Macabre: A Decent Bit of Bloody Fun (2009) BluRay 1080p English Review

Macabre is a film that knows exactly what it is doing. It is a film that unpretentiously offers up a stock standard genre set-up in order to give the audience what they want. And what they want is buckets of blood which Macabre delivers in spades.

Kimo Stamboel and Timo Tjahjanto are The Mo Brothers, an Indonesian writer/director team who offer up Macabre as their feature debut, a calling card to the world to pay attention to what they are doing. There is nothing particularly ground-breaking going on in Macabre. It begins with a standard genre set-up: a group of friends in the middle of a long drive back to the city stop to offer a stranded woman a lift home. Upon arriving at her isolated property she invites the group in for a quick bite to eat. Of course, her family is a bunch of psychos whose home doubles as a human slaughter-house where people are killed and sold to what seems to be rich people who dine on human flesh.

After about 20 minutes of obligatory set-up the film gets down to business and for the next 75 minutes offers some of the bloodiest cinema I have seen in quite a while. The Mo Brothers, obviously raised on a diet of American spatter movies, know exactly what their target market wants and they choreograph their kills with great relish. Dropping in references to Hitchcock and Scorsese among others, The Mo Brothers escalate their set-pieces with panache as each sequence tops the previous and before you know it the film is climaxing in a sequence where characters slip around a room totally covered in blood, wading through the skulls of dead babies and various body parts while trying to avoid a psycho woman with a chainsaw. Oh yes, it's one of 'those' movies.

 

Head 'crazy' is played by a woman with the name Shareefa Daanish and her classically OTT brand of loony is a joy to watch. While there is nothing subtle about her overly made up and arch performance, aficionados of movie psychos will have a ball with her character. From her stilted delivery to her poise with a chainsaw this is top grade loon.

Unlike a film such as Braindead for example, Macabre is remarkably stoic and serious in tone. There are short bursts of humourous relief but for the most part it is very straight-faced. For some audiences this may make Macabre a little too sadistic for their tastes but I felt the Mo Brothers kept the whole film on the side of being entertainingly extreme rather than confrontingly so.

It's an engaging, bloody horror film, designed to be enjoyed with a group of friends and some drinks. There is nothing revelatory about it whatsoever, apart from the fact that a couple of young guys in Indonesia have made a better Friday night horror film than anything that's come out of the Hollywood factory in years.