A second detour sign a bit farther down directs the Northern drivers to turn right down the ill-maintained dirt track that leads, in about a quarter of a mile, to the little town of Pleasant Valley, South Carolina, population 2000.
When he spies an isolated vehicle with Northern license plates- like that Ford from Illinois or that Mercury from… wait, who had blue text on mustard yellow in the mid-60’s? Pennsylvania, maybe? New Jersey?- he signals ahead to his friend, Lester McDonald (Ben Moore, of She Freak and Moonshine Mountain), who replaces the sign pointing Atlanta-ward with another announcing a detour down the little-traveled Route 202. Virtually alone among Lewis’s pioneering but uniformly awful gore-horror films, Two Thousand Maniacs! has something going on beneath the surface, and what gets revealed during those last few minutes is a crucial part of it.ġ10 miles north of Atlanta, a young man whom we will come to know as Rufus Tate (Gary Bakeman) stands perched in a tall tree by the side of the highway, peering at passing cars through a pair of binoculars. I do so because the twist is integral to what elevates this movie so far above what would seem to be its natural level, making it stand out so starkly from the rest of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s mostly worthless output, and because there is thus no other way to explain why someone who has already subjected themselves to Blood Feast or The Wizard of Gore or any of the rest of that crap would stand to gain anything by giving Two Thousand Maniacs! a chance.
Fair warning: Two Thousand Maniacs! has a twist ending, and I’m going to spoil the shit out of it.
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