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This is why cheaters never win.

I've been trying to rent some of the more obscure Spagetti Horror films to see if any of them are lost classics. At the moment I am concentrating on the work of Lamberto Bava (son of Mario) and, while following the traditional giallo format, so far none of what I've seen really had any of Argento's style or substance. That's not to say they're terrible films, they just dont live up to the master's works. A Blade in the Dark, for instance, had good atmosphere but very little gore and almost no real story (although lack of plot is a problem that can be leveled at many of Dario's works, there's usually more than enough to make up for it, whereas BITD dragged on between murders).

Today I received Macabre. This was Lamberto's first film, released shortly before the death of his father (Interesting side note: Mario's last contribution to film before his death was, ironically, the grim reaper in Inferno), and was based on a true story. In New Orleans, a married woman with two children carries on an affair behind her husband's back. During one such tryst, she is interrupted by the news that her son has drowned in a bathtub. Horrified, she demands that her lover drive her to her house to confirm what she was told. The lover crashes the car, and he is killed. A year passes, and the woman is released from a mental hospital. Divorced from her husband, she takes up in an apartment owned by the blind brother of her deceased lover. Despite their mutual attraction for one another, the woman ignores the blind man's advances and gives her affections instead to a mysterious being who visits her late at night. A being who happens to have the same name as her dead lover. The only thing stranger than that is her odd habit of keeping her kitchen freezer shut with a padlock...

There's a story here, enough to keep you fairly entertained all the way through. Not a lot of gore, and the murder scenes arent all that fascinaing. Still worth the rental, and certainly not as bad as I feared it might be. During the making-of featurette, however, I saw an impressive clip of the movie I want to see next-Bava's Shock. B- or C+, somewhere in that area.