It's Mardi Gras in New Orleans and a group of friendly revelers open their group up to a mysterious female hitchhiker which will soon prove a deadly move for each of them.
From the movies opening it's evident the quality of the imaging won't be great. It's clearly shot on a low grade camera. In fact the opening shot starts off very grainy before clearing up, almost as if they want the rest of the film to look glossy by comparison. But in the end, this shouldn't matter, movies like Incoherence have powered through that aspect with competent filmmaking. Fat Tuesday may be a little short on that but it is not without some value. Shot during the actual Mardi Gras with candid parade goers as extras and dialogue almost entirely improvised by its actors, it really does capture a realistic undercurrent of what it would feel like to be there in person. And to its credit, tackling a New Orleans's Mardi Gras is a pretty lofty ambition.
The movie's pacing is its biggest detractor. It takes a good while for any danger to happen and from then on every scene of dialogue and action is connected by extended montages of the festivities. At first it was effective as multiple establishing shots of the parades and streets. It gives us a chance to see some of the eccentricities of Nola and exhibit the energy and mood, but then it keeps doing it. Like, ALOT. It's a characteristic that wreaks of famously bad student films like A Certain Sacrifice, in that though the movie is barely over an hour all montage moments go on incredibly long. "Can't cut any available footage otherwise it won't reach feature length." Now the film isn't anywhere near as bad as A Certain Sacrifice. Fat Tuesday at least has a coherent plot, and an interesting one at that. But when environment shots take up the majority of the film, the movie appears to be a film of New Orleans stock footage being interrupted by a plot. It's hard to escape the idea that the actors and filmmakers simply wanted to go to a New Orleans for Mardi Gras, filmed some of it, then threw in just enough story to call it a movie.
The actors are decent with much of their scenes relying on their improv. Their moments of humor and camaraderie are among the film's better moments. It adds to the movies realism and you get enough character that you do feel at least a little something when one of them is killed. And like I said, the idea isn't bad. With so much chaos and actual foul play going on in Mardi Gras it's a worthwhile idea to have a horror film about such crimes getting lost in the mayhem. The film's closing scenes feature a street sweeper disposing of the massive amount of trash left in the streets. You do get the feeling conveyed about how any potential proof of misdeeds being lost forever. Its first grisly death holds some interest but as the movie goes on it loses steam. It drags from murder to murder with long montages in between but the deaths get more and more mundane until the final one feels like an anti climax.
If you're into student films or a fan of the New Orleans's Mardi Gras scene you might like this movie, but any real potential is swept away like the mopped up debris in the street. The film is clearly more experimental than mainstream but without more plot, Fat Tuesday had a fat chance at succeeding.
