I Watched It So You Won't Have To
Steve Nyland aka Squonkamatic, October 2018
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.
A trailer for "Mardi Gras Massacre".
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.
Where it belongs, and yeah I still want one.
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.
D'oh ... Plan to silence free speech backfired.
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.
Dirtbucked DVD-R bootleg VHS rip. The film did get a decent release by sleaze specialists Code Red but it appears to have gone out of print*, and few seem to be complaining.
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.
Better yet, watch Drive-In Massacre for free via YouTube.
Actually has a couple of interesting scenes.
Actually has a couple of interesting scenes.
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