[this post was originally published a year ago on my new defunct horror film blog]

Macabre (Indonesia, 2009)

I had the opportunity to see Macabre a few nights ago on the first day of Fantastic Fest. I was hesitant to see it because I had heard that it was extraordinarily gory and while I’m a huge fan of horror films, I have a low tolerance for guts being splashed all over the screen.

Nevertheless, I took my chances since the screening was free to me (I have a staff badge because I’ve been volunteering during the festival).

Macabre follows six friends leaving a bar and heading to Jakarta to take two of them, Astrid and Adjie, to the airport. As the van chortles along ominous roads on a dark and stormy night, the group sees a girl, alone and drenched, who claims to have been robbed. They hesitantly acquiesce to take her home after their offer to call her a cab is rejected.

After arriving at her home, she manages to convince them not only to come inside to meet her mother, but to stay for dinner. This is where my eye-rolling began. Perhaps customs are different in other countries, but I find it hard to believe that people would agree to stop in at the home of a complete stranger and have dinner at her behest as a symbol of her gratitude. Also, don’t flights usually have pretty strict departure times?

But let’s suspend our belief (such is the nature of horror films) and continue. What occurs over the next hour or so is painful. Not only in its degree of gruesomeness but in how forced the acting on Dara’s (Shareefa Daanish) part is and the fact that the film feels like it’s wrapping up and coming to some conclusion and never fully gets there.

There’s a birth scene which take about thirty seconds. The baby is then left alone while the woman leaves to go find her husband because, naturally, if you’ve been separated from your husband, given birth prematurely whilst being held captive and tortured, you would clearly leave the baby alone and leave. Obviously. Then the baby gets stolen much to everyone’s surprise. Some people get killed. There’s an endless array of shlock tactics to keep everyone grossed out and nervous, but bloody scene after bloody scene gets tiresome after a while and we become desensitized so when the final kills do take place, no one cares. By the end of this film I was just waiting for the villain to actually die (after about four fake outs) so I could go get a drink.

Macabre’s main problem lies in the fact that it does something that’s already been done and redone and then remade and then digitally remastered, but it doesn’t do it that well nor does it add anything to the formula. Horror fans are familiar with the innocents-lured-to-creepy-isolated-place meme and although we love it, we’re not going to stand for subpar knock offs.

If you’re looking for 95 minutes of blood streaming everywhere and some limbs being flung about then this will be right up your alley. If, like me, you need your horror films with a little more.. uhm.. meat, don’t waste your time.