[3.75/10] Macabre (2009)

Macabre (2009)

"Macabre" is an Indonesian slasher flick that involves a group friends on a late-night drive to Jakarta, who stop for a young woman who claims to have been robbed. She invites the group to dinner at a stately mansion with her peculiar relatives, and the friends soon realize that they may have stumbled into their doom. "Macabre" tries hard to be shocking, disturbing and outrageously grotesque, but fails miserably to be all that, as it offers nothing more than flat and undeveloped characters, uninteresting villains and, of course, buckets of gore. Simply put, it brings absolutely noting new to the table. Its plot is build on tired 'horror' cliches, and there's not a single original moment in the entire movie. Plus, it shamelessly borrows ideas from many other good and not that good slasher movies, which makes it even less intriguing, simply because we've seen it all before. The victims are portrayed as total dummies who make completely stupid and illogical decisions for no other reason than to to set themselves up for gruesome deaths. They're so undeveloped, that it's hard to feel sympathy for any of them or to care if they die or not. Shareefa Daanish as the monotonously speaking cold-faced mother, Dara, is supposed to be creepy and disturbing, but in fact, she's just an unbelievably bland and silly-looking villain that ultimately fails to terrify and has a very little or no impact at all. The other villains, Maya and her brother, are just too sweet and good-looking to be scary or to be taken seriously. Gore is the only area where "Macabre" succeeds. Death scenes and the splattery gore effects are well done, nasty and very graphic - gore fans will be in heaven. Un-scary, formulaic and surprisingly boring, "Macabre" is a slasher gorefest at its worst.

• My Rating: 3.75/10
• Rotten Tomatoes: N/A
• IMDb: 6.2/10