MACABRE (Mongrel, 2009) D: the Mo Brothers, w/ Shareefa Daanish, Julie Estelle. Rating: NNN DVD package: none. Rating: NNN
Macabre gives The Texas Chainsaw Massacre an Indonesian twist that’s well worth a look for genre fans.
Four guys and two women, one of them eight months pregnant, give a lift to a young woman caught in the rain. Her mother insists on feeding them. The house is lovely, filled with antiques. The family – mother, daughter, two sons – seems gracious and genteel. Before long, the visitors are slated for the chopping block, and from then on it’s a matter of capture, escape and recapture. Both sides inflict escalating levels of graphic damage until the few survivors are gore-soaked and barely able to crawl to the climax.
The movie gets a lift whenever Shareefa Daanish, as the matriarch, is onscreen. She’s beautiful, elegant, just slightly too stiff and slow, with a voice like the grave. She has one particularly unsettling moment mid-movie where she seems to be literally reassembling her face to greet visitors.
The disc has no extras. We’ll never know if Macabre might be meant as a shot at Indonesia’s upper class.
EXTRAS Indonesian audio. English subtitles.
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