Macabre (aka Macabro)

JULY 12, 2007

GENRE: ITALIAN, PSYCHOLOGICAL
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

Yesterday’s movie took about 30-35 minutes for anything to happen that would ensure I was actually watching a horror movie. Well Christ, Macabre takes damn near 80! Come on people, I’m gonna see 365 of these goddamn things before the year is through, you gotta step up if you wanna be remembered at the HMAD Awards!!!

The fact that the movie is titled “Macabre” is sort of a spoiler, since the only macabre thing in the entire movie occurs during the climax. You wouldn’t call Robin Hood “Sean Connery shows up as the King!” would you? Actually, I might.

Regardless, for a Lamberto Bava movie, this one is not only slow, but it almost makes total sense too. Nothing completely “What the Christing fuck?” happens until literally the final scene in the film. When I watch a Bava film, I expect to get so baffled at the logic that eventually I get more confused when something that makes sense happens. None of this ‘reality’ bullshit!

You know how I say some would have been better as a short movie? Even as a short film this one would drag. After a great opening that sees a guy get decapitated in a car accident AND a little girl drown her brother in the tub, the film decides to put itself on pause, treating us to an endless array of scenes such as “Blind guy making soup” “Whore woman walking around New Orleans” and “Blind guy fixing saxophone”. And Bava failed to really make the viewer understand that the woman was seemingly fucking someone; I just assumed she was masturbating. So when the blind dude tries to figure out how someone else could be in the house without him knowing, I had no idea what the hell he was up to. I had to read the back of the box to understand it.

Back to the little girl though… she is without a doubt the most hateful child I have seen in a film since my beloved Cathy’s Curse (and she was at least possessed!). The girl is like 8, and yet she is so angry at her mother for cheating on her dad that she kills her brother, then puts a picture of the kid in her mother’s room to freak her out. Then she finds an earlobe of the mom’s dead lover and puts it in her mother’s soup. She also smokes one of her cigarettes. What the fuck is the kid’s problem??? We never know. Bava just suddenly has a disembodied head kill the blind dude and the movie ends. Whatever, movie.

I’d also like to point out the rather stupid line “We visit his grave every year”, when it’s only been a year since the kid died. I wish I had more to say on the matter, but I wrote it down, and had nowhere else to put it. So it’s sort of like the end of the movie, it comes out of nowhere, too late to have any meaning. Just not as funny.

What say you?