Mario Party Jr: Macabre

Can the son ever be as good as the father?  Obviously in my case, the answer is 'yes.'  Self-boasting aside, let's look at today's film Macabre.  It's the debut film of Lamberto Bava, although even he admits its origin is sketchy.  As he says in an Interview on the DVD- thanks, Anchor Bay-, him and three friends wrote the Screenplay as a joke (of sorts) after hearing a weird story from America.  America- good for inspiring obscure horror film plots since 1776!  The plot is a weird one, escalating very quickly and then...just kind of meandering to a finish.  It's one thing to be a slow film- see Let Sleeping Corpses Lie-, but it's another thing to be a film that starts dramatically and then just grinds to a halt.  Imagine a James Bond film that begins with the Action Set Piece Opener cliche, only to be followed by 80 minutes of James Bond investigating the inner-workings of MI-6 a la Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.  That would be weird, right?  That said, the movie is quite interesting.  To find out how it can be both, read on...

Like I said, this movie is supposedly inspired by a real story.  I'm sure that the Director of Dinner With A Vampire to do a true story justice.

In the beginning, a woman leaves her two kids at home with the token black gardener to have an affair.  The daughter knows that she's hiding something...somehow and has a logical solution to get her attention...

Drowning her brother in the bathtub!  Yeah, that's a logical reaction.

Oh and the pay-off to this comes at the end.  Kind of odd that the Police didn't solve this one right away.

On the way back home, she freaks out and her secret lover crashes the car, killing him.

After this, the movie jumps ahead 1 year and...turns into a Tennessee Williams play.  You think I'm kidding, don't you?

 Since the affair obviously came to light, our heroine moves into...the building where she was having the affair.  At the same time, she's trying to get back with her husband- who only has two real scenes- and her murdering daughter- who nobody caught.

Skipping ahead, she teases the guy who owns the building, who just so happens to be the brother of the guy she was screwing.  She fails to make up with her husband, but finds solace in some mysterious thing in her refrigerator.

Since I'm just flat-out telling you the plot, it sets up this new Meme I thought up today...

Here's the last third of the film in quick succession...

The thing in the Refrigerator is her lover's head.  She takes it out every night to...well, you figure it out.

Her daughter keeps coming over and finally tells her about how she killed her brother.  This leads her mother to kill her in the bathtub.  Ironic?

The dripping water wakes up the blind brother and he struggles with our head-keeping heroine, who falls face-first into...something on her oven...I think and dies.

To wrap shit up, the blind brother walks over to the bed and...is killed by the head of his brother leaping at his neck.  You were trying to outdo Pieces, weren't you?  The End.

It's slow as hell...but it is still good.  The film is supposedly-inspired by a real newspaper headline about a woman having a torrid affair with the decapitated head of her former-lover.  If that's remotely-true, it's very creepy.  That does raise my biggest issue with this film- unexplained events.  The movie says that our heroine went crazy after the boyfriend died and was locked up in an Asylum for about a year.  Apparently, she took his head, ran all of the way back to the Apartment Building, stuck it in the Refrigerator and got herself put away.  I should also mention that the blind guy supposedly had the power off for a long time, since, well, lights don't do him much good anyhow.  In comparison, the daughter never being found out as the killer is a minute error!  It was the twist ending to Mindhunters, so that's something.  If you can accept those inconsistencies, the movie is a great kind of slow-burn horror film.  I was beginning to think that I made a mistake labeling this as Horror for this week's reviews...but then everything came together.  It really does feel like someone turned a Tennessee Williams play into a horror film, which is especially interesting considering that it came from an Italian Director!  In place of a joke, i'll leave you with this inexplicable title card from the end of the film...

Next up, I'm not doing Vampiros...since it wasn't interesting.  Instead of that or the other film I had planned, it's something else!  Stay tuned...