Special Mardi Gras Edition

In honor of Fat Tuesday, we here at Moonshine Mountain are honored to present our three favorite Cajun hixploitation movies:



3. Poor White Trash (1957) Originally released as Bayou, this piece of swamp schlock was re-edited to include newly shot gore footage and became a drive-in classic. Yankee architect Peter Graves travels to New Orleans and falls for a Cajun queen. His rival is none other than the completely bugfuck Timothy Carey (pictured above). The movie itself is nothing much, but every second Carey is onscreen is riveting, and his bizarro swamp boogie is the stuff rewind buttons were made for. Savor it over and over again.



2. Gator Bait (1976) Ah, sweet Claudia Jennings, queen of the hick flicks. Here she is Desiree Thibodeau, the sexiest coonass in all the swamp. When rednecks kill her sister, she becomes a one-woman revenge squad. Sure, her Cajun accent is a little shaky, but nobody wears Daisy Dukes like Claudia. (Well, except Daisy Duke, I guess.)



1. Southern Comfort (1981) National Guard troops get lost on maneuvers in the Louisiana bayou and run afoul of the locals. Yes, it’s basically a Deliverance knockoff, and it’s never going to win any awards from the Cajun Anti-Defamation League, but this lean and mean Walter Hill action flick builds to an unbearably tense and suspenseful finale.

So there you have it. Happy Mardi Gras!