Welcome to Pleasant Valley
Actually, 1964 was a long motha fuckin' time ago, so let's change that...
That's more like it!
I've been meaning to do this post for a while now, but my lady and I took our daughter out to the local theater today to see The Amazing Spider-Man (which I did indeed find Amazing) and I figured it would be as good a time as any to finally snap some shots of our town, Saint Cloud, Florida. Some of you may have never heard of Saint Cloud. Some of you may have but can't place where. And I'm sure there are some of you who know all about Saint Cloud. Back in 1964, Herschell Gordon Lewis came here, turned the place into Pleasant Valley and filmed Two Thousand Maniacs. The entire town reportedly participated, but you'd be hard pressed to get any of these peeps to say a thing about it these days. The place looks a bit different now than it did in the film, but not necessarily better. The people look the same, just more of them. I wanted to get some pics of the townies but I didn't want to end up being rolled down a hill in a barrel full of hammered nails, so I declined trying that shit.
Anyway, I'm just gonna start out with a few random pics, then I got some comparison photos, which are pretty damn cool.
- Saint Cloud is pretty stuck back in time, but holds a whole lot of charm. This is an old bank turned cafe, and far off to the right is city hall.
- This is the side of the movie theater we went to today. It's one of those old school two screen cinema deals. They print out your tickets on a cash register receipt. For me, my lady and our daughter it cost $20 for the movie tickets and one big as fuck Coca-Cola. Not bad. I've asked the place if they'd be interested in hosting old school Horror and Sci-Fi films on the weekends... no such luck, thus far. But I'm not giving up just yet. I like the place a lot. Not crowded like a multiplex, but today certainly proved that a small group of people can be every fucking bit as obnoxious as a large crowd on opening day.
- Cool looking antique shop. We didn't go in. It's not really my thing. I mainly just took the picture because I thought the truck was cool. There's a whole lotta stuff like that around here.
Now let's get into the comparison pics. I tried my best to get some of the same angles of the film. They aren't completely perfect, but I don't think I did that bad.
1964
2012- Pretty fucking wild, right? Not too fond of the shit brown paint decision.
- At first I made the mistake of thinking this was the same side of the building shown in the flick. But after a closer observation of the end pillar in the second pic, I figured out that it wasn't. The people that own the floor shops live directly above their stores. I'm not sure how many people there today were around during the movie, but most of them are older folks, so I'd bet some of them were in the film. And the one's who aren't I would be willing to bet are ancestors of people who were. This is kind of one of those towns that people seldom leave.
1964
2012- There weren't any people hanging out of windows today.
1964
2012
- That's my best interpretation. Forgot to suck in the beer gut. They added on a brick gate and did another brown shit paint job. To be honest, it was really cool and kinda freaky at the same time to take this shot.
I was hoping to dig some more up for this post, but it proved to be more difficult than I expected. Nevertheless, I love being around history like this. We literally live 3 blocks down from where these pictures were taken. We moved here from Orlando in 2007. It's a strange little place with strange people, but I'd take it over a big city any day.
