All the worst aspects of
grindhouse sludge appear in Mardi Gras
Massacre, a sexed-up horror picture with so much nasty gore that it
received an X-rating during its original release. We’re talking closeups of
women’s torsos getting sliced open so their hearts can be yanked out. Telling
the story of a psychopath luring New Orleans prostitutes back to his lair so he
can sacrifice them in weird rituals—maybe it’s Satanism or maybe it’s voodoo,
but the end result is the same—Mardi Gras
Massacre offers crappy filmmaking, exploitive nude scenes, and rotten
acting. Worse, it drags on for nearly 100 minutes thanks to slow pacing and the
presence of two long interludes: a documentary-style sequence featuring
on-the-street footage of Carnival celebrations, and a dance number. More
specifically, a disco dance number. Because, you see, instead of proper local
flavor for a picture set and shot in New Orleans, Mardi Gras Massacre is driven by a soundtrack of thumping, upbeat
disco numbers, and at one point the picture stops dead so leading lady Gwen
Arment can swirl and twist her way through several minutes of generic
gyrations. As can be said of so many other bad movies made for the grindhouse
circuit, Mardi Grass Massacre has
nowhere to go and isn’t in any hurry to get there. The plot, such as it is,
concerns a detective (Curt Dawson) and his hooker girlfriend (Arment) getting
mired in the search for a dude preying on the Big Easy’s working girls. From
start to finish, this is a reprehensibly bad film, so it’s only of interest
for the most masochistic viewers. That said, scuzz-cinema freaks may dig some
weird elements, including the opening scene, during which the killer solicits
his first victim by searching for the “most evil” prostitute in New Orleans.
Also worth mentioning is the occasionally disquieting score, a bizarre mixture
of bouncy dance tunes and creepy electronic noises.
Mardi Gras Massacre: LAME
1 comment:
It turns out there was a whole sub-genre of early to late 1970's New Orleans-set softcore
drive-in films that are a world unto themselves, and only seemed to last up until the dawn of the 80's. The local Louisiana flea-bitten Orson Welles of this lost cinematic universe was the mysterious Jack Weis, who directed 1978's "Mardi Gras Massacre" which is the single greatest softcore disco-era slasher horror film ever made, the encapsulation of a kind of deliriously surreal trash-film nirvana that in the right mood can supersede even the greatest works of cinematic art while viewed in a completely narcoticized state. Steeped in full blown female nudity, cheap rock bottom gore, and enough over-the-top cartoon level misogyny to generate it's own MeToo trial all on its own, one of the most ironic aspects of the whole movie is its "sensitive" love story between one of the killer's potential victims, a hard-nosed prostitute who falls for the gruff cop assigned to solve the case of a slew of working girl murders across the French Quarter as Mardi Gras is about to get underway. That, and the killer, who is a well-spoken and well-dressed upper-class dandy who speaks in the low melodramatic tones and epically drawn out pauses of an alcoholic no-talent kiddie-show host on Halloween night, actually lets one of the women go from his Aztec God/human sacrifice rumpus room because she's a classically trained ballet dancer, thereby signaling that our cardboard villain has a secret soft spot in his sick and twisted soul for the artistically inclined. Most likely a closeted homosexual himself whose flamboyant taste and aesthetic sensitivities were humiliated by both friend and foe in early childhood (his methods of dispatch are decidedly fanciful as if he's in his own movie-within-a-movie) this Creole masterpiece of Z-grade atmospheric New Orleans grime, decadence, fern bars, and exploitative sleaze is absolutely impossible to ignore.
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