan with co-scribe Chris Cobin and producer Chris Tuffin supplements many of the first track's most salient points with recountings of the origins of the project (there are 2001 maniacs because they thought it would get made by 2001), the sneaky enlistment of Englund (who was bombarded with Internet questions about whether he was doing it–before he had even heard of it), and the fact that the filmmakers have no shame: they claim that when they show 2001 Maniacs in the South, it's a Yankee-baiter, but when they show it in the North, it's a Dixie-smacker.

A making-of documentary, "2001 Maniacs: Inside the Asylum" (42 mins.) covers the production soup to nuts: from the genesis of the project to the unique authentic location and "splatstick" approach to violence and humour to the many gore effects. As a revelation of the tech elements, this is pretty good, although it founders when anyone tries to get philosophical. Aside from the usual blah-blah about the legacy of horror, there's a painful bit where Sullivan explains that "hate is love flipped on its backside." You bet, Timmy.

A ludicrous and unnecessary menu of 27 deleted scenes is largely padded out with extended scenes and unbroken takes; there's a handful that will be of interest to makeup F/X buffs, one take of an MOS bedroom scene that's funny for the off-screen directions, a blooper, and a bunch of thoroughly uninteresting additions to already-uninteresting scenes. The only real find is an alternate intro in which John Landis chides our heroes instead of Peter Stormare. (David Friedman is on hand as his enforcer.) While the scene is much funnier than the current lead in, it's less splashy and was probably wisely cut for not opening the film big enough. A six-minute audition reel features various cast members in what looks like someone's garage, basement, and living room–it's a flailing free-for-all, but at least the production forced some of these people to shave their facial hair. The film's trailer plus trailers for Heebie Jeebies, The Mangler Reborn, Green River Killer, and Streets of Legend round things out.

87 minutes; R; 1.78:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1; CC; English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Lionsgate/Maple