Last week, I took my poor, put-upon readers on a quick stroll through Hick Flicks, Scott Von Doviak’s colorful chronicle of the “rise and fall of Redneck Cinema.” Careful readers might remember some of the keywords from that piece; a complete list would have to include moonshine, backwoods, joyride, derby queen, yokel, monkey, and Burt Reynolds. At the end of that award-winning column, I promised to reveal the 10 lessons Von Doviak learned from his 24-Hour Hillbilly Horror Marathon, a self-imposed endurance contest that led him to watch 15 backwoods horror flicks in a single day. (More, I might add, than I’ve seen in 35 years.)

Von Doviak started his visual feast with the four “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” titles, followed by Charles B. Pierce’s serial-killer saga “The Town That Dreaded Sunday.” Next came “Deranged, Poor Pretty Eddie” (also known by the august title “Redneck County Rape),” “Motel Hell,” and “Southern Comfort” (often referred to as a Cajun “Deliverance”). “Hunter’s Blood” and “Blood Salvage” follow, and he caps off his odyssey with the classic Wes Craven two-fer, “The Hills Have Eyes” and “The Hills Have Eyes II.”

That’s an impressive list, and you can’t expect a man who’s made it through to the other side to come away unenlightened. To that end, Von Doviak offers his list of the Top 10 Things I Learned From My Day of Hillbilly Horror:

10. Ask nicely, and don’t taunt the rednecks.

09. A man who whistles “Bringing in the Sheaves” is probably bad news.

08. Moonshine is flammable — use this to your advantage.

07. The sheriff is in on it.

06. The old man at the gas station? He’s in on it, too.

05. Swamps ain’t for skinnydippin’.

04. No good can come from picking up hitchhikers.

03. That shortcut that’s not on the map? Don’t take it.

02. Yes, that’s your boyfriend’s face, but that is not your boyfriend.

01. Don’t eat the beef jerky.

Those are valuable lessons right there, and just the sort of wisdom that can be hard to find in today’s more homogenized Hollywood fare. But while Von Doviak laments the fall of classic redneck cinema and the drive-in theaters that sustained it, he ends on a positive note, writing about “a rich, vital cycle of films” that “has raised redneck cinema to a whole new level of artistic accomplishment.”

Is Von Doviak talking about “Sling Blade?” “Forrest Gump?” “Cold Mountain?” No, he’s talking about “hickumentaries,” the name he gives to a series of recent documentaries that portray rural subjects with complexity and compassion. There’s 1992’s “Brother’s Keeper” to start his list, with “Paradise Lost,” “Hands on a Hard Body,” “American Movie,” and “Mule Skinner Blues” rounding out the Top Five. (Unlike the horror marathon, I’ve seen most of these, and Van Doviak’s right: they’re great movies.) “The true golden age of the hick flick may still lie ahead,” Von Doviak writes, and there may not be a monkey in sight.

(Jay Hardwig can be reached at smardwig@charter.net)