Macabre (1980)

Made in 1980, Macabre is an Italian horror film made by Lamberto Bava in his first film as sole director after two films co-directed with his father, Mario Bava, also a prolific horror film maker. Mario Bava sadly died less than two weeks after this film’s release, but Lamberto Bava would go on to direct a large number of trashy horror films, most of which are unknown outside his native Italy. His most well known films being Demons, Demons 2, and Blade in the Dark.

Macabre was also part of a movement in Italy at the time away from the gruesome but stylish gothic and giallo films popularised by earlier directors such as Mario Bava and Dario Argento. Giallo, in case you aren’t aware, is the Italian word for “yellow,” and is their term for a thriller or murder mystery, coming from the yellow covers of an Italian thriller imprint. Around the turn of the 1980s, Italian horror films became increasingly graphic and visceral, seeking to shock with the level of violence and explicit gore, such as Cannibal Holocaust, released the same year. Although Macabre is nowhere near as outright disgusting as the cannibal films of this period, it does have a few effectively gruesome scenes.

Like Cannibal Holocaust, and many other films of around this time period, the claim that it is based on a true story is made at the start to add frisson, but becomes patently absurd in light of the events of the film. In the case of this film it is true only in the vague sense that one of the plot points was in a crime story in a newspaper, and then the writers made everything else up.

Set in New Orleans, Macabre tells the story of Jane Baker (Bernice Stegers), a woman having an affair, whose son and lover are killed in disturbing circumstances, following which she rents the upstairs flat in the house of a blind man, Robert Duval (Stanko Molnor), who becomes suspicious of what she does in her flat at night…

As Lamberto Bava’s first solo feature film, his inexperience does show, and the film lacks a lot of the energy and speed of his films, preferring instead a more traditional, leisurely pace, with infrequent moments of shock. I found the main problem with the film to be one of pace; after a strong and shocking first ten minutes, the film settles down to an hour’s worth of building atmosphere and trying to create tension before a strong climax in the last ten minutes. Unfortunately, the movie can’t sustain the tension over a whole hour where very little happens, and the film starts to become staid and uninvolving. On the plus side, the film is well shot, and the house that provides the main location of the film is suitably atmospheric and well lit. There are also several memorably spooky and effective location shots of a fog-wreathed New Orleans.

One more problem, which unfortunately Bava had no control over, is the terrible dubbing, with posh sounding English people performing dodgy Deep South accents which you may either find amusing or annoying.

The special features on the disc are the trailer (one of those types that give away all the plot and action scenes, so I recommend only watching it after you’ve seen the movie), a rather pointless photo gallery, and a 10-minute overview of Italian exploitation at the beginning of the eighties, which is informative, if too short to really give more than an overview of the genre.

The transfer is quite sharp but the film stock is scratchy, with occasional compression artefacts, and the audio is stereo, unimpressive, but without any problems.

In conclusion, this film holds little interest for the average viewer, but for horror fans, particularly of Italian horror, the film’s great importance in the development of a major director, and its position at a time when Italian horror exploitation was exploding.

2 stars

Last edited: 25th July 2009