Mardi Gras Massacre

As much as I think this film is a pile of crap, there's 'something' about it that I like. I think it's the grainy, dirty feel to it, which isn't something many horror films have. This cannot save it though, because whichever way you look at it, it gets rather tedious after the first few deaths. Don't get me wrong - they are quite bloody in a Herschell Gordon Lewis kind of way. I even thought the weird sounds that are played when the killings occur added to the grainy atmosphere. It's just that you get sick of seeing the same thing over and over. Also there's too much tedious bumbling from the police and a dull sub-plot. I thought the ending was rather cool though, when he drives the car into the water and all they find is his mask. Mind you most people would have fallen asleep by this point.

Overall I would say Mardi Gras Massacre is worth the once over if you're a horror completist - just don't expect too much!

Yet another video nasty. Yet another laugh-riot. Before I actually saw many of the films on the DPP list, I, somewhat misguidedly, thought that they would be shameless atrocities full of shocking violence and depravity. I know better now. A significant number of them are unintentional comedies. And Mardi Gras Massacre is a perfect example.

The story concerns a madman who picks up prostitutes and ritually slaughters them in his bachelor pad. He's pursued by a couple of hopeless cops. The Mardi Gras goes on in the background.

This film is spectacularly badly made. The acting and especially the exposition scenes are of a pornographic standard. Although, the killer, played by an English bloke, is very very amusing. He is fond of overly dramatic pauses, such as 'are you......................evil?'. The dialogue in the movie in general is atrocious in a gloriously stupid way. In fact, so is the editing. Scenes cut into each other suddenly and jarringly but, again, this only adds to the fun. As does the music. It varies from the type of music you would expect to hear in a porno, funky disco, avant-garde noise and the bass-heavy proto-house that accompanies the murders. In other words technically and artistically, this film is a mess, albeit enjoyably so.

The murder scenes are all identical. They're not particularly convincing but nevertheless crude and sleazy; pretty obvious video nasty material. And the aforementioned music that accompanies them is, in fairness, pretty much effective. Less effective but brilliantly rubbish is the love-montage scene where our detective and prozzie stroll around New Orleans - it's an utter cheese-fest of the first order. The cops in these kind of movies are usually pretty ineffective - let's face it, if they did their jobs properly we wouldn't have much of a movie - however, the police in Mardi Gras Massacre are biscuit-taking in their ineptitude. They are absolutely hopeless.

A similar thing could be said of this movie but I'm not going to because I found it way too enjoyable. This is proper Z-Grade film-making. They really don't make them like this any more. There was a peculiar type of slightly out-of-order sleazy-violent horror film that was made in the 70's and early 80's. And this is a good example. It's terrible but good. If you like unintentionally funny bad movies with a dash of sleazy violence then really I have to recommend this to you; to do otherwise would be.................evil.

Not exactly a straight slasher as many believe but it's surely as cheesy, and unintentionally funny as any slasher from the 80's.

"Mardi Gras Massacre" could be considered as a toned down exploitation low budget. The plot asks for brutality, violence, sleaze but the truth is that the execution of the idea isn't as half as good as it should. Poor New Orleans, really. Not because of the recent tragedies, but, because this movie has generated a bad fame for the Mardi Gras celebration. Of course, only among in the Horror movies world.

The ritual method is repeated in all the death scenes. So we don't get originality or probably there wasn't enough budget to at least create three different gore scenes. It's okay but even ultra low budget slashers have at least two different killing methods! Anyways, "Mardi Gras Massacre" has generated some kind of cult over the years but sincerely, this isn't a must see. The movie should only be watched by b-movie lovers or morbid fans of low budget cheese and sleaze!

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.

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.