Gathered together for one final hoorah before moving abroad, a group of friends ready to head toward Jakarta to accompany their happily married couple on a rainy night stop and are driving their car when an attractive young woman walks in front of their vehicle who claims to have been robbed. The gang drives the woman to a house isolated in the countryside where her masculine sounding mother Dara requests them to stay for dinner before they get on their way. Who says no act of kindness goes unpunished? Soon the group of friends, one of whom is pregnant, realizes they just attended the dinner from hell and now must fight for their lives before they are killed and chopped up into little pieces to be served as tasty meals.
Macabre, directed by the Mo Brothers, is a creepy Indonesian film. The reason it’s creepy isn’t because of the subject matter or weird cult family but rather the strange look and sound of the mother, Dara. She is this young looking woman who clearly is much older than she appears to be and talks with a deep voice that would unsettle even the bravest of men. She is very proper and deliberate with everything that she does and, like creepy kids or dolls in films, she cocks her head sideways almost at a 45 degree angle to insure that we should be worried about her motives. Let’s also tack on the fact that she is abnormally strong and precise with her violent attacks. When it comes to creepiness, the son, Adam, comes in at a close second.
There are a lot of moments in Macabre where you’ll want to shout “why won’t you just die already” and that’s what actually makes it fun. Normally this kind of frustration gets annoying but for some reason it works in this film, probably because none of the actors actually say or question the family’s nearly invincible nature. This leads to a lot of solid gore effects that only keep getting more grandiose in nature as the film progresses and the stakes get higher.
There are a few issues I had with the film but one stands out the most, namely the survival instincts of the friends who were being attacked. Normally people have a heightened sense of awareness when their lives are being threatened but instead these people had very inconsistent responses to the danger they faced. They were loud when they should have been quiet, when they escape from captivity they decide to go back to the house and when they realize that it takes a lot more to hurt these people they still try to fight them. Why would anyone continue to attack people who seemingly can’t be killed? It makes no sense.
Overall, Macabre ended up being a rather fun, albeit ridiculous, bloody horror that is very in-line with the style of Timo Tjahjanto and Gareth Hwu Evans’ segment in V/H/S/2. It’s culty, it’s bloody and it has characters that know how to legitimately creep you out. Sure, it has its issues that you find in most horror movies, with some being hard to overlook, but it certainly delivers on drenching your screen with blood and guts for those who enjoy that type of horror or those that have the stomach to muscle through it.
As for special features, the DVD comes with four deleted scenes and a 13:17 “making-of” featurette comprised of interviews with the producers, directors and talent all cut with clips from the film.
Movie Rating: A bloody film that’ll satisfy most genre fans’ need for gore (6.4/10)
DVD Rating: 3/10
Macabre will be available on DVD from Bloody Disgusting Selects and The Collective on November 5th
Recent Comments