Hello, and welcome to the Scary Toilet!

What the fuck is a scary toilet you ask? Well, it is a lot of things, all coming together here in a big brown, run on sentence. This is the sewer pipe of Marc and Annie’s site and I ladies and gentlemen, am the Janitor, your host as it were. While you backstroke around in my filth, I’ll be waiting by the door to give you a towel. This is where Marc and Annie flush things they don’t want to look at. There are alligators here and wedding rings, dirty diapers and dead birds, all manner of cast-off and forgotten items. Hop in the swan boat and let’s take a look around. Just keep your extremities inside the boat and you’ll be alright.

On your left you’ll likely spot a lot of older films that have become lost due to rights issues, which prevents them from making their appearance on DVD, poor bastards. We’ll dust some of them off for you from time to time. Leaning on my mop I will pontificate their value and lament their unavailability.

Around the next bend in the pipe, on the right, you’ll notice low-brow junction, these are cinema’s brown trout, stuff considered smelly and flushable. They often gather to party before anyone notices the shitter is clogged. This is where current unmentionables get piled up, the debris that Marc and Annie call me in to fish out before company arrives and comment on the stench. Uwe Boll can be found here and so can fantabulous mistakes like Snakes on a (cgi) Plane.

Finally, we come to the bowels of the bowl, where shit tends to settle. Here is where I will be grabbing today’s selection; older classics that deserve recognition for their impact on the genre, even if they don’t bring in much revenue anymore. A lot of these films (like today’s ) are definitely not shit but simply settled like sediment for all of us horror bottom feeders to dig up and look at.

Two Thousand Maniacs!

Directed by: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Written by: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Starring: William Kerwin, Connie Mason, Jeffrey Allen, Ben Moore

Deadly DVD Rating: 3 tarnished stars!

You know old Herschell Gordon Lewis, the Godfather of Gore, if you don’t then get the Hell out of my bowl! The man is a legend and needs no introduction here. His films are legendary for their excessive gore, bad acting, and do it yourself attitude. They made him a wildcard in the film business. H.G. did things his way and took risks that few others back in the 60’s would. He first popped up back in 1960 with a picture called The Prime Time. He went on to direct five more after The Prime Time, before hitting on the gore angle in 1963, when he directed the infamous Blood Feast!

Enjoying the success and notoriety of Blood Feast Lewis followed with Two Thousand Maniacs! the following year. This time around, he staged his notorious murder set pieces in the tiny town of “Pleasant Valley”, Deep South U.S.A. (In actuality it is St. Cloud, Florida). He brought back Blood Feast stars Connie Mason and William Kerwin, who after meeting on the set of Blood Feast were married, and remained so until 1989 when Kerwin passed away.

Two Thousand Maniacs is the story of two car-loads of unlucky Yankees. Diverted by a mock detour sign, the “carpetbaggers” find themselves the guests of honor at Pleasant Valley’s Centennial celebration. Unbeknownst to our protagonists, they are a lot more than just guests here; they are sacrificial retribution in retaliation for atrocities committed by Union soldiers, 100 years earlier. Say that ten times fast and I’ll slap you with my fuckin’ mop!

What follows are some of the silver screens most interesting (and dumb) kills! Setting the ‘pigeons up’ in the town’s hotel, the Mayor (Jeffrey Allen) clandestinely plans each guest’s demise with the help of some local talent. Hot and dumb is the price of admission and it won’t be long until the blood begins to flow! Splitting up the first pair of damn Yankees, the ‘Millers’, ‘John’ (Jerome Eden) and ‘Bea’ (Shelby Livingston), proves to be far easier than you would think, “Bea” is taken for a walk by local overweight lothario ‘Harper Alexander’ (Mark Douglas) who shows her his southern hospitality by cutting off her thumb and then delivering her to his friends to finish the job with an axe! Hubby ‘John doesn’t fare much better after getting liquored up by townie tart ‘Betsy’ (Linda Cochran), and ending up drawn and quartered as the evenings entertainment.

After all that, there is still more with the infamous barrel roll with nails and boulder baseball on the town common, all perpetrated by insanely-grinning locals, who act as if they were at the fair watching their progeny chase pigs. Maniacal fun, as gleeful as any ever placed on the screen. Back in the 60’s, this film was as disturbing to people as Cannibal Holocaust and Texas Chainsaw would be in the 70’s. It was the beginning of the extreme and say what you will about the acting talent of beautiful Connie Mason or the plot holes that trucks could have maneuvered through, it was still groundbreaking for its time.

Sure it was hokey, and wooden doesn’t quite do justice to just how bad the acting was, but it has a nostalgic charm. Especially if you, like myself, were a bit traumatized as a child by some of Herschell’s other nasties. It did me some good though, because there is an innocence to this carnage that can’t help but take you back to the days when you were a little girl in your pink taffeta dress……..maybe I’ve said too much. Stop hitting me! I’ll clean it all up and then we can go jump rope or find little Billy and see if he wants to go strangle some Yankee cats.

I had better get back to work now because Marc and Annie don’t pay me to talk to you and it kind of hurts when they throw shit at my head and pick on me for being ugly! Its O.K. though cause if they only knew what I did to their coffee in the morning they wouldn’t be so goddamned smug would they?

Y’all come back now ya hear! We got us all kinds of fun down here in the Scary Toilet and we really want to play with you! I’ll come back in a couple weeks and do some plunging and we’ll see what we can find floating next time!