Mardi Gras Massacre

From the perspective of yet another guy who's trying to see all the 'official' video nasties - namely me - Mardi Gras Massacre passed the litmus test. It offers another dose of the very particular atmosphere unique to a lot of no-to-low budget shock horror films from the seventies and early eighties, in this case involving one crazy devotee of a Mexican death goddess who ritually sacrifices (disembowels) a series of prostitutes in New Orleans pre- Mardi Gras. While I was satisfied in a broad sense, I can't stress enough that Mardi Gras Massacre is an extremely incompetent film, both hilariously and tediously so. It's riddled with the kind of woeful technical blunders I thought had ceased to be with the underground exploitation flicks of the sixties and early seventies. I'm talking about tons of non-featured actors clearly reading their lines from cue cards held just off camera. I'm talking about actors not being given another take even after they've fluffed multiple lines of dialogue. I'm talking about the kind of continuity screw-ups in which a person can be standing, then sitting, then standing again in consecutive shots. During an arguably important chase scene of the villain by the cops, the actor playing the villain is curiously absent. A series of long shots of scenery and of anonymously driven cars appear to be intended to cover up this omission. (Maybe the guy wasn't paid to stay on the set that long?)

Technically, it is all that bad, but of course there's content to entertain. There's real New Orleans scenery, lots of crass discoey glitz, badly amusing dialogue ("I hear you're the most evil woman in this room,") a cheesefest love montage between a cop and his newly beloved prostitute, and several cheap but plenty splattery disembowelment murders. The killings are all executed identically in editing and FX, which is a curiosity for this genre, as well as just something which kind of sucks. But I did find effective the grizzly synth score associated with the bad guy and used during the lead up to each of the sacrifice scenes.

All in all, Mardi Gras Massacre is another dire triumph for lurid, bad-bad horror.

My review was written in May 1984 after a screening at Selwyn theater on Manhattan's 42nd St.

"Mardi Gras Massacre" had the makings of an atmospheric B-movie set in New Orleans, but emerges as a mee Grand Guignol exercise reminiscent of Herschel Gordon Lre7744ewis ("Blood Feast") pictures of the 1960s. Extremely obscure feature is not listed in any fantasy reference books or film production charts but appers to been lensed circa 1978.l Story concerns an unnamed nutcase who seeks out "evil" prostitutes and ritualistically sacrifices them on Tuesdays to an Aztec goddess whose name translates as "The Lady of the Serpent Skirt". This leads up to Fat Tuesday (i.e., Mardi Gras), when he plans a three-girl sacrifice. Frank, the cop on the case, falls in love with a heat-of-gold blond prostie named Shelley while he incompetently tries to track down the killer. Not surprisingly, Shelley (who proves to be amazingly forgetful, having met the killer at film's opening) is one of the three potential Mardi Gras victims until Frank and cohorts come to the rescue.

Location lensing at bars and strip-joints plus some flavorful quirky performances (particularly an ofay pimp who has his rhyming slang down pat) are "Massacre"'s high pints. Unfortunately, the pic's raison d'etre consists of repetitive gore stagings in which the killer ties each nude prostitute to a table, ceremonially cuts her hand and foot and then (switch to closeup of a well-matched rubber model torso) cuts open her chest to remove the heart as a sacrifice. Target audience for this old-hat attempt at shock is very limited.

Filmmaker Jack Weis directed a black-oriented period picture "Quadroon" in 1971 and announced an ambitious (bu apparently unrealized) project entitled "Storyville" in 1973, the milieu later captured in Louis Malle's "Pretty Baby". With "Massacre", he has taken the low road, which leads directly to obscurity.

This inept gore movie is often compared to Herschell Gordon Lewis' "Blood Feast", but it is not quite as bad nor nearly as unintentionally funny as that anti-classic. However, it is very hard to take seriously and didn't really deserve its famous inclusion on Britain's "video nasty" list.

The very repetitive plot involves an Aztec high priest picking up surprisingly attractive New Orleans prostitutes, tying them naked to a makeshift altar, and cutting their hearts out with a stone dagger. This is intercut with a few expository scenes of the local police stumbling ineffectually around, and some canned footage of the Mardi Gras celebration to (barely) justify the title. I might point out that the influence of the Aztecs never quite reached New Orleans (it should have been a Haitian voodoo priest but I suppose THAT would have been culturally insensitive). Also, the real-life Aztecs generally preferred to sacrifice MALE warriors from other Indian tribes, and besides anybody that knows anything about making sacrifices to the dark gods knows that they prefer virgins, not prostitutes. Obviously, this movie is pretty damn ridiculous and hardly compares to bargain-basement realism of other "nasties" like "Maniac" or "I Spit on Your Grave". It does mix full-frontal nudity and a lot of gore, but even in that respect it's not as disturbing as such films as "Bloodsucking Freaks" and "The Gore Gore Girls" (although it does lack the black humor of those films).

The film has been accused of misogyny (probably based on throw-away dialogue and ad-lines about "cutting out the part with which the women do evil"). But as I've often said, just because you enjoy seeing naked women tied to fake sacrificial altars doesn't necessarily make you a misogynist, and NOBODY is going to mistake the unconvincing plastic dummy that they use for heart-ectomies with a real woman (real women have rib cages). Far from encouraging "sexual sadism" as censors have claimed, it might turn normal people on with the nudity but will have them laughing their asses off at the inept special effects. This is a movie very undeserving of its reputation--either good or bad.

flavorless performances..."exHOTic" dancers...a deranged madman...bondage...torture...grrrl-fights...bumblesome cops...a "falling-in-love" montage...disemboweling...an evil Aztec goddess...a cheezy bachelor pad with a sacrificial altar...disco...a repeat of that disemboweling we saw earlier...scheming hookers...dope pushing pimps...street scenes where passers-by stare blankly at the camera, unaware that they are unpaid and uncredited extras in a bottom-of-the-barrel celluloid bowel movement...

Thank you, Mr. Jack Weis. I'm going to name a pet after you one day.

This sort-of-remake of H. G. Lewis' BLOOD FEAST is an all-time anti-classic, and not to be missed. Ten filthy stars...that's one star for every dollar spent on making it. Now you just run along and get yourself a copy, 'cause you KNOW you can't have mine.

Man, this is one dumb, idiotic movie with excessive sex and violence and no redeeming values whatsoever... Great! This blast is a treasure for schlock-lovers, as a mad priest who worships the evil entity of Quetzacoatl (which I have INDEFINITELY misspelled and can't pronounce for the life of me... then again, did they pronounce it right in this movie?). He gets down on the town, looking for prostitutes with reputations for being... "evil". (Ha ha, couldn't resist.) As the crappy spaced-out disco music soars, he torments and guts the fully nude ladies. Such ugly trash, and funnier than hell. The acting, the dialogue, the gore, the music, the dumbass characters (especially the cops)... A laugh riot, all in all! Recommended, fer shore!