Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964) review

Six Yankee tourists, including Terry Adams (Connie Mason) and hitchhiker Tom (William Kerwin), get detoured when driving around in Georgia and wind up in the town of Pleasant Valley where the residents are celebrating their Centennial ... except it turns out it's really an act of revenge for a brutal massacre by Union soldiers during the Civil War.  Despite the movie's crude and amateurish nature (all that cackling!), you can look at this from two perspectives: for the Northerners, this is an unfortunate part of American history no one wants to think about or acknowledge (remember Sherman's March?) while for Southerners who lost the conflict (and like to break out the Confederate flags), it's lodged in their collective psyche and they still hold a deep-seeded grudge.  Of course, its main function for the exploitation crowd is not to present a lecture out of an AP text book but show a good amount of gore (a woman has her arm hacked off and cooked, a man is ripped apart by horses, etc.): Lewis is mainly here to, in the words of Natalie Merchant, give 'em what they want.