SYNOPSIS
A teenage girl brings six of her friends to her aunt's house for summer vacation; gorgeously-shot weird things happen to them for the next ninety minutes.
OPINION
A notorious cult classic honored with a Criterion Collection release in 2009, House deserves its newfound rep as a vanguard of Weird Japanese Cinema. Arguably acceptable even for kids, if your kids can handle some mild nudity, the film is brazen in its structure: one bonkers scene concept after another, without stopping to take a breath. A head flies out of a well and bites a girl's ass; a girl's fingers are bitten off by a piano; and this god-damned menacing cat just sort of stalks around, freaking everybody out. I don't think of House as formally satisfying, or particularly effective as a horror film, but it is utterly unique, gorgeous, and worthwhile. If the idea of nostalgic-for-a-time-before-the-70s advertising-filmmaking used to hazily, surrealistically dance around the outline of a feeling, or a fleeting idea, sounds good? Then you're gonna love it. Alternately: eat some mushrooms half an hour before it starts.
CAST + CREW
Director: Nobuhiko Obayashi (The Drifting Classroom, Sada)
Cast: Kimiko Ikegami (Dangerous Women, A Chaos of Flowers)
Miki Jinbo (Keiji monogatari 4: Kuroshi o no uta)
Yôko Minamida (Pigs and Battleships, An Outlaw,
The Guys Who Put Money on Me)
CONTENT (spoilered; highlight for warnings)
violence against young women, fatphobia, ass-biting
CAREER STATS [on a scale from 1 (least) to 10 (most)]
FUN: 9
The teens are fun, and the imagery phantasmagorical.
SCARINESS: 3
Weirder than it is scary, but wow, is it weird.
INTENSITY: 5
Claustrophobic, cluttered frames offset whimsy with dread.
RECOMMENDABILITY: 7
An experience for all Japanophiles and horror freaks.
SEE ALSO:
Evil Dead 2, Jigoku (1960), Kuroneko, Santa Sangre
