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.

Film Review: TRAUMA (1993, Dario Argento)

Stars: 3.8 of 5.
Running Time: 106 minutes.
Notable Cast or Crew: Asia Argento (MOTHER OF TEARS, THE LAST MISTRESS), Christopher Rydell (ON GOLDEN POND, MASK), Piper Laurie (TWIN PEAKS, CARRIE), Frederic Forrest (APOCALYPSE NOW, FALLING DOWN), James Russo (MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO, THE NINTH GATE), Brad Dourif (CHILD'S PLAY, ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST). Gore by Tom Savini (DAWN OF THE DEAD, FRIDAY THE 13TH). Music by Pino Donaggio (CARRIE, BODY DOUBLE) and Andrea Bandel.
Tagline: "A new dimension of fear."

I can sum this one up for you in just two words: "Minnesotan Giallo." I could probably make the argument that this is Argento's last great film (before they became at best, mediocre, and, at worst, money-laundering operations), but with a movie this ludicrous, that's probably a meaningless distinction, and I could easily say the same for OPERA (1987) or SLEEPLESS (2001). Nonetheless, I apparently like TRAUMA a lot more than most people do.

Based on screenplay co-written by Dario Argento, T.E.D. Klein (one of the great, underappreciated horror writers of the 1980s, whose novel THE CEREMONIES is an all-timer), Franco Ferrini (PHENOMENA, ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA), Gianni Romoli (producer of CEMETERY MAN), and Ruth Jessup (production secretary on EVIL DEAD II), TRAUMA is a delicious slice of You Betcha Message-Movie madness where the twin cities are, apparently, Minneapolis and Rome (feel free to insert a St. Paul/St. Peter's Basilica joke here).

Like most of Argento's gialli, the plot has plenty of twists and turns, a satisfying/relatively surprising payoff, and notably (that is, for the thriller genre at large, not for Argento), one that holds up to repeat viewings and doesn't cheat the audience. See also: DEEP RED and TENEBRE, who also hide their Big Secrets––like Poe's purloined letter––out in the open, if we care to look. 

 

Also like most Argentos, TRAUMA has a black-leather-gloved killer, well-choreographed murders, stylized gore, avant-garde POV shots, childhood trauma, uncomfortable family member nudity, bizarrely specific animals and/or insects being instrumental to the plot, and more than a few nonsensical (Eurotrash) grace notes. New for Argento are the American milieus (though his segment of TWO EVIL EYES was also shot in the States), a semi-understated De Palma-lite orchestral score by Pino Donaggio (instead of his usual Goblin/Simonetti music), and the decision to make this a "Message Picture." (More on that in a minute.)

I'll attempt to guide you through the joys and bafflements of all this TRAUMA without giving any significant spoilers–– so, without further ado––grab your lutefisk, Vikings jerseys, and dopey ear-flap'd trapper caps, cause dontcha know we're about to delve into My Top Ten Minutiae for Argento's TRAUMA:

 

#10. Americana. 

Argento is so clearly taken with/horrified by what the ol' U.S. of A has to offer that he can't bear to look away. In a hotel hallway scene, it's the drunken man in the background in a Shriner cap:

In a corporate diner, it's what passes for food:

 It's the parking lots: 

The concrete architecture and pick-ups with fiberglass truck caps:

And, finally, in what I can only assume is a moment inspired by Argento's first confusing stay in a corporate American hotel, we see the victim unable to fight off the killer at a crucial moment because the room's lamp is screwed to the table

instead of being loose and easily removable––as it apparently should be––for defending against black-gloved, hammer-wielding murderers:

 

#9. The Message Picture Angle. 

Hoo boy, here we go. Asia Argento––Dario's daughter––plays one of the film's dual protagonists. Having witnessed the murder of her parents, she has acquired a number of problems. From the filmmakers' point of view, the most important of these is an eating disorder. You see, she binges and purges.

This, as we all know, is not a cartoonishly simplified, textbook case of bulimia, but rather––according to Dr. Dario Argento and every character in the film––"anorexia."

 

That's right: Argento decided to make a Message Picture about overcoming an eating disorder and proceeded to misidentify the disorder. To those who are not lifetime aficionados, this is the most Argento thing he could possibly do. In Dario Argento's MONK, Tony Shalhoub would express every symptom of OCD, but they'd call it multiple personality disorder. In Dario Argento's TRAINSPOTTING, Ewan McGregor would spend half the movie shooting up heroin but they'd call it a gambling addiction. This is, obviously, incredible. For instance, Argento would rather put way more time, effort, and detail into something like

#8. Butterfly P.O.V.

It's a dizzying scene, completely unnecessary, and yet it's a perfect moment of Pure Cinema.

#7. But Wait, I'm Not Done Talking About the Message Picture Angle.

Oookay, so he keeps going. There are lengthy monologues and montages about "anorexia" which flirt with absurdity,

 

interrupted by images of sad, skinny women on the streets of Minnesota who may not even know what they're being filmed for

as the "symptoms of anorexia" get weirdly specific (every person with anorexia is deeply attached to an unstable mother?)

Oh, did I say "flirts with absurdity?" I meant, "dates absurdity, marries absurdity, purchases a burial plot beside absurdity..."

Err––WHUT? Let's not ponder that last one too deeply.

#6. Christopher Rydell's bland "David Parsons." The secondary protagonist is a mopey dude who makes a living as a horror sketch artist for a local Minneapolis news station.

 

Huh. Didn't know that was a real, full-time job. Guess I'll defer to the expert on such matters: Dario Argento. 

Even though he's an American who has been featured in such films as MASK, GOTCHA, HOW I GOT INTO COLLEGE, and ON GOLDEN POND, Argento pulls a pouty, Eurotrash performance out of him. He sorta reminds me of Marco Gregorio ("Trash" in Enzo Castellari's 1990: BRONX WARRIORS).

He's a grown man with this sketchy day job and a pretty normal life and a newscaster girlfriend until he meets up with Asia's teenage runaway "Aura" and decides to let her move in with him. (Ostensibly, it's because he also has struggled with drug problems––oh yeah, did I mention that Asia's character is also a heroin addict? That's mentioned once and then buried beneath a lot of bulimia––but the whole thing feels a little creepy.) He wears the kind of 90s outfits you'd see on Chandler from FRIENDS. Oh, hey, look, there's a Chi-Chi's in the background.

That'd be a good trivia question: in which Dario Argento film is there a Chi-Chi's? This one.

#5. Brad Dourif!

He has a bit part here as a former doctor going through a midlife crisis, and he's got the six-day stubble and gold chain/earring combo to prove it. He gives his role some sleaze, some comedy, and some pathos.

He, or his agent, must have insisted on the strange credit of "special appearance by."

It's only weird because there are other, well-known character actors of similar caliber and with a similar amount of screen-time. Actors like...

#4. Piper Laurie!

As an Eastern European psychic and Asia's on-screen mother, Piper offers us shades of CARRIE while hamming it up and laying on a thick Romanian accent.

As always, she's fantastic. Horror royalty in this household. Royalty, I say.

#3. And Frederic Forrest. Another oddball American character actor/Oscar nominee being used very effectively.

That's right, there are three Oscar nominees in this movie. It's a shame that Argento's association with great American character actors pretty much dried up post-1993 (are we counting Steven Weber in JENIFER? No, no we are not), cause they really deliver some earnest post-giallo seasoning to the proceedings here.

#2. Meta-Argento. He gets extremely self-reflexive in TRAUMA. To name a few moments, there is sudden and creepy pre-murder doll placement, as in DEEP RED:

(As a whole, it's very DEEP RED-influenced, from opening with a "séance gone wrong" to using the earlier film's bloody finale as a sly inspiration for the murderer's preferred instrument here.)

Hand-acting by Argento, which can be morbidly comic when things aren't going as smoothly as the murderer would prefer (as in DEEP RED, TENEBRE, OPERA, and elsewhere):

A domestic murder which thematically and literally recalls the iconic, extended crane-shot setpiece of TENEBRE (as well as the nature of the victims):

Impassive animal witnesses to murders, as in PHENOMENA, THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, FOUR FLIES ON GRAY VELVET, and elsewhere (here, it's a gecko):

Impromptu, macabre paper dolls, as in DEEP RED: 

And a random child learning more about the murderer (and earlier) than any other character, which is certainly a post-SHADOW OF A DOUBT ur-Hitchcockian idea which lies at the root of many of Argento's films.

That the child in question closely resembles Macaulay Culkin is simply a reminder that this movie was made in 1993.

#1. Reggae Dance Party.

Without spoiling the end of the picture, I will tell you this: it concludes with a reggae concert/dance party on a suburban Minnesotan porch. The lead dancer is, I believe, one of the skinny girls from the earlier street montage. What this is all meant to indicate is, at best, unclear. But who are we to question the maestro's judgment?