Only now does it occur to me... MACABRE (1980)

Only now does it occur to me... what would happen if Lamberto "son of Mario" Bava took inspiration from Tennessee Williams to make his own Southern Gothic Italotrash horror saga? And what if all he actually remembered from Tennessee Williams was the ghoulishly nutty finale of SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER? And what if the lead character was, for some reason, named "Robert Duval," just one letter's separation from the iconic actor? Well we don't have to wonder about any of this, because we have... MACABRE.

Based on a true story, yeah, okay.

I'm gonna tell ya right off the bat––this review will be full of spoilers. And I don't feel bad about that because there's nothing in this movie that feels "motivated." It's a collection of crazy things that happen without dramatic rhyme or reason. You do you, Lamberto. And for my Italo-Horror enthusiasts, let me tell you that this is way closer to "bottom-tier Fulci" or Joe D'Amato than Mario Bava or Dario Argento. The two movies of which it reminds me the most are probably BUIO OMEGA and CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Within the first twelve minutes, we have some of the sleaziest saxophone and worst child dubbing in the history of Italian film, which is absolutely an achievement. We have an unhappy woman stumbling around in heels and DYNASTY dresses (CITY OF WOMEN and XTRO's Bernice Stegers)

who is having an affair with a guy named Fred. This upsets her––aforementioned, poorly dubbed––daughter (Veronica Zinny)

who acts out by smoking a bunch of cigarettes and drowning her little brother in a bathtub.

The unsighted landlord, Robert Duval (Stanko Molnar, doing some of the best/worst/offensive blind 'schmacting' I have ever seen) 

lazily assembles brass instruments while awkwardly listening to extramarital sex with, uh, "ZATOICHI-esque augmented hearing."

When mom receives the phone call that her son has drowned, she rushes to the hospital with her lover but, unfortunately, they get in a car accident in which Fred is decapitated.

This is already more melodrama than I can shake a stick at and we're fewer than fifteen minutes into this bad boy! Madness, absolute madness.

Mom soon builds a Hobby Lobby shrine to her ex-lover

which I think would get maybe a C+ at my science fair. Comically, she has included his credit cards among the dead man's relics. 

The next hour is where this film really bogs down. She moves into the blind man's boarding house and there's a whole lot of lame tension building about the source of the orgasmic noises coming from her room, where she is the sole occupant. Much hay is made about this mystery.

This was mostly shot in a studio in Italy, but the crew traveled to New Orleans (for three days) to shoot exteriors. This is a nice documentary look at the city in 1979, and visually impressive in some instances:

but usually Lamberto Bava is out here making sure he got his money's worth out of those expensive shoot dates. Generally speaking, every time someone goes from point A to point B, we she them open the car door, get out, slam the car door,

 

walk up to the gate, unlatch the gate, mess around with the gate, open the gate,

 

relatch the gate, walk up to the stoop,

ring the doorbell, wait around for the door to be answered, etc.

It's pretty spectacular, actually, though indicative of how bogged down this movie gets in its middle hour.

Anyway, the secret is finally revealed: mom has apparently been masturbating, nightly, with Fred's severed head.

I really like the placement of the ice tray there. I feel like the thinking was "how's the audience gonna know it's a freezer if there's no ice tray?," but instead you're left with even more questions, like "I get that somebody who masturbates with a severed head every night is not very squeamish about hygiene, but does she really not care when she gets hairs in the cubes?"  

 

 Really goin' to town, I wonder if they used this clip in the Oscar reel

The beauty of all of this is that I've excised no great subtext or rationale; Bava presents it more like: "hey, she loved the guy, so obviously she would love... his head."

This all leads to Robert Duval discovering her secret, whereupon the severed head gains the power of flight and bites him on the neck until he dies!

It is my belief that this scene inspired  ZOMBI 3's greatest moment (a film by Bruno Mattei, Claudio Fragasso, and Lucio Fulci), one I have described as "The Ol' Zombie Head in the Fridge." 

Though the flying severed head in that context at least makes a little more sense because it's in a zombie movie. Later, this ground would be revisited by Michele Soavi in CEMETERY MAN (1994).

 Anyway. MACABRE, ladies and gentlemen.