MACABRE (2009 - Indonesian)

Studio:       The Collective
Director:    Kimo Stamboel, Timo Tjahjanto
Writer:       Kimo Stamboel, Timo Tjahjanto
Producer:  James Toh, Freddie Yeo, Gary Goh, Greg Chew, Delon Tio
Stars:     Shareefa Daanish, Julie Estelle, Ario Bayu, Sigi Wimala, Arifin Putra, Daniel Mananta, Dendy Subangil, Imelda Therinne, Mike Lucock, Ruly Lubis

Review Score: 

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Summary:

Six friends are captured and tortured by a murderous family after giving a ride home to a desperate stranger. 

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Adjie is encouraged by his pregnant wife Astrid to make amends with his estranged younger sister Ladya. Adjie tells Ladya that he and Astrid are moving to Australia. Ladya still blames her brother for the death of their parents. In the restaurant where Ladya works as a server, Alam takes a bottle to the head when he defends Ladya from a patron’s insults.

Ladya, Alam, Astrid, and Adjie leave the restaurant in a minivan with their friends Eko and Jimmy. They find a woman named Maya stranded in the rain who claims to have been robbed. Attracted to Maya, Eko insists that they take her back to her house.

Maya asks everyone to come inside and meet her mother Dara. As a token of gratitude for returning Maya safely, Dara invites the six friends to stay for dinner. Outside, Ladya sees a large man dragging garbage bags followed by a strange thin man. Inside, the thin man introduces himself as Maya’s brother Adam. Dara gives Astrid a strange drink before Astrid and her husband are shown to a room upstairs where they can rest while the others gather for dinner.

At the dinner table, the large man is introduced as Dara’s other son Arman. Maya excuses herself during the meal and Eko follows her to a bedroom. Ladya, Alam, and Jimmy fall unconscious at the table after drinking drugged wine. Eko also passes out while trying to have sex with Maya.

Alam finds himself alone at the dining table when he regains consciousness. He asks Maya where his friends are. When he realizes that something is wrong, Maya begins slashing at Alam with a knife. Alam wrestles the knife away from her only to be attacked by Adam. Adjie and Astrid witness the attack. Astrid barricades herself in an upstairs room after Adjie is attacked. Adam then stabs Astrid’s hand with a knife through the door.

Ladya, Eko, and Jimmy find themselves tied with rope and locked in a basement room. Through a hole in the door, Ladya watches as Arman dismembers Alam with a chainsaw in another room. Upstairs, Dara tortures Adjie while Astrid is forced to listen from the other side of the door.

Arman drags Ladya to the slaughter table. He begins licking her. Ladya feigns a willingness to kiss him. Arman removes the tape over her mouth and she bites off his tongue and escapes.

When a car pulls up outside, Astrid screams out the window for help. However, the couple in the car is there to buy the human meat that Dara traffics. The concoction that Dara forced her to drink earlier causes Astrid to give birth.

Maya and Adam find Arman injured in the slaughter room. Ladya, Eko, and Jimmy escape to the outside through a vent. They return to the house only to discover that their vehicle is gone. Maya appears with a crossbow and shoots Eko in his ear. Everyone flees. Dara takes the crossbow from Maya and fires a bolt into Ladya. Jimmy goes back to help her and has his neck twisted by Adam. Ladya flees while Eko distracts Adam. Eko runs to a nearby road and is met by a vehicle.

Dara steals the newborn baby while Astrid tends to her injured husband. Dara claims that if Astrid chooses to save her husband, they might survive. But if Astrid tries to take back the baby instead, all of them will die.

Adjie regains consciousness and finds a room filled with baby skeletons. Astrid stumbles in with Dara’s oversized hairpin protruding from her neck. She pulls it out and dies from the wound. Dara comes in and lays the baby on a table. Adjie tackles Dara to the ground and attacks her, but she manages to strangle him with her bare hands and knock him out. Ladya returns to the house and is captured by Arman.

Maya pulls her mother to the front door where the family is visited by four policemen: Syarief, Sonny, Taufiq, and Petrus. Syarief and his unit are investigating Dara’s home after finding Eko alongside the road. Dara assures the police that Eko is a boarder at her home and that nothing is out of the ordinary. She asks that the policemen bring Eko inside. Petrus goes to get him, as well as a thief named Iyut that the police have also picked up. Meanwhile, Arman throws Ladya onto a bed upstairs. While looking around the house, Sonny finds a projector with an old film that shows Dara teaching her children how to dismember humans. He also finds a box of old photographs of Dara and her children that date as far back as 1889.

Upstairs, Ladya stabs Arman in his eye when he attempts to rape her. The commotion causes the police to investigate. Arman slices Taufiq’s throat, but Taufiq manages to shoot Arman. Adam cuts the power in order to black out the house and then finishes off Taufiq. Maya stabs Sonny. Petrus shoots Sonny out of fright. Adam hacks up Petrus, but Syarief shoots him before Adam can attack Iyut.

Syarief and Sonny retreat outside while Dara puts the heel of her shoe through Iyut’s eye. Maya follows the two officers and repeatedly stabs Sonny with a knife. Syarief takes an assault rifle from his vehicle and shoots her. Dara comes outside and bludgeons Syarief to death with his own weapon. Cradling Maya in her arms, Dara snaps Maya’s neck to end her suffering.

Ladya finds Adjie and the baby. Dara instructs Adam to bring her their heads. Adam fights the siblings. As Adam is about to kill Adjie, Eko reappears and stabs a sword through Adam’s chest. Ladya sets Adam on fire and he in turn sets the room ablaze by stumbling around. Eko, Adjie, and Ladya escape the flames with the baby.

Adam reemerges and throws Eko over the upstairs railing. Ladya and Adjie manage to take off Adam’s head. When they go downstairs, they discover that Dara has dismembered Eko with a chainsaw. Dara attacks the siblings and ultimately kills Adjie with the chainsaw, as well. Dara explains that human meat is desirable because it keeps her and her clients young. Ladya manages to choke out Dara and flees the house with the baby.

Ladya and the baby escape in the police vehicle. Dara suddenly attacks through the driver’s side window. Ladya puts the car in reverse and opens the door. While Dara clings to it, the door smashes against a tree and flies off, seemingly killing Dara.

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Review:

There is more red plasma to be found within the 95 minutes of “Macabre” than there is stocked inside an entire fleet of American Red Cross mobile blood banks.  In fact, more blood comes out of the film’s 15 main characters than could possibly fit back inside the bodies of three times as many human beings.

Adjie is estranged from his sister Ladya, who still holds her brother accountable for the death of their parents.  Adjie’s pregnant wife Astrid hopes that the siblings can make amends before she and her husband move to Australia to raise a family.  At least Ladya will be left in the care of Adjie’s friend Alam, who has a fondness for Ladya that causes trouble when chivalry springs him to her defense.  Eko balances things out with a jovial yin to Alam’s hotheaded yang.  And everyone has Jimmy to drive the car.  That may sound like more threads to keep track of than a telenovela, but do not be fooled.  The truth is that those backstories are just fluff and these half dozen friends are mainly lambs for the slaughter.

When the sixsome makes the mistake of playing Good Samaritan and offers a stranded robbery victim a ride home, they have no idea that they are signing themselves up for Sally Hardesty’s worst nightmare.  Their night of beer drinking, flirting, fighting, and armchair family therapy turns to screaming, torture, terror, and exsanguination after they end up captive in a house occupied by a family of sadistic human meat traffickers.

No one will accuse The Mo Brothers, who wrote and directed “Macabre” together, of pulling any punches.  Theirs is a film that seeks to play chess against Peter Jackson’s “Dead Alive” just so that it can proudly exclaim, “checkmate!”  “Macabre” is not so much a horrific story of tension and survival as it is a balls to the wall carnival of mayhem and crimson.

However, The Mo Brothers know how to create characterization in addition to carnage.  What is most interesting about how they introduce the heroes and the villains is that the personalities develop naturally over the course of the plot.  There are not any obligatory scenes of exposition slowing down momentum or forcing character traits upon the players unnecessarily.  The economy with which “Macabre” approaches setup and plot details is in sharp contrast to how liberally it doles out buckets of blood when the killing begins.

And once it begins, it does not stop.  By the time “Macabre” comes to a close, the sets are soaked completely from wall to wall and ceiling to floor.  If such a crime scene ever existed in real life, no one would even think to attempt cleaning it up.  Even a homeowner’s insurance adjuster would suggest razing the entire building to the ground, or possibly even light the match himself.

Oddly enough, for as over the top as the violence is, it strangely never comes across as gore for gore’s sake.  This is not a demo reel for a makeup effects company.  There is a purpose behind the visual shocks.  “Macabre” is an intentionally brutal story and the excessive fountains spurting from severed limbs and decapitated heads only elicit laughter when the brain does not want to comprehend the unending horror.

Where a limit does exist is in the number of chainsaw dismemberments and butchered body parts that can continually pass across the screen before the viewing experience becomes frustratingly redundant.  “Macabre” features six heroes and four villains, and then adds another five pieces of prey for the predators in the third act.  As blades and blood fly everywhere throughout the house, it becomes difficult to track who is alive and who is dead, especially when the seemingly dead have a tendency to keep coming back for more.

In one scene, a police office is stabbed in the stomach, and he presumably dies.  Later, he suddenly stumbles into a room and is accidentally shot by a startled fellow officer.  Still later, the same officer resurrects again for another appearance only to be hacked to pieces, apparently dying for good this time.

“Macabre” is well shot, well executed, and has almost enough white knuckle winces in its hour and a half runtime than “Saw” does in the entirety of its franchise.  It also walks a delicate line with violence that avoids leaning into black comedy territory and never strays too far into disturbing realism.  At the same time, “Macabre” never quite quits while it is ahead.  As exciting as the ride can be, it starts spinning its wheels too long in the same territory, and misses capitalizing on those moments where a little more restraint would have made things a little less repetitive.

Review Score:   65

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