Macabre film review - it's good, go watch it

 

A surprisingly entertaining, creepy and effective Indonesian riff on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre formula, it receives my thumbs up.

Adjie, his pregnant wife Astrid, and three of their friends set out on a road trip to Jakarta. Along for the ride is Adjie’s estranged sister Ladya, with the hope being that over the course of the trip the two siblings will reconcile. Early on in their journey they pick up a seemingly injured and lost woman named Maya who claims to have been assaulted. They give her a ride home and are invited in for dinner with Maya, her two creepy brothers and her strange and enigmatic mother Dara. Over dinner things quickly take a bad turn, and Adjie and his friends find themselves desperately trying to escape from Dara’s brutal and sinister family.

While the basic plot of the movie is a fairly straightforward Texas Chainsaw-styled horror set-up, it’s used to great effect and there are some creepy twists and surprises to spice things up. This is a good example of how this sort of movie works (with a bad example being, essentially, every sequel and remake of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre – barring the Jessica Beals one).

The violence is bloody and fast, with an excellent use of practical effects leading to some truly juicy gore. It also makes the gore fun, never lingering or overexposing the acts themselves (but gloriously displaying the end results), avoiding the trap of torture porn (where somebody getting stabbed is dragged out for five minutes with constant screaming).

The actress who plays Dara is freaking creepy as hell, talking in slow deliberate sentences and never blinking. She’s the sort of memorable villainess many lesser horror movies wish they could have. She contributes to the surprisingly effective atmosphere the movie has, with the house the movie takes place in being suitably creepy  (filled with mounted animal heads, walls with bladed weapons, and a few more sinister room revealed over the film’s duration).

The pace is pretty good as well, which is important for this kind of movie. Within the first half hour the characters have all been introduced and the action has well and truly got going. Many of these sorts of films seem unsure of how to build their tension and begin, leading to long stretches of pure boredom (the opening forty minutes of Wolf Creek are pointless; nothing happens). Macabre gets to the point with sufficient build-up, and remains creepy throughout. There are some points where it loses focus a little; the actions and whereabouts of the main few characters are ignored for a few minutes when potential new victims appear at the two thirds mark, but it quickly rights itself and always remains entertaining.  

The movie receives my approval, which is a change considering I've done nothing but bitch about movies for the last two months.