Basag ang pula (1984)

... aka: Crazy
... aka: Insane

Directed by:
Ben Yalung

After passing by a strangely silent man sitting by a fire, attorney Abad (Vic Silayan) picks up his teenage daughter Diane (Dang Cecilio). It's late at night when the two head down a deserted stretch of road and run out of gas. The father gets out to try to look for help and doesn't return. Diane is then terrorized by a psycho with blood all over his hands who first attempts to get into the car and then produces the father's severed head before killing her (off-screen). The killer - Fernando (Ace Vergel) - is next seen in the slums collecting rats in a cage by the sewer, which he then takes back home to torture and kill. Unfortunately, a real rat is shown actually being tortured (singed / set on fire repeatedly with some kind of hot iron). Fernando then flashes back to his traumatic childhood with his horrible mother (Lucita Soriano), who frequently locked him up in a closet where rats crawled on him and then repeatedly smacked him in the face when he caught her with one of her lovers.

Later that night, Fernando spies on a couple necking in their car and decides to punish them. He jerks the boy out of the window and stabs him to death but the girl escapes and runs down the highway in her bra until she finds a police car. A foot chase through the woods ensues but Fernando manages to lose the cop. Now with a bunch of police out patrolling the streets looking for him, Fernando ducks inside a parked school bus. Just seconds after he stabs the driver to death a bunch of schoolgirls from St. Anne's Academy start showing up. It turns out the bus is there to take them to a secluded vacation retreat to celebrate their upcoming graduation. The police, led by Lt. Miranda (George Estregan), swing by to warn them that there's a sex maniac on the loose, but the girls don't seem to care all that much. They're heading out of town, anyway, right?

After getting rid of the body in the bus and finding himself some non-bloody clothes, Fernando impersonates the driver so he can flee the city. He takes the girls, along with uptight headmistress Nida Rivera (Armida Siguion-Reyna) and her younger assistant, teacher Patria (Liza Lorena), to their rented lodge in picturesque Baguio City. There, they'll indulge in swimming, aimlessly wandering around in the woods, giggling, extremely corny "getting to know yourself better" activities, even worse "how to be an upstanding young woman" seminars and, of course, dying. Unfortunately there's a huge block of time after the bus driver is killed where no one dies at all and the killer is barely even in the film.

To try to make up for that, they keep cutting back to Manila to boring scenes where the police try to get an ID on the suspect and bits where we learn a teensy bit more about some of the girls. One of them - Chiqui (Snooky Serna) - happens to be a dead ringer for Fernando's late girlfriend (who was gang raped and murdered by some thugs) and thus ends up receiving a bunch of unwanted attention from the nut. And then there's Elizabeth (Debraliz Valasote), who is chubby and thus loud and obnoxious and thus constantly used as annoying comic relief, along with the obese, mentally-retarded handyman Diego (Bomber Moran), who speaks only in moans and grunts. In a surprisingly sleazy subplot, young Leni (Angela Perez) is having a secret sexual liaison with the butch, stern old headmistress. Well, OK, but when are these people going to start dying?

An hour into the movie and forty minutes since his last kill, Fernando catches one of the girls - Paz (Maritess Samson) - having awkward standing-up-facing-each-other sex in the woods with her boyfriend. After he leaves, Fernando grabs her and slits her throat. Immediately after, the horny resort owner, who was previously rejected by Fernando, tries to seduce him a second time and ends up with a knife in her back. The girls use the cheapest looking Ouija board ever (made with a white sheet of paper, a marker and a drinking glass) and manage to contact a spirit who claims to be Paz and tells them she was murdered. Nonetheless, a couple of girls go out during a thunderstorm to look for their missing friend and one of gets slashed to death. Paz's boyfriend Joseph (Ricky Davao) returns only to get stabbed to death in his car while listening to the Rocky (?!) theme music. Others are stalked and killed, sometimes accompanied by a "London Bridge Is Falling Down" instrumental.

There's lots of wandering around looking for people and calling out names, dancing and pot smoking around the campfire and a bizarre scene of the headmistress attempting to hypnotize Chiqui so she can have her way with her but instead getting stabbed in the face after the killer sneaks into bed in Chiqui's place. Sound trashy? Well it kind of is but this isn't trashy like other countries trashy films. Despite there being a psycho killer running amok, rapists, a perverted lesbian, sex, a high body count and a gaggle of nubile teen girls running around, there's no nudity, next to no real gore and little variety to the kills. Most of the murders don't even show any blood. And none of that bodes too well for what is basically just a run of the mill slasher flick... especially one that runs 118 minutes! Shame too because the first 30 minutes are pretty decent, especially the opening sequence.

Vergel, who is pretty effective under the circumstances, was nominated for Best Actor at the FAMAS Awards (the Filipino version of the Oscars) for his role. Never English dubbed or subtitled, this is mostly in Tagalog but with some words and sometimes entire lines spoken in English. Either way, it's not difficult to follow. The only available prints I found are both very washed out but I doubt a better quality version would really help matters much here.

★1/2

Macabro (1980)

... aka: Baiser macabre (Macabre Kiss)
... aka: Conspiración macabra (Macabre Conspiracy)
... aka: Frozen Terror
... aka: Hátborzongató (Creepy)
... aka: Macabre
... aka: Macabro - Die Küsse der Jane Baxter (Macabre - The Kisses of Jane Baxter)

Directed by:
Lamberto Bava

Well-to-do New Orleans wife and mother Jane Baker (British actress Bernice Stegers, who later starred in XTRO) can't wait for her older husband Leslie (Fernando Pannullo) to scoot off to work in in the morning. It's not that she completely hates him or anything. She's just got stuff to do, like sneak off to meet with her lover Fred Kellerman (Roberto Posse). Jane even rents a separate apartment in an old home from elderly Mrs. Duval and her blind adult son Robert (Stanko Molnar) just to carry on her affair. As for her two children, Jane has a normal young son but her pre-teen daughter Lucy (Veronica Zinny) is something else. While Jane's at her apartment, Lucy smokes cigarettes, thumbs through mommy's underwear drawer and even finds the phone number to the apartment and starts incessantly calling there, which prompts Jane to just hang up on her. What can poor neglected Lucy do to get her mom's attention? Well, if you're this little psycho, you're going to resort to attempted murder and try to drown your little brother in the bathtub.

When Jane gets word of the "accident," she and Fred jump in his car and start rushing back to her house. They're in such a hurry, and she's in such a distracting hysterics, that Fred goes off the road for a split second, hits a guard rail and manages to decapitate himself. The traumatic event is enough to send Jane to a nuthouse for an entire year. When she's finally released, she doesn't go straight home. Instead, she hops in a cab and returns to her secret love nest. Mrs. Duval has since passed, but Robert is still there and her locked apartment was left as is the entire time she was away.

The lonely and alienated Robert, who barely scrapes by fixing musical instruments and has let both himself and the place go in the past year, starts cleaning things up and making himself presentable again to try to impress her. His only real thrill before Jane went away was listening to her passionate lovemaking through the walls. Now that she's single, perhaps she'd give him a chance? The good news is that the amorous sounds start emanating from Jane's apartment yet again. The bad new for Robert is that he isn't the one causing them. Nor is any other man because she never seems to have any guests aside from her estranged husband (who now hates her guts) and daughter. So who is it? Why, the only man who could ever satisfy Jane before... and she's not letting little things like death and decapitation stand in her way!

As it turns out, Jane is keeping Fred's head tucked away in her always-locked freezer and has started "making love" to it by basically dry humping a mound of pillows with the head placed on top. The first question that popped into my mind was, "How in the hell did she even get his head there?" Just the idea that she was in a bad car accident, immediately found the severed head and somehow managed to walk miles through a densely-populated area of New Orleans back to her apartment without anyone noticing there was this blood-covered woman carrying around a severed head is just too ludicrous for words. The car accident itself would obviously prompt a swarm of onlookers, the police immediately being called to the scene and the authorities, ya know, actually looking for the missing head afterward. If you're to get any enjoyment out of this one, that's one major detail you're just going to have to overlook.

Robert, who's fallen in love with Jane, starts sneaking into her apartment when she's out and discovers her morbid little secret but he's unable to convince the ex-husband to help. Meanwhile, the daughter basically starts stalking and annoying her mum mom with her constant presence. She too becomes aware of the head but refuses to acknowledge it because she's desperate for her parents to get back together. The twisted little psycho does however manage to sneak a piece of the dead lover's earlobe into mom's veggie soup just for a kick.

First released here in the U.S. in 1983 under the title Frozen Terror, this is slow-paced and surprisingly restrained considering the director's later reputation as a goremeister and the distasteful subject matter. There's effective claustrophobic atmosphere, some genuine suspense at times, lots of great shots around New Orleans and interesting dynamics between both Jane and Robert and Jane and her daughter that keep things fairly intriguing through the slower passages. Unfortunately, the build up is undermined somewhat by an unintentionally funny finale and a silly freeze frame shock ending grafted on at the very last second.

"Inspired by" an actual incident that occurred in New Orleans where an unstable woman kept her dearly departed husband's head in her refrigerator, this was the feature film debut of Bava, who'd spent the previous fifteen years mostly working as an assistant director to his legendary father, Mario Bava. He also assisted other top Italian horror directors like Dario Argento (on Inferno) and Ruggero Deodato (on his notorious Cannibal Holocaust). After Macabro proved to be a success, Bava would direct many other films over the next decade, most famously the big hit DEMONS (1985). After the Italian film industry hit the skids, he settled into mostly TV work.

Bava co-wrote the script with Roberto Gandus and brothers Antonio and Pupi Avati. It was filmed in late 1979 in both New Orleans and Italy and has always been one of Bava's easiest-to-find and best distributed films. There were VHS releases from Avid and Lightning / Vestron and DVDs from Anchor Bay and Blue Underground. The German company X-Rated Kultvideo released it on Blu-ray in 2016.

★★1/2