Mardi Gras Massacre (1978)

Police try to capture someone who is commiting ritual murders of women during Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

Director:

Jack Weis

Writer:

Jack Weis

Stars:

Curt Dawson, Gwen Arment, William Metzo

Cast

Cast overview:
Curt Dawson	...	Sgt. Frank Hebert
Gwen Arment	...	Sherry
William Metzo	...	John (as Bill Metzo)
Laura Misch Owens	...	Shirley Anderson - the Evil Prostitute (as Laura Misch)
Cathryn Lacey	...	Disco Girl #1
Nancy Dancer	...	Disco Girl #2
Butch Benit
Wayne Mack
Ronald Tanet

Storyline

Low rent semi-remake of Blood Feast (1963) - the movie that broke the barrier in showing gore on screen. In this version of the same story, instead of an Egyptian character we have a deranged Aztec high priest as the main character. A serial killer in a welder's mask stalks the streets of New Orleans during the Mardi Gras festival. He is a strange intense-looking guy who shows up at a bar which is also home to the town's prostitutes. He tells the chicks that he wants the most evil woman in the bar. The head ho points him into the direction of a fat breasted brunette. She tells him, 'I could win first place in any evil contest', and away they go. The Aztec priest takes her back to his place and makes her strip. He then ties her to a table in his basement and begins doing some magical ritual with baby oil that makes her nipples rise. He then proceeds to torture her by amputating hands, then feet, then 'the part that you use for evil'. These are then sacrificed to Coatla, the Goddess of ...

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Plot Keywords:

evil | police | bar | gore | mardi gras | 

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Taglines:

Everyone is celebrating nobody hears the screams of the victims for the sacrifice.

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Genres:

Horror

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Certificate:

X

Details

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

11 August 1978 (USA)

Also Known As:

Emisario del Terror

Filming Locations:

New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

Company Credits

Technical Specs

Runtime:

97 min

Color:

Color

Did You Know?

Trivia

The sequences in the killer's sacrificial altar room were all filmed in a warehouse.

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Connections

References Blood Feast (1963)

User Reviews

The director was no stranger to gross incompetence, but I still like this.

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.