Gruesome Galleries: Lamberto Bava’s MACABRE

SHOCK riffs on the 1980 Lamberto Bava head-trip MACABRE.

As the 1970s became the 1980s, the Italians – led by gutslingers like Fulci, Deodato, Lenzi, D’Amato and the like – were pushing the limits of on-screen violence, offering up an endless spate of disgusting, over-the-top spectacle shockers that used graphic gore as a character, not just the punchline to a set piece.

But toiling amongst these titans, Italian filmmaker Lamberto Bava released a picture that is just as disturbing as any of the meaty messterpieces made by his colleagues and yet is a much more sophisticated, emotionally complex and upsetting experience to endure.

That movie is MACABRE (or MACABRO, or FROZEN TERROR), a slow, sad psychodrama that was released in the thick of the Italo-exploitation boom and, because it wasn’t as sensational as other films of that canon, came and went and never quite became the cult item it should have become.

Bava is of course the son and was the longtime collaborator of the man who almost single-handedly perfected the parameters of the Italian horror film, Maestro Mario Bava. And, like Bava senior’s work (the director was an artist and photographer first), there’s a refinement to Lamberto Bava’s sensibilities that is hard-wired into his DNA. And because of this, MACABRE is as much a fairy tale as it is a lurid expose of forbidden sex and psychosis.

In fact, Bava Jr. had worked on and, depending on who you believe, directed much of Mario’s final film, the previous years’ SHOCK (aka BEYOND THE DOOR II) and both stories sort of mirror each other; both tales deal with a woman pushed past the edge of reason into madness. Though in SHOCK, there is a legitimate supernatural threat and in MACABRE, the monster lives solely in the leading lady’s mind…

Based loosely on a headline Bava once read about a real-life necrophiliac, MACABRE sees a lonely housewife (Elisa Kadigia Bove) keeping her dead lovers’ severed head in the refrigerator, perfectly preserved. When her hormones surge and juices flow, she takes the head out and gets off on its chilly mouth, making love to it (a good 5 years before Dr. Hill did this in RE-ANIMATOR) as her insanity swells.

This perversion however is only the syrup on stack of psychotic cinematic flapjacks.

The real star of MACABRE is Bava and his crew, who lace the movie with such a relentless melancholy and broken beauty that it’s almost overwhelming; there’s gorgeous, rich cinematography by Franco Delli Colli (who shot the first I AM LEGEND adaptation, THE LAST MAN ON EARTH) and haunting. sax-soaked sex jazz music by Ubaldo Continello, both elements working in collusion to masterful effect.

Rub up against some of the eeriest scenes and promotional posters below…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_JE3D5iXvE