Upsetting Day: Rave MacBeth 🌭

Fair is foul, and foul is fair:

Rave Macbeth b’filths the air.

Rave Macbeth (2001) is a movie that exists. You suspect it has premise problems. You are right. Shakespeare’s The Tragedie Of MacBeth does not map onto a Y2K-ish rave, for the same reasons Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar does not map onto a waterpark. What would intrigue our scheming characters? Brutus would be too busy following Cassius down the big slide. Mark Antony would come not to bury Caesar, but to bury snack bar nachos in his tum-tum.

Rave Macbeth clocks in at a long-feeling 86 minutes. Nothing speeds up a Shakespeare adaptation like dropping most of Shakespeare’s characters and almost all of Shakespeare’s words. This is “a loose adaptation” raves The Internet Archive. Ignore that hyperlink. Never watch this movie. Yes, somebody dumped it on The Internet Archive. Also if you live in Brooklyn, you’ve had two different recent opportunities to see Rave Macbeth on the big screen. Irony is not dead in America’s most tiresome irony smithy. I’ll bet everyone laughed, and high-fived, and were also too cool and superior to do any of that stuff with each other, when this font from The Matrix was the first thing on screen.

It’s hard to summarize Rave Macbeth (2001). It’s like a combination of The Matrix (1999) and Romeo+Juliet (1996), but in zero good ways and without enough guns. Rave Macbeth is also a combination of American cable TV actors, a German production team, German aesthetics, and a German disregard for William Shakespeare. This movie is 86 minutes of Lex Luthor From Smallville shouting repetitive Panic Words while a guy named Klaus holds the camera. The opening titles add more zesty ingredients to this recipe. They’re a celebration of the graphics from Windows Media Player (makes sense) and the Lord Jesus Christ (???).

The makers of Rave Macbeth gave themselves the task of adapting MacBeth the impossible way. Writing movies is hard. If you adapt William Shakespeare, you can borrow literally every word he wrote AND blame the wonky/boring parts on him. This movie doesn’t do that one easy part. They throw out Shakespeare’s script except for three witches and two character names. Can you guess which two names the movie keeps? You guessed wrong. One retained name is “Hecate”. Hecate is a super-witch who middle-manages the witches. Hecate is such a low-tier Shakespeare character, Shakespeare stole Hecate from mythology twice. The other play name that makes it into this move is “MacDuff.” MacDuff is the only character in this movie with a Scottish name. He is also dead, in this movie. In the play he’s a key character and the spark for a fun (misquoted) line. In the movie, guys named Marcus and Dean and Troy occasionally mention the prior offscreen death of “MacDuff” in boring walk-and-talks through a pit of sweaty extras.

Here is what happens in Rave Macbeth: nothing, for a long time. At the tail end of the tedious laser light show of the opening credits, a distorted German voice tells you there used to be a play called MacBeth.

We get it, filmmakers. You don’t read. You don’t read, and your excuse is that MacBeth is soooooo old. Then you cap that off by showing me a Florida license plate. America’s swamp-ninsula is no place for classic texts, drug laws, or logic. And you don’t focus on “story” or “meaning” or “art” when one of your movie’s executive producers is simply the name “Jonas”.

The distorted German voice belongs to a man I nicknamed “Trashy Wiseau.” This man plays Hecate. In both the play and this movie, Hecate is a pointless middle manager who does no actual managing of the three witches. If you were going to give Shakespeare any notes on his script, you’d cut Hecate. This movie embiggens the role so they can cast the director’s beer hall buddy or whatever. Hecate intones fake Smart Guy Stuff from a chair in a room of screens. His screens monitor the main characters. Two main characters are…

Marcus (MacBeth / Lex Luthor From Smallville) and…

Lidia (Lady MacBeth / one arc on CBS’s Cold Case).

As you can tell, they are on drugs. After taking drugs in a car they enter the club. The filmmakers don’t name the club. How dare they not give us the treat of a funny club name? Do you know how fun it is to name a rave club? Especially if that club is a re-skin of The Setting Of MacBeth? It’s a crime that I can’t go on eBay and buy a prop bartender shirt from this movie bearing text of “Club Dunsinane” or “The MAC” or “The 40/40 Castle”. I already tried to get a SECURITY tee from the fictional club “Volcano”, to get that autographed when I someday meet Pierce Brosnan. That doesn’t exist and I’m mad about it and my loved ones have noticed. Anyway: screw these Germans for missing the intrinsic naming opportunities in their production of The Scottish Bottleservice.

Marcus and Lidia are friends with another couple. The other couple is…

Troy (Banquo / a recurring love interest on NBC’s American Dreams) and…

Helena (a wife of Banquo who’s barely mentioned in the play / one of the leads from Wet Hot American Summer).

All four of them are here to rave. On the way in, Marcus and Troy affirm their devotion to raving. But wait: three “petri girls” bother Marcus and Troy in the dingy hallway between the front door and the lasers. These “petri girls” babble the sort of witch prophecies that are in MacBeth, as rewritten by Germans. This shocks Marcus and Troy to their core, in the sense that they talk about it for a little bit.

Marcus and Troy dislike this delay. They ought to be taking drugs inside the club, after smoking drugs outside the club. However: could this be a prophecy? In a savvy update to MacBeth, the movie swaps out superstitious Scottish feudal-climbers, and swaps in nihilistic club rats. Nobody is less interested in the hard-to-hear words of porkable women than stoned douchebags in shiny shirts. It makes no sense that the plot proceeds to hinge on this. Also: is “petri girls” a slang term? I couldn’t find anything by googling it. It might be a German attempt to create Florida slang about girls whose bloodstreams contain drugs or STIs or both.

Either way, Troy and Marcus wonder if these gals are onto something. Maybe Troy and Marcus will climb the hierarchical ladder of attending and/or managing a rave. That battle for status consumes them, I guess. Then they enter the club. It looks like a real and popular club. I’m now an expert in the low-budget cinema version of “a cool druggy club”. This one is legit. I (positive meaning of) BLAME THE GERMANS. Somebody from an authentic and gentrifying part of Berlin cattle-called these extras.

Marcus and Troy catch up with Lidia and Helena. Everyone toggles between pronouncing Helena’s name both the ways. Also Troy briefly kisses Lidia, on the mouth, and Marcus sees that. This makes sense as dumb raver stuff. It also makes the story a thousand times weaker. Regular MacBeth is a fable about the pitfalls of chasing power for its own sake. Rave Macbeth gives MacBeth a different and honorable reason to beef with Banquo.

Can these good times keep on rolling? No. A man wearing Oakley sunglasses says Dean (vaguely King Duncan / distractingly the kidnapped policeman from Reservoir Dogs) wants to speak with Marcus and Troy. Wow: how will Marcus and Troy rave with their girls AND meet with Dean? Surprise: they already do both of those things most nights. Marcus and Troy meet with Dean often, because they are vague footsoldiers for Dean’s club-owning and drug-dealing. Also, this movie is somehow MacBeth. This means the witches halt the movie, chant over grating sounds, and define Dean’s “come here a second” as an immense turning point in Marcus and Troy’s lives.

Dean tells Marcus and Troy they are Dean’s new “seconds”. To me that is a job title from duels of the Powdered Wig Era. To Dean, that is a joint Vice Presidency Of Drug Distro And Rave Oddjobs. This promotion gives Marcus and Troy pause, because they got it after Dean had a previous second called “T.C.” killed. Shakespeare’s MacBeth has a character named “Third Murderer” and that’s still a better and more vivid name than “T.C.” Anyway Marcus is neutral about this proffering of money and/or power.

Marcus and Troy depart to discuss Dean’s offer. They also accepted the offer before departing. Confusing! Pointless? Also as Dean finishes talking to Marcus and Troy, an entire Oakleys Man appears behind Dean by mistake. Huh? It’s weirder and stranger than all of this movie’s witch scenes. It’s also distinctive. Rave Macbeth is a frothy mix of continuity errors and Y2K hump-club aesthetic. It achieves the head-spinning unease of The Matrix by accident, and achieves the most dated part of The Matrix on purpose.

Marcus and Troy have a heart to heart. There’s also a beat where Marcus can’t get a Zippo to light, for either no dramatic reason or no comedic reason. After perfecting cigarette-lighting dramedy, the movie turns serious. Dean gave Marcus and Troy three rules to follow: don’t take the drugs we’re selling, don’t copulate with drug/club customers, and a third thing I don’t remember because the movie forgets to circle back to it. Marcus and Troy break Rule #1 as fast as possible.

In a tragedy about fate and morality, the tragic lead characters should break all three rules. In Rave Macbeth they borderline do nothing wrong. They take drugs, in a drugs situation. Rule #3 evaporates. They’re also too loyal to their girlfriends to break the second rule of “no sex with customers”. The only violator of Rule #2 is Dean, in an implied foursome that feels like it’s padding out the run-time. I assumed the production banked some fivesomes, sixsomes, et cetera in case there’s a German law about minimum minutes to qualify as a [long German word meaning “cinema tax break getter”].

Troy bones no one. Marcus and Lidia have sex in a stockroom, because the actress agreed to show a fraction of one boob. This steamy encounter gets intercut with Helena shouting a joke book joke about raves, to Dean. Dean hates this.

Post-coitus, Marcus is shocked to find Troy sitting with Dean at the VIP table that’s not even roped off. For some reason this is bad, to Marcus. To me it seems like a thing people do in clubs? Especially if you know the owner, who is your boss, and just gave you a stellar performance review? If my hospitality industry work-friend drank a $300 prosecco with our supervisor, I would not feel like a Scottish thane b’schemed me.

Marcus wrangles some Oakleys Men to assist him in confronting Troy outside. This scene features our second and final mention of a MacBeth character.

There are maybe three lines in Rave Macbeth when characters say a version of Shakespeare’s dialogue. This would be fine if Rave Macbeth swapped in worthwhile dialogue. Maybe you update some of the “prithees” and “anon”s. I’m down with that. Instead, Rave Macbeth’s cable teevee actors shout “Hey, man! What! Huh! Man!” while garbling a story. This sucks. If you’re adapting Shakespeare, the tragic moments are opportunities. Shakespeare’s characters don’t react to tragedies in the real life way. You can make people say interesting poetry while plotting, romancing, murdering. This movie “updates” that poetry into oblivion. When Marcus kills Troy (!) he shouts “fuck” real long a couple times. It’s somehow less articulate than a real-life friend-murderer would sound.

As Marcus hollers, Lidia almost puts some energy into the line “Marcus, come on. Get up. Get up. Get up. Get up.” This is one of Lidia’s many anti-nods to the words, vibe, and importance of Lady MacBeth. In Rave Macbeth, one of the greatest female roles in drama history transforms into a party girl watching her boyfriend get weird. Lidia only begins pushing Marcus to take more “power” after he does several more threats and murders without her encouragement. Lidia also forces Helena to OD on drugs. Lidia also kisses Helena a little, because the Germans who made this movie are men. Later, Lidia washes her hands in a sink. The handwashing goes the normal way. The spot comes out, damn it.

With Troy and Helena dead, we have three remaining characters for a little while. Then Marcus kills Dean. Marcus does this by stabbing Dean, after talking Dean out of not killing Marcus with a gun. Marcus achieves this clever power play by pretending to beg for mercy. His begging lacks the art of the words of William Shakespeare:

Hecate watches this with satisfaction. You can tell he’s satisfied because he does a large arm flourish to put on a terrible hat.

Now Marcus and Lidia are kings and queens of the rave. We figured this out on our own. Hecate stops the movie to commandeer a bathroom mirror to say this out loud for a long time. Then Lidia crowns herself (METAPHOR) with a Party City wig.

Marcus gets a funnier coronation. While the witches do voiceover of a line MacBeth says in MacBeth, Marcus and Lidia stroll through their new domain. They stroll up behind the DJ’s turntable. Without turning around or getting a tap on the shoulder or anything, the DJ knows it’s his cue to step aside for Marcus. The DJ then makes a sweeping arm motion, to communicate a message of “thy vinyls, my liege.”

Right before all this, the witches used the bathroom mirror like a Zoom Meeting, to deliver a prophecy: “The day is lost only when blood rains from heaven.” Marcus and Lidia smugly nod to each other about this prophecy. Clearly it is impossible, and not an Achilles Heel or Chekhov’s Gun or Any Other Thing From Stories. Admittedly, the real MacBeth characters are also this dumb. But the play does a better version of the same plot point. The play’s Obviously Tragic Prophecies are that Birnam Wood will march toward Dunsinane and that MacDuff was born by c-section. Those twists work because those were new twist ideas. The scheming couple in this movie come off much dumber, because the movie’s prophecy is about bloody rain in a club. Rave Macbeth (2001)’s audience and characters seem like the kind of people who’ve seen Blade (1998). Shortly after the prophecy, the club’s ceiling rains blood. This happens because Marcus gets in a gun-pointing standoff with Dean’s loyalist guerrilla Oakley Men. Dean shoots an Oakley Man. Oakley Man flails in pain, and misfires. His bullet hits a fire safety sprinkler. The bulletproof sprinkler turns on instead of breaking. Then the sprinkler switches to raining blood instead of water, for unspecific magic reasons.

The Oakley Men and Marcus/Lidia shoot each other. As Lidia perishes, Marcus delivers The Bard’s iconic lament of “Fuck! Don’t do this to me Lidia. Don’t do this to me. Fuck! Don’t do this to me.” After they die on top of each other, the movie clears out the rave extras so all five characters can stand up and get in a line and look at the audience together. There’s better end-of-play blocking in middle school productions of Our Town.

Did I stick around for an after-credits scene? Of course I did. There is not one, even though that would be fun. Instead there’s a thrilling easter egg where the producers thank enough ravers to populate an Iowa county seat.

Again: never watch this movie. But if you do watch it, watch any thirty seconds or so. You’ll discover the treat I’ve saved for this blog’s ending. Rave Macbeth is a tragic drama. It is also set to the pulse-pounding rhythms of rave music. For those two reasons, the entire movie hinges on us feeling like we are IN. THE. HEAT. of a fast-paced sonic tapestry. Instead:

Oops! According to Brooklyn snobs, Rave Macbeth may be the first movie made entirely in a digital format. According to the finished product, they fucked up plugging in their hard drive. Every single word, song, and sound effect was re-taped after the fact. None of that ADR is competent. Lots of it doesn’t quite match characters’ lips. The line readings are too loud, or too calm. When Dean cocks his gun to almost-execute Marcus, and then un-cocks it to change his mind, it sounds like the same truck backfiring twice. At timecode 38:15 Lidia exhales a quick puff from a cigarette. The foley work for her exhalation had me looking up hurricane wind speed categories.

So that’s Rave Macbeth for you. We should’ve heeded this film’s prescient warnings and learned digital technology was a mistake, built by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. (Memo to cast and crew: whoopsie-deutschies, Klaus dropped all the SD cards down a storm drain. See you bright and early Montag to re-record all sound/fury.)

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Yvonne Clapham, who left a letterboxd review of Rave Macbeth that said “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”