Mardi Gras Massacre (1978)

Director: Jack Weis

Writer: Jack Weis

Composers: Dennis Coffey, Mike Theodore

Starring: Curt Dawson, Gwen Arment, William Metzo, Laura Misch Owens, Cathryn Lacey, Nancy Dancer, Butch Benit, Wayne Mack, Ronald Tanet

More info: IMDb

Tagline: Name: Nancy Dancer. Measurements: 38/24/36. Born: Gary, Ind. 12/21/58. Died: N.O, LA. 2/13/78. ... and that was only the Beginning.

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

My rating: 3/10

Will I watch it again? No.

You know those no-budget, bad horror movies that have about 25 minutes of actual plot but they stretch it out to 90 minutes?  Yeah, this is one of those.  It took me two tries to get through it.  It's pretty bad and amateurish and I'd say it's so bad it's good except for the excessive filler.  Nearly every scene goes on too long.  Actors take forever sometimes delivering their lines.  It's stuff like that that will ruin any chance of feeling like you're at least having a reasonably good time.

But if there's one good thing I can say about it, the gore effects are impressive and there are several scenes where girls get cut up.  Sure, the gore is good but it's the same effect done multiple times and even that gets old.

They did a great job matching the dummy with the girls.  I'm impressed.  But after you see it a couple of times, it's no longer impressive and it gets swallowed up by the rest of the picture with its dreadfully slow pace.  The music is too sparse when the characters aren't in a nightclub.  You'd think being set in New Orleans would be great but we're rarely ever outside so this could have easily been shot anywhere and spliced together with someone's vacation footage.  Besides the nudity and gore, the best scene in the movie, unintentionally, was when the two detectives get THE ADDRESS of the suspected killer and rather than go get the guy, they go to a bar for a couple of drinks. When someone busts in, who has been trying to find them, tells one of the detectives that his prostitute ex-girlfriend has been abducted by the killer, only then does he have a fire under his pants to get him to act on it.  They get to the guy's lair, save the day and give chase to the bad guy.  Now we get a chase scene filmed in N.O. but it's the last five minutes of the movie.  It's too little, too late.  I kind of dug writer/director Jack Weis' earlier picture, CRYPT OF DARK SECRETS (1976), which is filmed in southern Louisiana in the swamps. I'm going to have to revisit that one.