BADass SINema Unearthed - Blu-ray 4K UHD Review

The plot—if you can call this moonshine-fueled fever dream a plot—concerns a group of Yankee tourists lured into the backwoods town of Pleasant Valley for a centennial celebration that’s less history lesson and more blood ritual. The locals beam with hospitality so syrupy it ought to be bottled and taxed, but beneath the Southern-fried smiles lurks a revenge fantasy aged a century in oak barrels of spite. What unfolds is a pageant of absurd, theatrical carnage staged with all the finesse of a traveling carnival sideshow. It’s not realism; it’s grotesque Americana filtered through a cracked kaleidoscope.

This is splatter before splatter knew it was splatter. The gore is bright, almost cheerful—fire-engine red against homespun dresses and dusty porches. Lewis doesn’t aim for dread; he aims for spectacle. The violence plays out like a demented county fair attraction, complete with grinning townsfolk and jaunty music. It’s outrageous, yes, but also weirdly playful, as if the film itself is elbowing you in the ribs saying, “Relax, friend, it’s only viscera.” There’s something audacious in that tone—an understanding that horror can be a prank as much as a punch.

What makes the film endure as gnarly late-night fuel isn’t just the bloodletting but the brazenness. There’s no apology here, no wink toward prestige. It’s exploitation cinema with its boots planted firmly in the mud, daring critics to clutch their pearls. And yet, beneath the kitsch and carnage, you can feel the pulse of a filmmaker testing the boundaries of what could be shown, what could be sold, and what audiences would line up to see if you promised them something they weren’t supposed to watch. It’s transgressive in the way a garage band is transgressive—loud, raw, and unconcerned with polish.

By the time the end credits roll and the jug band fades, you’re left with a sticky aftertaste of cheap thrills and subversive glee. Two Thousand Maniacs! isn’t high art; it’s low-down, dirt-road delirium. But in the right frame of mind—lights low, expectations lower—it becomes a raucous celebration of horror’s scrappy independence. It’s gnarly, nutty, and unapologetically unrefined, the kind of late-night oddity that feels less like a movie and more like a dare whispered through static.

Home Video Distributor: Arrow Films
Available on Blu-ray - November 10, 2020
Screen Formats: 1.85:1
Subtitles: English
Video: 1080p
Audio: LPCM Mono
Discs: Blu-ray Disc; seven-disc-set
Region Encoding: Locked to Region A

When Arrow resurrected the Herschell Gordon Lewis Feast Blu‑ray box set, it wasn’t just a re‑release — it was a full‑scale archaeological dig conducted by maniacs who love cinema too much to let its weirdest artifacts rot in the swamp. This set arrives like a grindhouse holy text, a lavish, oversized altar to the Godfather of Gore, packed with restorations so crisp you can practically count the brushstrokes on the latex intestines. Arrow treats Blood Feast and its deranged siblings with the reverence usually reserved for Bergman or Kurosawa, which is exactly the kind of cosmic joke H.G. Lewis would appreciate. The packaging is a riot of lurid artwork, the extras are deep‑cut academic fever dreams, and the whole thing feels like a lovingly curated museum exhibit dedicated to the moment American cinema shrugged off good taste and said, “Let’s see what happens if we show EVERYTHING.” It’s not just a box set — it’s a blood‑drenched celebration of outsider filmmaking at its most gloriously unhinged.

Video

Arrow Video’s restoration of Two Thousand Maniacs! feels like someone scrubbed the dried corn syrup off the lens and let the madness breathe in high definition. The colors—those audacious, carnival-barker reds and sunburnt Southern yellows—pop with a lurid vibrancy that finally does justice to Herschell Gordon Lewis’s drive-in blood ballet.

Grain is intact, textures are honest, and the image has that lovingly preserved roughness that reminds you this was shot fast and mean on 16mm, not polished in some antiseptic studio vault. The mono audio crackles with vintage charm, the banjos and screams sounding clearer but never sterilized.

Arrow doesn’t sand down the exploitation edges—they frame them like artifacts in a grindhouse museum, complete with scholarly extras that treat the splatter like sacred text. It’s the kind of restoration that respects the grime, presenting the film not as cleaned-up nostalgia but as a fully weaponized slice of 1964 mayhem, sharper and nastier than it’s looked in decades.

Audio

Arrow’s restoration of Two Thousand Maniacs!  doesn’t just clean up the picture — it resurrects the film’s gloriously primitive audio with a PCM 1.0 mono track that feels like it was piped directly from a 1963 Miami grindhouse through a time‑warped speaker cone.

This is Herschell Gordon Lewis sound design in its purest form: dialogue that occasionally sounds like it was recorded inside a broom closet, music cues that crash in like a marching band falling down a staircase, and the wet, sloshing “gore” effects that hit your ears with the fidelity of a man stirring a bucket of chili off‑mic.

Arrow doesn’t try to modernize or sterilize it — they preserve every hiss, pop, and analog imperfection like sacred relics of exploitation cinema’s birth.

Supplements:

The special features play like a midnight‑movie séance where scholars, weirdos, and exploitation lifers gather to praise the Godfather of Gore. You get archival interviews with Herschell Gordon Lewis himself, where he cheerfully explains how he invented an entire subgenre with pocket change and a pathological disregard for the MPAA.

There’s a commentary track featuring Lewis and producer David F. Friedman riffing like two carnival barkers reminiscing about the time they conned America into watching a man hack off limbs with a machete from a hardware store. Arrow also loads the disc with featurettes on the film’s production, the birth of splatter cinema, and the cultural shockwaves that followed.

You get outtakes, trailers, radio spots, and the kind of behind‑the‑scenes ephemera that feels like it was rescued from a Florida storage unit moments before the roof caved in. It’s a treasure trove of grindhouse archaeology — a lovingly curated museum of mayhem for anyone who wants to understand how a no‑budget gore flick became a cornerstone of cult cinema.

Commentary:

• See special features

Special Features:

DISC TWO: TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! (1964) & MOONSHINE MOUNTAIN (1964)

• Introduction to the films by director Herschell Gordon Lewis
• Audio Commentary on Two Thousand Maniacs! with Lewis and producer David F. Friedman
• Two Thousand Maniacs! Outtakes
• Two Thousand Maniacs Can’t Be Wrong – Tim Sullivan (director, 2001 Maniacs) on Two Thousand Maniacs!
• Hicksploitation: Confidential – visual essay on the history of the American South’s representation in cinema
• David Friedman: The Gentlemen’s Smut Peddler – a tribute to the legendary producer featuring Herschell Gordon Lewis, filmmakers Fred Olen Ray, Tim Sullivan and Bob Murawski
• Herschell’s Art of Advertising – Lewis shares his expert opinion on the art of selling movies and how to hook an audience.
• Trailers for Two Thousands Maniacs! and Moonshine Mountain

	Movie
	Video
	Audio
	Extras
Composite Blu-ray Grade