User Reviews

This is one of the few movies that left me completely unsatisfied in every way. Not only does it have one of the worst endings in history but it also breaks one of the fundamental rules of horror (i.e never use the same method of death twice). This film contains, for all intents and purposes, only one murder repeated THREE TIMES!! The first time is all well and good but once the repetition started I lost interest real quick. The only thing for me which kept the film interesting was the complete incompetence of the police in catching a killer who finds his victims in clubs by asking anyone who crosses his path if they know any 'really evil' women (slightly suspect to say the least). His flagrant over-use of the word 'evil' is both comical and annoying in equal measure, especially since the women he ends up with are far from it. And how do the police trace this 'Lurch' like character who sticks out like a sore thumb (dressed in a three-piece suit in a night club and flashing money to all) and who could not possibly be mistaken for anyone else? Not by his face, voice, obvious wealth or general demeanour. Not by the scores of people he spoke to or those who actually hooked him up with the victims. They trace him through the flimsiest, luckiest of leads when a Chinese delivery boy they speak to, purely on the off-chance recognises a f**king ring. Hilarious in completely the wrong way. The hilarity coming not from the film but by the thought that someone actually conceived this piece of crap. A mind numbing experience and a waste of good time.

A deranged killer cultist (woodenly played by William Metzo) picks up hookers in New Orleans and sacrifices them to an Aztec god by pulling out their hearts. Man, does this gloriously ghastly cinematic abomination possess all right wrong stuff to qualify as a real four-star schlockfest: hilariously horrible acting from a lame no-name cast (Gwen Arment cops the top thespic dishonors for her wince-worthy turn as jaded streetwalker Sherry), hopelessly all-thumbs (mis)direction by Jack Weis (who also wrote the wafer-thin script), tacky gore, a plodding pace, slipshod editing, crude cinematography, a complete dearth of tension and creepy atmosphere, and plenty of needless filler in between the killings all add up to create one of the single most spectacularly shoddy celluloid stinkers to ever ooze its lurid way across the big screen. Foxy brunette "Playboy" Playmate Laura Misch Owens, who was almost invariably cast as whores in the handful of movies she popped up in, appears here as -- big surprise! -- evil prostitute first victim Shirley Anderson. The tasty abundant gratuitous female nudity and seamy Big Easy red light district milieu keep things nice'n'sleazy throughout. The get-down groovy disco soundtrack hits the funky-throbbing spot. A total cruddy riot.

A Sleazy badly acted exploitation slasher about a killer performing human sacrifices to his Aztec god.

The killer lures prostitutes into his apartment and after tying them to a table and oiling them he removes their hearts from their chests. Mildly enjoyable, for the first time but oh boy we're gonna see the same procedure over and over again. Acting is terribly special effects are tolerable but what makes it so bad is how poorly its scripted and edited. Its booooring. No amount of naked women getting butchered is going to make it feel anything but dull.

Only for the hardcore sleaze and exploitation fan or if you're a slasher fan and have already seen everything else.

Oh yeah it would probably be good to mention that this is a Video Nasty so any nasty completionist (like myself)is unfortunately going to have to bare though this.

I mean, you can, if you insist. Hell I had to buy the damn thing, to know it was on my shelf as a physical unit. To say "I have "Mardis Gras Massacre" uncut on DVD", paid the right price for it (less than $15*) and yeah. I wish it was the VHS, but now I don't have to go through all the rigamarole to find one that is in decent playback condition enough to rip a copy onto my phone. Which is where movies like this belong. In some scummy gutter like venue where men watch shamefully as stacked 70s movie babes are suggestively stripped nude, oiled, shackled to a table and eviscerated for the entertainment of jaded minds. What other reason is there to see it? And if you're going to go along with it that far you might as well own your own copy, and in the most degrading format possible. Which these days means on a phone so you can take it anywhere, gleefully sneaking some sleaze in private, at convenience, and with no one else observing how you consume it.

Rest assured I watched the damn thing with my clothes on sitting up at my desk and found the proceedings to be about as erotic as getting fresh squid at the Korean market up on Avondale Place. The nudity is all depicted in static long shots, the closeups of the Hero Torso which the guts are cut out of laboriously fake in appearance. If anything the Code Red DVD picture quality hammers home the fact that one is watching cheaply made depraved prurient junk. The women are attractive enough, but so what? If you can't see them. The movie is a pale drab exercise in applied sleaze and a working demonstration of how even the most artless and inept among us can likely squeeze out a gory low budget horror film if they put their minds to it. The filmmakers did it purely for the money with no delusion of art, artifice of reality, imagination. Or even the honest filthmongering of your basic Grand Guginol showpiece with freaks biting off chicken heads and turning into gorilla women. The fascination for me to see it an extension of a morbid interest in the DPP "Video Nasty" list, wanting to see what the furor was about, why this or that title ended up "banned" from kids who were looking for a cheap rental night thrill. Or vicarious sex criminal wishing to see his most base of fantasies played out, since he doesn't have the stomach to go through with it himself. I bet Mary Whitehouse sold more movies than any other hustler of horror schlock dreck just by being herself. Hell that's why I bought it.

The movie sucks and is awful on so many different levels, but has a kind of mindless attention to duty which is still somewhat admirable. The women all walk through the proceedings like they are waiting in a dentist's office, and the inept handling of the shock sequences deadens whatever juxtaposition of prurient fascination which make other gore-shockers border on the pornography department. This does too, but only in the sense that porn is a cheat and this stupid little movie cheats at every chance it gets to try and escape being anything less than a base voyeuristic fantasy for sick twisted minds who wish pain & suffering on their fellow human creatures.

So in that sense score one up for being able to lambast the thing for being stupid, predictable, drecky and unrewarding. Adventuresome and challenging horror thrillers are given distinction by having crap like this available to be better than, and yes even stupid "Drive-In Massacre" is better than "Madi Gras Massacre". At least that movie gave us a couple of characters to observe. Here it's just gutting mannequin dolls with strange disco music playing. Watch it if you feel the need but you're not missing anything by looking for something else. It's no "Psycho Puppet", that's for sure. There's nothing in this movie that you haven't already seen done by those who had genuine talent and vision for morbid phantasmagorical cinema shows. This one has the imagination of last season's shriveled brown iris bulbs. The taste of a warmed up leftover TV dinner. And the fun factor of a soggy sandwich bag. You can do better.

The fact that the creator of Mardi Gras Massacre, Jack Weis, went on to direct a Melissa Etheridge special makes me happy to no end. Because it's as far away as possible from this scuzzy, scummy and downright nasty addition to the world of the slasher.

While most slashers spend so much time naming their killer exciting names like the Phantom Killer, Madman Mars or Frank Zito, the killer here is just named John.

That said, he may as well have been named Fuad Ramses, because if Mardi Gras Massacre was any more like Bloof Feast, it would have to film a TV playing that film.

John is searching the bars and strip clubs of New Orleans to find the most evil women possible so that he can take them home, tie them up on his Aztec altar, but on his metal mask, give them a massage and then rip out their hearts in a ritual to the goddess Coati. If the shot of the heart being sliced out looks the exact same every single time this happens, so much the better.

Sergeant Frank Abraham gets assigned to the case after the first girl, Shirley, is found on the train tracks with her organs missing. Along the way, he starts sleeping with one of the local girls, Sherry. Their romance is, well, it's not really a romance as much as a bad cop sleeping with a bad girl with a heart of gold. Honestly, no one in this movie is all that morally sound, as we should see Frank as the hero and then there's a scene where he slaps Sherry around. When they reunite at the end, it's not really something that's a call for celebration.

What does make this movie worth shouting about are the extended disco scenes that seem to go on forever. There's an amazing one where several girls get into a dance floor skirmish that I watched several times in a row, shouting at the screen in pure joy. There's also a montage where he cops are questioning suspects intercut with dancing, particularly a dancing street performer who answers all of the cops' questions with some fancy steps.

Mardi Gras Massacre has everything a movie needed to make it in the slasher boom: an amazing poster, a great tag, lots of gore and nudity, an interesting title and a willingness to be reprehensible trash (that's a compliment, I swear).

It's no accident that it ended up as one of the original video nasties, a title that I'm certain it wore with no small amount of pride.

There's also enough wool here to knit a sweater. Unfortunately the main girl Gwenn Armant doesn't bare her beaver but plenty others do. It's the most 1970s movie ever, with mustachioed cops who look like they should be in a Beastie Boys video and disco dance contests. There's even a chick fight on a dance floor. The main bad guy, whose voice sounds like he should be narrating nature documentaries, picks up hookers then sacrifices them to his Aztec god, as many people do. However instead of sacrificing hookers to Huitzilopochtli like most people do, he sacrifices them to Quetzalcoatl, which is a nice change of pace. The two cops are completely inept. Dirk Diggler and Reed Rothchild would've done a better job. We also get to see Mardi Gras back in 1978, when it was mainly a homosexual hangout. Groovy and far out movie.