Fun if not macabre

Another movie that's been sitting on my DVR for a while is the early William Castle horror effort Macabre. This is the one that had Castle show up to the premiere in a coffin and offer insurance policies to anyone against dying of fright during the movie. Well, the movie isn't exactly that frightening, but it's fun for what it is.

William Prince stars as Rodney Barrett, a doctor in a small California town who doesn't have a particularly good life. Some years back his wife Alice died in childbirth (the child, a daughter named Marge, survived), and the gossip around town has been that the not-so-good doctor probably could have done something to prevent it rather than getting good and drunk. Alice was the daughter of the town's banker, Jode Wetherby (Philip Tonge), but the child lives with the doctor who has a nanny Miss Kushins (Ellen Corby). About the one other person who supports the doctor is his assistant Polly (Jacqueline Scott).

Well, there is one other person, Sylvia Stevenson (Susan Morrow), whom Dr. Barrett is planning to marry and make her Marge's stepmother. Again, however, the gossip around town is that Barrett was having an affair with Sylvia before Alice died, which might explain as well why the town doesn't much care for him. And if that's not bad enough, things are about to get a whole lot worse for Dr. Barrett.

Barrett returns home where in theory Miss Kushins is supposed to be looking after Marge. But Marge isn't there. And then the phone rings, and Polly answers it. She hears a strange voice telling her not only that Marge has been kidnapped, but that the caller has already held a funeral for Marge! That might also fit with the fact that the local undertaker Quigley has called the police chief Tyloe (Jim Backus, decidedly playing against type here) to report that a child-sized coffin has been stolen from his funeral parlor!

Now, since the call says a funeral has already been held, Dr. Barrett suggests that she must have been buried at the cemetery, leading him and Polly to head off there. He also tells Kushins not to say anything to Jode, since Jode has a notoriously bad heart and the information might trigger a heart attack. Naturally, the first thing Kushins does when she's alone is go right over to the Wetherby place. Add in a blind sister-in-law who carries on wanton relationships with various men in the town, and it all leads up to a climax in the cemetery where everything is explained to some level of viewer satisfaction.

William Castle was obviously a good promoter, as Macabre was a commercial success. That having been said, being such a low budget movie it's not exactly good. There's more smoke than fire here, with mostly subpar acting. There's also a scene in the climax at the cemetery that made me think of Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent. William Castle certainly had ideas, even if he couldn't always translate them into truly good movies.

Still, Macabre is thoroughly entertaining because of how off it is, and how frankly silly the payoff is once we get to it, which is thankfully not that long since the movie only runs 71 minutes. It's definitely worth your time.