Macabre is somehow kind of boring and kind of great at the same time. It's a mostly slow moving thriller that occasionally tests your patience, but when you look back at the whole shebang there's no doubt it works. It's got a sort of plodding but tension-filled feel to it - while there aren't any super tense scenes, there is just this underlying feeling that something terrible is going to happen. It's an interestingly structured film - the opening ten-fifteen minutes are pretty horrific, and then things slow down and stay that way until the last ten-fifteen minutes. But you spend most of the time feeling confident that the film will get back to the peak established earlier - it's just a matter of how (and when) it's going to get there. And ultimately, Macabre doesn't let you down.
It's hard to get into too much without spoiling that first part... and it works better if you go in cold. So if "moody early 80's Italian slow burn" is your thing, best ignore the rest of this. Also, it's the feature film debut of Lamberto Bava (Mario's son), who also directed Demons, Demons 2, and, uh... Devil Fish. Fair warning though - it's pretty straight-forward (i.e isn't as bugnuts as some of Bava's contemporaries) and doesn't have as much atmospheric moodiness as you might expect from a film with the Bava name attached to it.
