After The Feast

Two Thousand Maniacs! 1964
Color Me Blood Red 1965

“Holy Bananas! That’s a girl’s leg!”
That’s also the most compelling reason to see H.G. Lewis and David Friedman’s third and final collaboration, Color Me Blood Red. By 1965, it was becoming clear that the Hersch and Dave show was being stretched a bit thin, and that fraying shows in every tortured frame of that ill fated third outing. By the final day of filming, the partnership would be no more. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

America’s thirst for gore was growing in the wake of Blood Feast, and Lewis and Friedman knew they had to deliver in order to survive. Fortunately, they had a number of ideas up their collective sleeve, and a dedicated crew to help with the effort. So, late in 1964, they rolled back down to Florida, this time to St. Cloud (now simply another tooth in the Disney Monster’s gaping maw, but at the time, a genuine small town near Orlando), and commenced the filming of Two Thousand Maniacs!. With the freedom of a larger budget and no small amount of notoriety (thanks to the success of Blood Feast), they were able to take over the entire town, along with most of it’s residents.

Of course, it might have had something to do with the premise of the film. One would imagine it would be difficult not to sell a film about a small southern town luring northern tourists to their horrible demise in revenge for the Civil War to…well, a small southern town whose residents were probably still a bit miffed about that whole “losing the war” thing.
It’s also probably best to avoid completely the subject of civil rights at this juncture, being that it was 1964, and Lewis and Friedman wisely did just that, populating the film entirely with white people, thereby allowing southerners to get their jollies with sweet dreams of revenge, and northerners a wholesome laugh at the expense of their redneck neighbors to the south, without anyone having to think about real problems.
And did I mention the theme song? And it’s haunting refrain? “Yeeeeeeeehaaaaaw! The south’s gonna rise again!” Lewis, as with Blood Feast, wrote the music, and Dave Friedman sang lead, backed up by about half the population of St. Cloud. No, really.
Two Thousand Maniacs! had the biggest budget, and the most resources available, of all of the Friedman/Lewis collaborations, and to be honest, the film suffers for it. On a surface level, it was their most successful film. Everything went smoothly, from planning to production to distribution, and more money was made off it than ever before. But yet…
Something about Two Thousand Maniacs! is just… off. What should be the most enjoyable film of the series is somehow the most strangely empty. And there’s nothing that can logically account for it. It’s just not fun.
Now, that said, I can’t dismiss it entirely. There are still some great, imaginative, completely over the top gore sequences, and the interaction of Bill Kerwin and Connie Mason (who still can’t remember her lines) is worth the price alone.

Conversely, Color Me Blood Red, which based on the circumstances involved in the production, should be the worst of the trilogy, is my personal favorite. Using an entirely new cast, including (gasp) a professionally trained theater actor, our pals Hersch and Dave headed to Florida one final time, this time to Sarasota, the home of the carnival folk. Friedman, having a background in the circus, had always wanted to film there, and their connections won out again, affording them quite a bit more than their miniscule budget would normally allow.
There were problems from the start. Gordon Oas-Heim, the aforementioned professional actor in the lead role, was a bit of a prima donna, as one might expect, and caused further problems by insisting that a script be provided (on no previous Lewis/Friedman collaboration had there ever been a permanent working script). To make matters worse, an upstart company in Chicago that made aquatic bikes provided the crew with a few of their products, with the expectation that they be used in production. The company recieved a prominent credit, but, like most early sixties inventions, the bikes barely worked. Still, the actors involved gave it their all, and there are three separate scenes involving the bikes. Wait, let me amend that - involving people struggling desperately to make the bikes move a few feet across the water.
Still, it’s these touches, and a few incredibly inspired (or possibly just desperate) casting choices, that make Color Me Blood Red such a joy to watch. The best bits involve a distracting little duo of ever so hip kids who show up in about half of the film’s scenes, dressing in identical outfits, and spouting slang so unbelievably annoying as to verge on genius.
The plot, meanwhile, is equally ludicrous, involving a painter whose work is panned by the critics until his girlfriend accidentally drips blood on one of his canvases, and awash with the heady glow of artistic inspiration, he stabs her in the head, and uses her blood to paint his next masterpiece. I think you can tell where this is going…

Alas, the shortcomings of Color Me Blood Red were to prove fatal to Lewis and Friedman’s partnership. The events leading to it’s demise are a bit hazy, but the short version is that creative differences with Lewis and some shenanigans with bank financing in Chicago led David Friedman to pack up, in true carny style, and leave in the middle of the night for California. There, he would make countless other exploitation films, as Lewis labored away in Chicago, cranking out trash by the truckload. They both made lucrative careers for themselves, and by all accounts slipped quietly and happily into old age.
Nothing they made individually, however, would ever live up those three golden years of blood, guts, carnage, and sunny Florida beaches that were the Blood Trilogy.

Editors Note: Following the submission of the above article, Mr. Beedon was promptly dragged into the street and beaten with various blunt objects for writing such a trite and sappy ending. He should be back in form by next week.