![]() ![]() Wisely, The Mo Brothers do not dwell on the details too long and simply jump in and let the blood flow. There is also something to do with removing people’s organs for collection by a mystery couple where what is going on is not exactly clear. The Mo Brothers never do a huge amount to offer explanations – there is some suggestion of occult rituals and a set of photos that indicate that Shareefa Daanish’s matriarch was the same age back in the 19th Century, while the family want Sigi Wimala’s newborn child for reasons that may well have something to do with their being immortal and possibly also having supernatural strength and invulnerability to damage. The Mo Brothers appropriate the plot basics from Texas Chain Saw – a group of innocents who stray into a house off the beaten road where they are abducted, tortured and killed by a very strange family. It rapidly becomes apparent that Macabre is an Indonesian variant on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). The spookily intense and coldly regal Shareefa Daanish as Dara, the family matriarch ![]() In a head-spinningly abrupt space of time, the banal exchanges of the early sections slide into full-on Torture Porn brutality – scenes with Mike Muliadro being pursued through the house by Imelda Therinne slashing at him with a knife Sigi Wimala barricading herself in the bedroom, only for Arifin Putra to stab her in the hand right through the door the others tied up in the cellar watching through a hole in the door as Ruly Lubris beheads, then eviscerates and removes the organs from Mike Muliadro. Nothing however could be further from the truth.įrom about the point of the dinner party, Macabre opens up into something else altogether. From these scenes, Macabre seemed to be shaping up to be yet another Asian horror story, one that feels as though the filmmakers are straining to create an atmosphere of something sinister – scenes like those of members of the party spooking others with animal skulls come across as very try-hard. Things become slightly but not overly strange with the introduction of Imelda Therinne as a mystery girl who claims to have been robbed and asks for a ride home, before inviting the group in to meet her family. The first fifteen or so minutes seem to be banally shot digital footage concerning a group of friends and their visit to Ario Bayu’s sister Julie Estelle. Not even the program notes fully prepared one for what to expect. Macabre was a complete unknown before I sat down to watch it at the 2011 Vancouver Indonesian Film Festival. Macabre is a debut film for the directing/writing duo known as The Mo Brothers, the otherwise unrelated Kimo Stamboel and Timo Tjahjanto, and is a feature-length expansion of their short film Dara (2007), which appeared in the Brian Yuzna produced anthology Takut: Faces of Fear (2008). ![]() Indonesia has certainly made horror films before this – the IMDB lists some 130 titles made between the 1960s and the present – although none of these appear to have had any wide release in the West. Macabre – no relation to the William Castle film Macabre (1958) or to Lamberto Bava’s necrophilia film Macabre/Frozen Terror (1980) – is an Indonesian horror film.
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