Summary
A speakeasy cellar in 1929 New Orleans exhales jazz and ganja haze; inside, Billy B. Van’s itinerant grifter—part Ziegfeld clown, part riverboat shaman—stumbles on a crate said to contain the shrunken head of Marie Laveau. The head, eyelids stitched with crimson thread, whispers lottery numbers that win once, twice, then invert into cursed augury: fortune becomes flame, lovers calcify into statuary, streetcars career off their tracks as though the city itself were a roulette wheel rigged by loa tricksters. Tom Bret’s script spirals outward like a hurricane’s eyewall—every good-luck charm becomes a spider, every spider weaves a web of debt, every debt is collected in blood. Our anti-hero, draped in Mardi Gras beads that grow heavier with each betrayal, races from bayou cock-fights to Catholic confessionals, chasing the original sin of a wish. When he finally buries the head beneath a crossroads at dawn, the ground burps up gold coins that melt into tar as the sun rises; he laughs, weeps, then walks backward into the Mississippi, vanishing while still singing a cracked lullaby in Creole patois. The film ends on a close-up of the empty crate rocking on a wharf—inside, fresh stitches crawl like caterpillars across the darkness, implying the hoodoo is merely between owners.
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