Review of Macabre (1980) by Dougal S — 06 Nov 2010

Is this film weird? Oh yes...

Set in New Orleans a woman has a rented room in a blind man's house where she meets her young lover for a passionate affair. When she leaves here children alone one day to see said lover her young daughter responds by drowning her brother in the bath. Rushing home in a panic the woman and lover are in a car crash in which he gets decapitated. Flash forward a year and the mother has been released from the asylum she's spent the last twelve months in and returns to her rented room - and then it starts getting really weird.

The first film from Lamberto Bava this slow boil giallo never manages to reach the heights of his more illustrious father's films but does manage to pull off a distinctly seedy feel to proceedings. The blind house owner is the only positive character, a wandering innocent, whilst the rest of the cast play out their bizarre psychosis around him.

The body counts isn't particularly high for a giallo and the gore quotient isn't massive aside from the grand climax and much of it has the feel of a TV movie - if the TV companies had ever commissioned sleezy psycho-sexual pictures. It does stick in the memory though (mainly due to it's central plot premise) and is one for fans of the genre or those wanting to relive the halcyon days of the early video boom where this sort of fare was peddled out by every corner newspaper shop wanting to turn a quick buck.