Macabre (a.k.a. Macabro, Frozen Terror)

So, due to not being able to pull screencaps from the Macabre DVD and having to prepare myself for a job interview I had this morning, I ended up writing only a crude joke-free review of this film last night. As it is now, this review is almost 1300 words long. Maybe one day there will be a remix of this review featuring screencaps.

More reviews will be posted up on Monday.

This review was also posted at The Bloody Italiana Blog.

Last weekend I started reading The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett. I’m not more than eleven chapters into it, but there is a part where Alice Leggett (nee Dain) reveals to her niece-stepdaughter that the women in their family are cursed. What the curse seems to be so far is jealousy, mental illness, a possible drug addiction, and murderous tendencies. The mother and daughter in Macabre seem to suffer from the same curse that Dain women do.

From the outset of the film, we are told that this is based on a true story that happened in New Orleans. We are shown an idyllic setting of two children playing in the front yard, and the wife kissing the husband good-bye while he goes on to work, and the husband promising the kids that their mom will take them to a movie. As soon as her husband’s car is around the corner though, Mrs. Baker is on the phone to her boyfriend, agreeing to meet him in a half hour. She tells her daughter Lucy to watch her brother while she goes to a meeting that got moved up. Suspicious, Lucy reminds her that they were going to go to the movies. Mrs. Baker promises that she’ll be home soon, as she catches a taxi.

She soon arrives at her boyfriend’s apartment, which is on the second floor of a house owned by Robert and his elderly mother. We are led to believe at first that Mrs. Baker is there to see Robert, who is first revealed as taking a bath. It’s a little creepy, what with his mother being there and a minute later, his mother helping him wash his toes. But alas, Robert is blind, and kind of does need help with his baths sometimes. Mrs. Baker goes upstairs and meets up with Fred, her boyfriend. They make love loudly, and Robert can hear from below while fixing a trumpet…although old houses and buildings tend to have thin floors and walls, since I live in a city with lots of old architecture.

Meanwhile back at the Baker residence, Lucy is going through her mother’s address book and calling around to find out where she is. She figures it out quickly once her mom answers the phone at Fred’s and tells her not to call again. She continues to call, then decides to drown her little brother in the bathtub. She calls her mom again to let her know that her son has drowned, Mrs. Baker understandably freaks out and makes Fred drive her back to her house. It is during this drive that Fred hits a guard rail which runs through his car and decapitates him.

We meet Mrs. Baker again one year later as she is leaving a psychiatric hospital. She goes back to the house where Fred lived. It is at this point the exterior of the house is shown and it looks an awful like the house from Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond. Only Robert remains in the house – it’s never made clear whether his mother died or just moved away. Mrs. Baker has been paying rent on her boyf’s old apartment, and is to live there now that she has been released from the hospital, and it’s later revealed that her husband has divorced her. After some small talk with Robert, she goes upstairs. She walks around, smells Fred’s laundry that has been sitting in the hamper for a year that probably doesn’t smell like Fred anymore – more like dusty and moldy old house, and checks the icebox. She begins to set up her shrine to Fred – it features two pictures of him that look like two different men, the headline from the newspaper announcing his horrible death, a button from his clothes, and his Visa credit card. Okay, I can understand everything else, but why his Visa card? Did he buy her a lot of dinners with that card? Anyway, she slips into some lingerie and Robert, who has been getting himself dressed up in a slightly clashing plaid shirt and sports coat with a polka dot tie and preparing a romantic dinner of Campbell’s Chicken Soup, interrupts her to see if she wants dinner. Mrs. Baker turns him down, and claims to already have a date, seemingly comfortable wearing flimsy lingerie in Robert’s presence just cos he’s blind. The next shot is of Robert in his twin bed on the first floor listening to Mrs. Baker’s sex noises coming through the ceiling. This continues on for several nights, and she does call out “Fred!” every once in awhile. Robert’s suspicion that something isn’t quite right increases after finding a small piece of an earlobe with a small gold hoop earring attached to it in Mrs. Baker’s bed. He has a friend find the newspaper story about Fred’s car accident and decapitation. While Robert seems to have an inkling of what might be happening at this point, and how it’s connected to the locked icebox in Mrs. Baker’s apartment, he hasn’t totally figured it out yet, but some of the audience probably has, especially if they’ve seen the trailer.

I knew what Mrs. Baker’s big secret was, having gleamed it from a short blurb on DVD distribution website that sells Macabre. It is why I wanted to watch it. But it didn’t ruin things for me for once cos I was really interested in how far Lamberto Bava was going to push things and where this movie was going to go, and he takes it pretty out there. For one thing, he created a rarity in film: a completely vile and despicable child, and not in a campy Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory way. Lucy Baker is a cold, conniving, loathsome pre-adolescent girl, jealous of her mother and a delusional child of divorce (or at least pretends to be one around Robert) who manipulates everyone around her and was probably never suspected for killing her younger brother. When she finds out her mother’s secret, and later steals the piece of ear that Robert found to underhandedly show to her mom that she knows what’s up, it proves to be one of the grosser moments in an already pretty disgusting film. I seriously rooted for Lucy to get hit by a bus or something – that’s how awful of a character she is. One can at least sympathize a little with Mrs. Baker’s insanity, although she is a tad on the manipulative side too, at least when it comes to Robert, who obviously has a crush on her. But she was driven to insanity by losing two loved ones in a period of about an hour. She only ends up killing to defend the strange life she’s built for herself in that apartment. The film is features both death and reminders that this was based on a true story as book-ends.

I was surprised by how good Macabre actually was. I have seen Lamberto Bava’s Demons and Demons 2, but found them to mostly be bad-in-a-good way. Even after the big secret is revealed, the ending made me jump and shout “What the fuck?”, which is a couple notches down on the scare-meter for me, below “I can’t sleep after watching this” and “I have weird dreams after watching this”. Every character in this movie is creepy and weird, so it gives the film a good atmosphere. Most of it was very well shot also, although I think there were bits where the transfer didn’t quite work out. My only other gripe with it is that the dubbed New Orleans or Southern accents in this movie were terrible.

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