The reason I even picked up 2001 Maniacs is because it had Robert Englund on the cover. His stint as Freddy would be the only thing that would make me even consider watching a movie about crazed, backwoods, cannibalistic Southerners. That being said, even Robert was not enough to make this movie really enjoyable.
The movie drags along for at least a half an hour, just getting the young adults that are going to be murdered to the town inhabited by the people that are going to murder them. I’m not going to go into how they manage to find their way to the random town but rest assured by this time, you are annoyed with them and just want them gone. They have no survival instinct anyway. Darwin would be pleased with the weeding of the gene pool.
I say they have no survival instinct because two of the people that join the young college co-eds are an interracial biker couple (Black man and Chinese woman). One would think that an adult Black male would decide that staying in a podunk town festively decorated with Confederate flags would be a bad idea. Hell, I’m a White woman and I would have been out of there faster than you could say, “Do you hear banjos?” But no, he stays, despite a blatantly racist bellboy who responds to his question of “Where do all the Black people hang?” with “Out from that tree yonder”. Again, I would have been gone. But no, he and his girlfriend decide to stay and enjoy the hospitality of blatant racists.
Just in case there was any doubt in your mind, this movie will quickly devolve into a T&A gorefest. It is not really surprising, considering that each of the boys, save for one, is heterosexual and horny. The other boy is homosexual and horny. There are 3 women that were in the group (2 co-eds, and the Chinese biker). One of these female co-eds develops feelings for one of the boy co-eds, the Chinese biker chick is in a committed relationship, which leaves the final girl (Kat) vulnerable to the attentions of the prettier hillbilly boy.
Starting with Kat (who gets drawn, quartered and fed to her unwitting friends) the others eventually get killed off by the crazy Southern cannibals. This all happens in the span of about two days, which is amazing, because the group of young adults there don’t care enough about their friends to stop everything and hunt them down. The Southerners are counting on this however, and have simple excuses, such as, “Oh she went off with that other guy” (that other guy is also missing and thus, unable to provide any answers).
The victims in this movie are just like sheep to a slaughter. They are easily divided from the herd and done in one by one. This is interspersed with Robert Englund’s character talking to his two boys (both are stupid but one continuously chases a sheep, named Jezebel, with carnal intentions) and telling them the plans of how they are going to kill the Yankees. I’m not going to go into the deaths of the kids, but I’m going to say that at least one would have been easily avoided, had the Chinese girl actually paid attention to what was going on around her. She starts out square dancing with some of the Southern girls and is led up the a small podium under a heavy cast iron bell. Granny, who is the town’s matriarch, is the one “calling” the square dance and starts talking about the “pretty China doll” and how she doesn’t know what is going to happen to her. Now, I would have stepped off the podium, or at least stopped dancing, especially when Granny grabbed the rope. However, she does not, and she gets smushed because of this. The gay guy, that has been watching this, stops clapping in tune with the song when he starts to realize that something is amiss. His gay Spidey-Sense, which he has been ignoring, has finally kicked in. She gets crushed, and he runs away, however, his legs are now as useful as noodles, because he keeps falling and is eventually caught. He dies after baiting Englund’s character with the knowledge that his son loved getting fucked by a man and he made him squeal like a piggy.
The movie ends with a boy and a girl managing to get away, looking like they have been pretty roughed up. They make their way to the local sheriff and tell him what happened. He follows them in his truck back to where the small town with the crazy people murdered their friends. When they get there, they only find a cemetery. The sheriff bitches the two out and tells them that if he had a dollar for every drunken college kid that played this prank on him, he could have retired years ago. The boy apologizes, and says it was a prank. The sheriff leaves and the two kids read the grave marker for Robert Englund’s character which says, that the graveyard is populated with the towns people that were murdered by a group of Rebel Yankee soldiers and they won’t find rest until each townsperson is avenged via blood. The two then ride off into the afternoon/sunset. This does not last long, however, because one of the crazy Southern teens strung a line of wire across the road, which, since the two are riding a motorcycle, does not end well. He then collects their heads and walks off into the sunset.
What is most frustrating about this movie, is not just the horrible acting, save for a handful of performances, it is not the way it alternates from being well shot to looking unprofessional, or even the way how it makes sure that everyone in the small Southern town is not just a stereotype but an over-exaggeration of just about every stereotype imaginable, it is the fact that all of the young adults could have made it out alive. The only reason they stayed in the town for as long as they did was because they didn’t want to offend the villagers. Their cell phones still worked. They knew where their belongings were. They could have easily just gone off into the night, or Hell, early morning. If they were afraid that their actions would have offended the Southerners, they could have easily lied about why they were leaving.
The plot holes keep the movie from being truly enjoyable, even though Robert Englund tries his hardest to have fun with his part and to make the audience have fun with him.
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