6.2 | / 10 |
Users | 3.9 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.7 |
Eight college students traveling to Florida for Spring Break stumble into a remote town in Georgia where they are set upon by the residents who are out to avenge their deaths by Union troops over 100 years earlier during the Civil War.
Starring: Robert Englund, Lin Shaye, Giuseppe Andrews, Jay Gillespie, Marla MalcolmHorror | 100% |
Comedy | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English, English SDH, Spanish
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 3.5 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 4.0 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Does anyone still go to drive-in movies? Are there even any drive-ins to go to anymore? Once it was an American ritual to load the family into the car on a Friday or Saturday night, and head off to the nearest outdoor cineplex, which in those days meant a wavy-asphalted parking lot with bizarre tin speakers (which, remarkably, produced a very tinny noise) which you could hang on the driver’s side window. You had to wait until after sundown for the feature to get started, and even then the image could fade off into the waning evening light. And of course there was always the idiot who would either turn on his headlights or honk his horn at inopportune times. Ah, the memories. The other ritual associated with drive-ins was, of course, the date movie. What could be better than just two young lovers cuddled up in the front seat (hey, this is a family site!), watching a classic film? Or, perhaps, a “splatter film” like 1964’s Two Thousand Maniacs, films which mixed outré humor and horror, all designed to get that squeamish girl a little closer to her erstwhile protector boyfriend. The name Herschell Gordon Lewis is probably not that familiar to a lot of readers, but he is credited with founding the “splatter film” genre, and one of his most fondly remembered films was indeed Two Thousand Maniacs. In 2005, director Tim Sullivan approached the material with a post-modern eye and came up with 2001 Maniacs, a film which preserves the nutty over the top drive-in style of the original while injecting a liberal dose of decidedly more recent teen sex angles than a 1964 audience would have tolerated. It’s hard to disparage a film which is so deliberately silly, and if taken in the proper context, 2001 Maniacs, while no masterpiece, is an enjoyable little romp that manages to carve out (pun intended) enough punchlines to at least partially negate any lingering qualms about a somewhat “not ready for prime time” feeling the film and cast generate.
Robert Englund heads the welcoming committee.
Eli Roth waxes enthusiastic about Tim Sullivan's love for the horror genre in one of the extras on this Blu-ray, saying that Sullivan loves a horror film if it cost $100,000 or $100 million. If those two amounts are taken as extremes on a scale, one would have to assume that 2001 Maniacs' budget came in considerably closer to the first figure than to the second, so that must be taken into consideration when assessing this Blu-ray's AVC encoded 1080p image, delivered in an aspect ratio of 1.78:1. This is frankly an often pretty cheap looking affair, as befits its drive-in ethos, so anyone expecting state of the art visuals is going to be sorely disappointed. Colors are decent enough, if never as over the top as the material might warrant, but the lasting impression of this Blu-ray is one of a pretty soft and fuzzy image, also marred by inconsistent contrast and black levels, making a lot of the darker scenes hazy at best. Outdoor, brightly lit scenes fare best, with good to very good detail and well saturated color.
2001 Maniacs' DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 is a good sight (or hear, as the case may be) better than the image, sharp (no pun intended) and clear with a variety of well positioned foley effects throughout the many slash, dash, crush and explode sequences which signal any given character's demise. The bright metallic sound of knives, redolent of none other than Freddy Krueger, dots this soundtrack with a quicksilver shininess, neat high frequency squeals of impended terror. LFE gets a somewhat lesser workout, kicking in mostly to support sounds like motorcycles and car engines. Dialogue is clear and clean, and there are some occasional nice ambient environmental effects which perk up the many outdoor scenes. Fidelity is excellent throughout the film and dynamic range is also very good.
A severed handful or so of good to excellent extras supplement the main feature. They include:
2001 Maniacs may not be Art, or even art, but it's often laugh out loud funny and is just silly-stupid enough to appeal to even jaded, over the hill types like myself. The "twist" isn't very surprising, but a lot of the goofy humor is, and the entire film breezes by with nary a deep thought in its spectral brain. Recommended.
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