Mardi Gras Massacre, 1978, 92mins

3rd Sitting:

Mardi Gras Massacre, 1978, 92mins (NTSC): Successfully prosecuted

Kevs Blog -  

Well, there we were preparing to follow up the hilarity of Zombie Creeping Flesh/Hell of the Living Dead with something that has maybe has a bit more production/artistic value, or something that properly delivered on the "nasty" part of the video nasty genre and what happens? My order of the very recently released Code Red region 0 dvd of Jack Weis's "Mardi Gras Massacre" drops through the door, throwing all previous plans to the wall.

Now, it was only just as we were sitting down in Jay's appropriately dark, dank basement to watch this dvd that my excitement about the film we were both about to see for the first time suddenly faltered; Wasn't this the fairly appalling late '70s remake/rip-off of the ground breaking genre busting 1963 proto-nasty "Blood Feast" (also on the DPP list)? Yes, it bloody was. For a few seconds my heart sank, that was until the film started and suddenly the team behind Zombie Creeping Flesh were made to look like a cross between Steven Spielberg, Orson Welles and Sam Peckinpah in their heydays and the original Blood Feast seem like Se7en. Yes, here we were again, watching somebody failing to observe the most basic of skills required to direct and edit a film - I mean, even in ZCF we didn't get to see fluffed and tripped-over lines delivered by actors and those takes left in the movie. I can only think that the production was sooooo low budget that they just couldn't afford to shoot more film on a second take (oh how easy those digital filmakers of today have it), or indeed afford to have any kind of post-synch dubbing, judging from the overall sound quality (and this is definitely not because of any low quality dvd authoring). Surprisingly the, albeit one trick, gore effects aren't bad - probably where all the money for film stock and actors went. Still, at least they hadn't had to spend any money on the story, as the "lunatic religious nut, offing women as a blood sacrifice to some obscure god" plot had been provided to them for free by Herschell Gordon Lewis some 15 years earlier.

Anyway, the result another very funny movie that had us howling in disbelief; At least half of the actors must have been friends doing it for free, or maybe just drunks pulled off of the street. Yes the movie is set during New Orleans Mardi Gras, but if you're expecting some kind of celebration of the famous city, or even just a good look at the parades, well you can forget it - they might as well have filmed a wet Easter fete on the outskirts of Luton, certainly not one for the New Orleans tourist board to get excited about..... god, I've not even mentioned the music yet... well, I'll leave that to Jay. All in all, very enjoyable for all of the wrong reasons and, despite some (and I'm being polite here) over long montage moments, it didn't drag its feet too much and there was always something to laugh at within moments of us getting concerned that it was about to get boring.

Interestingly, this film received an apparent outright ban after the DPP successfully took it down and has never seen a release on these shores cut or otherwise since the ban, yet again proving that the moral guardians of the country in the 1980s must have been at the psychedelic mushrooms if they thought that exposure to this would have any other kind of reaction than violent outbursts of laughter. The only way this film could have corrupted anybody is by encouraging writers and directors to make truly awful films and if that was the case, banning it didn't bloody work, because "Love Actually" got made. Actually, that's not fair - Mardi Gras Massacre is a thousand times better than Love Actually and a thousand times funnier - maybe Richard Curtis should take note.

Right, lets do something proper nasty next time, I'm not sure how much more my sides can take...

Jays Blog


Kev has covered it pretty much and there is not a lot I can add - I would like to just mention a few things I found most striking about this film. Firstly the music.....sweet jesus the music!!!! So much of it and so loud. What were they thinking? I can only imagine that after watching back the initial edit of badly lit scene after badly lit scene (that also suffered from some sort of terminal sound quality issue when anyone was trying to speak any dialogue) someone said "what this film needs is a low quality disco soundtrack over almost the entire thing". Someone else then probably said "what just quiet and subtle in the background?" to which the reply was "no, it should be really loud and intrusive".


To be fair the music was the least of the 'crapyness' issues this film had - try a half baked, boring, pointless love story between a drunk hooker and a mildly misogynistic cop. Or editing so poor the same room and almost exact shot would be cut into another almost identical shot but in a slightly different angle (as if they has run out of film one day, gone back in the next day with a sort of 'I think the camera was about here wasn't it? ' approach to finish the scene). Or the oddly tiny desk the 2 cops had to share....like a child's school desk. Or the fact the actor playing the killer waited until he had his 'victims' tied up before giving the actress in question a few extra gropes for good luck. Or the fact he stabbed them in their 'foot of evil'.......I could go on, really I could but I think you get the general idea. 


Rubbish, pointless, badly acted, badly directed, terrible editing......flipping brilliant!!!

3 down, 69 to go....

 

2nd Sitting - Zombie Creeping Flesh AKA Hell of the Living Dead

KEVS BLOG:  

Zombie Creeping Flesh AKA Hell of the Living Dead, 1980 101 mins: DPP Failed to convict

Well, here were go with one of the most (but not THE most) brilliantly inept films on the list (oh thank you director Bruno Mattai)...

We are watching the Blue Underground, region 0 NTSC dvd, anamorphic 1.85:1 ration widescreen, which I think cost me about £4 including postage on Amazon marketplace - without doubt one of the best £4s I have ever spent!!!

Jeepers, well, the original Zombie Creeping Flesh was missing about 14 minutes of footage - I saw a bootleg copy of this version and it was a bit dull, but then all the young me wanted was gore and didn't appreciate lines such as "since when did you start caring about our balls", or something like that. This version is the full dubbed US version, but the thing to remember with half of these sort of films is that often the directors may have been Italian, but they also had their eyes on the US and so shot the films with a view to english language dialogue being dubbed on - Enzo G Castellari (Bronx Warriors, Inglorious Bastards) shot most of his films with the actors speaking in English ready for American/English voice actors to overdub the lines, so let's not get too "World Cinema" on this little trip we're taking....

Anyhoo, what can I say, a film that uses extensive incidental music from other films (including some of Goblin's "Dawn of the Dead" pieces), was done on such a low budget that it seems like over a third of what you are watching is inserts from nature documentaries and mondo footage and yet runs at least 15 minutes too long; a film that seems to have been shot in about two weeks and yet still has the feel that by the end of the shoot no-one knew where the hell the story was going and maybe we'd better just end it tomorrow because we don't actually know what day it is and we might be due to start making another one; a film that has extras that reappear in different roles several times, and yet it still actually does boast a couple of nasty moments and a couple of shocking ideas and mixes genres like a cheap cocktail.... well, all I can say is that, though over long, this was probably one of the most enjoyable ones we'll see, totally ludicrous and awful, but bloody funny and entertaining for all the wrong reasons. Jay could barely believe believe what he was seeing - I could, I'd only watched it a couple of weeks before and here I was sitting through it again! Jay was convinced it was just about the most poorly made and acted film he'd ever seen but, as I pointed pointed out to him, he hasn't seen Cannibal Terror yet...

JAY'S BLOG:
Oh my lord!!!! This film is amazing, not in a 'technical' way, not in a 'display of great acting' way, not in an 'interesting storyline' way ......just in a so very very poor its incredible kind of way.
Its a weird heady mix of zombie and cannibal genres with some sort of attempt at a moral backstory to do with governments wiping out the third world of something - bit confusing and not really ever explained properly. I find it best to just try and ignore the plot in a film like this...it just gets in the way.


There seems to be a cast of about 15 people in the entire film with all them doubling up as various zombies. Whilst I am on the subject of zombies, let me embellish on that aspect of the film for a moment. For a film with the word Zombie in the title and a plot (of sorts) about zombies you would be forgiven to expect some halfway decent looking zombies. Well the zombies in this film are green......that's it, just normal people with green faces....actually there appears to be some white people who are blacked up to look like natives then 'greened' on top.


All in all very enjoyable garbage - particularly the excessive use of documentary footage which the cast are actually meant to act 'opposite' as it were. Best example would be tribal chief in real life footage wandering off camera - then someone who is clearly a different build, age and possible nationality walking onto set to give our heroine (who is naked for no particular reason) a mask that is not even similar to the one the real native is wearing in the stock footage.


I would recommend this film to anyone who loves comedy - Kev and i giggled like little girls throughout it all. One last thing - why do they make the special police force (who are fucking morons by the way) wear such tiny hats? They just kept falling off!

2 down 70 to go...

Nightmares In A Damaged Brain

1st sitting:

Nightmares In A Damaged Brain AKA Nightmare, 1981 97mins (NTSC): Successfully prosecuted

KEV 'S BLOG: 

Initially we thought we'd do the list in alphabetical order, starting with the 39 films successfully prosecuted by the Director of Public Prosecution in the "Video Nasties" witch hunts of '83 and '84 and then doing the 33 that were on the list but that the DPP either failed to get convictions on or just ended up not bothering with. But, partly due to the fact we couldn't necessarily get easy access to all of the films in that order and the fact that my 30th Anniversary edition of Nightmare turned up, we thought sod it, let's just crack on in any random order, I mean Christ, it's a ridiculous OCD thing we're doing anyway, and I haven't seen Nightmare for over 12 years since I lent my bootleg copy to a mate who never saw again (honestly, although fairly entertaining it's neither that offensive or good, so it must have been me) and I'm right up for it soooo....

The copy we're watching is Code Red's (a fine company who's name, like Blue Underground, Media Blasters, Shriekshow and Shameless you are likely to see crop up a fair bit over the course of this endeavor) recent 2 disc, region 0, NTSC dvd. The set contains a staggering 3 different prints of the film (Code Red were keen to make available the best prints they could and were all set to release both the  2008 hi-def master, matted to 1.78:1 widescreen print and the 2005 colour corrected telecine 1.33:1 ratio unmatted version, then at the last minute found a better widescreen telecine print, so threw that in for good measure on a second disc) and this release has been awaited for a couple of years now by devoted fans of this sort of thing. Of the 3 versions we have opted for the 1.33 unmatted full frame version, partly because it is apparently director Romano Scavolini's intended viewing ratio and also, being 1.33 and a bit more of a scraggy print, it also makes the whole experience a bit more like watching it back in the 80s (did I mention OCD tendencies?).

Basically, I liked this quite a lot, although I do have to say that the film does really "weight" the, urm..., excitement at the front end. It's reasonable disorienting (ie confusing) and gory for the first 15 minutes, as a psychiatric patient lurches from nightmare to nightmare, but are we watching nightmares, some things that are actually happening, or flashbacks - who can say? Anyway, as psychiatrists often do, the patient is released having seemingly been a successful trial in some new breakthrough methods of treating psychopaths and he obviously heads straight to New York's 42 street for some great shots of dens of iniquity and some nice seedy encounters with some of the girls who work there... all the usual stuff really and all the better for it, but then when the bodies start turning up and he decides to head back to his family home in Florida...

Enter two idiot generic cops and a fairly dreary middle patch and suddenly you are praying for the potential victims to wander in to the killers path, to the point where I felt like offering to help. Funnily enough, I think my old bootleg may have been from the UK nasty edition as I have read that it was about 10 mins shorter, losing a lot of the exposition and none of the seediness or the gore, because thinking back I can't particularly remember either the cops or the boredom, anyway, gets better when the hilariously slimey, boat-dwelling hippy boyfriend of what looks like to be a sure-fire blond corpse in waiting turns up, nice big gory end as the nutter's background is explained, blame firmly leveled at the psychiatrists for letting the bloke out and we're done. Pretty good, but maybe not quite as much fun as I'd remembered.

In some ways it is fitting that we kicked off proceedings with this, as it is the only film on the list of 72 that someone (a chap called David Grant) in this country went to jail for distributing... terrifying days in the 80s, never mind the millions of unemployed, the loss of industry and the closing down of work and communities - lets blame it all on low budget films and send a small independent distributor to jail for it - the masses are appeased, the Daily Mail has its circulation figures and we're all happy... 

JASON'S BLOG:

 Ok, Kev is the expert on these films - I have always taken an unhealthy passing interest but he's the Don..we're using his collection. Mind you we're using my 'viewing room'. Which to set the scene is little more than 3 old cinema seats from the forties in a dank, dark basement underneath my house with a reasonable sized telly and multi region DVD player. Horrible but fitting!


Ok so Kev was excited about seeing this one....me?....not so much, and I can't say I enjoyed it. I also can't  understand what it was that upset the DPP so much back in the eighties, there was no real sense of dread or bad taste about the film. It did however contain the other hallmarks of a classic nasty - poorly made, confusing and slowly paced. I must admit I am writing this some days on and I am struggling to remember much about it. I do know that I wanted the killer to murder his ex wife by the end of the film...she was possibly the worst mother I have ever seen (and I have seen the ones that frequent Friar Street in Reading!), seeming to go out to see her hairy boyfriend leaving the kids home alone at the drop of a hat. She was impatient with them and full of self pity....so in my mind was prime for a killing. Apart from that I can only remember feeling very confused by the endless nightmare scenes.


Oh come to think of it - it did contain a scene when a kid axes his mother whilst she make loves to his Dad......maybe that's why it was banned. 

 1 down 71 to go....

Why are we doing this?

Me and my good friend Kev have decided to spend one night a week over the next 72 weeks viewing every singe one of the 72 films originally banned on the infamous UK Video Nasty list. I will soon be sharing our views on each film.