2001 Maniacs: Field Of Screams (Extreme Edition) [DVD] [2009]

Having watched, enjoyed & purchased the first 2001 maniacs, i looked forward to seeing this with great anticipation. When i read, however that Mayor Buckman(Robert Englund in the first film) had been replaced by Bill Moseley And Harper Alexander(Guiseppe Andrews in the first film) had been replaced by 'Skinny Puppy' lead vocalist Nivek Orge, i was slightly put off, but gave it a go anyway. Wish i hadn't.
This is a terrible film, amatuerishly made and acted, completely devoid of the sly humour and almost anti-heroic characters which made the original so likeable. Moseley to his credit does his best but is let down by a weak script and incompetent back up performances, including Orge who looks like an almost pantomime hammy style Dracula and Lin Shaye, so good in the first film but terrible here. The story(what little there is), concerns the resident ghouls of pleasent valley taking their guts n glory celebrations on the road to look for for fresh meat, when they encounter the cast & crew of a reality tv show and seemingy agree to help them, unaware they are to become the next course.
I would recommend this film to no-one. Its a complete waste of an hour and 20 minutes of your life. Don't get me wrong, the first film was no masterpiece but compared to this, it looks like an oscar contender. I hear there are plans in the pipeline for a third film in the series, depending on how well this one does. If this is anything to go by, they should definately not proceed.
AVOID!!!

I had been looking forward for a long time to watching this sequel. Although it had everything I was expecting and wanting. Gore, blood, guts, laughs and wanton nudity. Why was I left disappointed by this film? First off the comedy aspect of the film seems really pushed at times. The cast seem to be trying to hard at being funny. But the biggest disappointment for me was the sound. Seriously what the hell was going on with the sound track? It sounded awful, it truly sounds like the whole thing has been re-dubbed? I was so put off by the sound that I was focussed on the crap sound rather the action on the screen. I must admit that on Blu-Ray the film looked stunning. Watching Christa Campbell in full 1080p is a real treat. One thing that I enjoyed about the first film was the creative ways that the hillbillies killed off the northerners. So I was very disappointed that there is only one really extreme death in this. I thought Bill Moseley did a fine job taking over as Mayor Buckman and Lin Shaye is hilarious as Granny. But this sequel could have been so much better. Oh and did I mention that the sound was awful?

It's hard to believe this film is written and directed by the same team that made the first 2001 Maniacs. While the tone of that first film was a clever mix of sly comedy and nasty, mean spirited gore, this goes for farce, making the vengeful southerners of Pleasant Valley a big wierdo bickering family instead of the vaguely believable characters they were before. Whereas the first film made a big point about them reclaiming their honour and dignity, this film throws any dignity out the window, painting them as charicature inbred retarded wierdo hicks. To some degree this works - the comedy provided by the excellent Lin Shaye and her colleagues is the only thing holding this godawful mess together. The producers and directors crowed greatly about how they thought they'd 'finally found the right tone' and how this was a rare 'sequel that surpasses the original'. Both statements are so far off course that they made me angry watching the film, as they actually utterly trashed whatever they had in the original by trying to aim for 'so bad it's good' on purpose. The film is set in a field full of tents, as suddenly the townsfolk are able to travel across the USA, whereas before they were trapped in their town and its outskirts (Hucklebilly roams as far as the edge of the town limits near the original's ending). This seems to be as much for budget as for novelty. The cast of 'Northerners' who are lured into their trap are an utterly vile mix of self-obsessed reality TV show types. They make up perhaps the largest group of horrifically bad actors I've ever seen gathered together in one film. We're talking student-film here, not just B-movie. Their line delivery and emoting is so horrendously off cue and target that they're painful to watch and they drag down the entire movie. It's hard to say whether they were deliberately told to act like that, because it's possible with the occasional lapses into film-school camera angles, and the no-budget gore, which I'll get to in a minute. I can only assume this horrendous choice of film direction was deliberate as the writers' and director's characters and acting choices were light years better in the first film.
The gore is terrible, and not in a good way. With the exception of the first two kills - one at the start, and one satisfyingly gory kill in the tent camp - the gore is laughably poor, with no effort made to make floppy rubber masks and body parts look like the real thing. It's also tonally chaotic. They're southerners from an 1800's town that has no TV or radio, but they know how to drive cars, and are fluently aware of MTV and movies. How? They didn't know all this stuff in the first film, being utterly baffled with the outside world and all it's slang, gadgets and social mixing. (Although they did manage to move cars a few metres).
It also has horrendously misjudged offensiveness. In the first film any racial slurs or similar comments were placed in the context of these being hicks from the 1800's who'd never evolved, and they were faced down hard by the targets of their language. In this film, they just feel like gratuitous racism, because the characters are so fully aware of modern TV and entertainment that there's no longer any excuse that they're "from a different era". There's a very off-colour joke about one character 'looking for the underground railroad' (a network black slaves used to escape from slavery), and a horrific homophobic killing that's delivered with a sarky joke about 'Brokeback Mountain'.
There's a truly rubbish Flashdance song and dance number in the middle that really defines how low the film has slumped.
Once the climax begins, it's absurd, no-budget, and unexciting.
Not once during the entire film was I scared or excited. In fact I spent most of it staring at the TV loudly thinking 'For God's sake just END!' as I was determined to watch it to the finish in case it improved.
Utter tosh. I've never been so disappointed by a sequel in my entire life.