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"Here's a story you should know, from a hundred years ago..." Herschell Gordon Lewis' burlesque on a Faulknerian theme offers a detour from the main road into a sunny carnival of the bloody mind, "why, it's better than Halloween!" Centennial festivities in Pleasant Valley, Georgia, with a carload of Yankee tourists as guests of honor. "We gonna show you some Southern hospitality," bellows the mayor (Jeffrey Allen) amid Confederate flags and tiny nooses, his minions (Gary Bakeman, Ben Moore) hoot and holler and spit and scratch in approval. For the straying blonde (Shelby Livingston) a bucolic stroll and a severed thumb, the treatment escalates from jack-knife to hatchet and fades on one of the yahoos cheerfully poking at the gooey bits dangling from the mannequin's arm. Other activities include post-barbecue drawing and quartering plus rolling barrels studded with nails. Like the one brainy cow in the abattoir, only the hitchhiking professor (William Kerwin) knows enough history to worry about the hosts' demented grins. Spectral vengeance, banjo and splatter: "Symbolic, I think that's the word." Having picked up a modicum of craft since Blood Feast, Lewis integrates the gruesome money-shots less maladroitly into the story. Still, his sideshow-barker shamelessness remains undimmed—the most personal scene is the spectacle of a Volkswagen-sized boulder looming above one of the victims while the mayor inflames his audience, a salute from one peddler of seamy sensation to another. The twist is out of Brigadoon, the shock is a sprinkling of Ugetsu (breeze stirring foliage as smoke creeps into a still composition) following a mud-caked hillbilly joke. With Connie Mason, Jerome Eden, Yvonne Gilbert, Michael Korb, Linda Cochran, and Vincent Santo.
--- Fernando F. Croce |