Hausu

Title: Hausu (House)
Rating: 4/5
Genre: Horror, Comedy
Starring: Kimiko Ikegami, Kumiko Ohba, Miki Jinbo, Eriko Tanaka
Director: Nobuhiko Obayashi
Language: Japanese

This is by most measures of a successful film almost exactly the opposite. The plot less coherent than the plot of ‘Lost’ if it was slammed into 90 minutes, and with ‘special effects’ that are only special in making you appreciate the fact we're no longer are plagued with random glowing lights to indicate something magical, as if floating heads and dismembered fingers playing piano didn’t already hint at this. This is so dreadful in fact, that it evokes more images of ‘Evil Dead’ than anything else (yet predates it by four years) with more than a dash of ‘Wizard of Oz’ style backdrops and insanity to send this into full-blown cheesy overdrive.

Fortunately it doesn’t take long before all hopes of deciphering the perplexing random sequence of events is lost and you realise that there can be no mistaking this for a serious film; between the magical demonic kitten called "Snowflake" and the watermelon wielding madman sending these seven Japanese school girls to meet their grizzly fate, one that often involves vanishing clothes – in fact one of them is forced to spend half the film in her frilly panties, not that I’m complaining – and unlikely carnivorous objects in the house. In fact, this constitutes most of the plot; there is some other information about how one girl (Oshare) runs away from home to visit her aunt (who happens to have possessed snowflake), only to be tracked down by her father and step-mother with marginal success, but this never really becomes required information.

The lead’s friends invited are easy enough to remember, most having nicknames conveniently chosen from English words; Mac (coming from ‘Stomach’) with an insatiable appetite; Fanta (from fantasy) who often day dreams and imagines things (just guess who first sees something odd and is inevitably not believed); Prof the glasses-wearing bookworm; Kung-Fu the karate kid; Sweet the clean one and finally Melody, whose only real trait is that she plays music. And if she isn’t playing music, she carries a guitar with her, just so you remember which one she is. And no, none of them really have any purpose other than to die in amusing ways (Kung-Fu being the only possible exception, who has the dual task of dying in an amusing way in her underwear, which remains a highlight).

If there is any point in this review thus far that makes it sound as though you will have seen anything like this before, let me put it bluntly; you probably haven’t. The basic premise has been seen before, and the notion of characters to be killed has existed since the dawn of the genre, but never before have they died like this. This makes ‘Attack of the Killer Tomatoes’ seem sensible by comparison; even the non-essential plot deviations from the bear making noodles to the cat’s very own musical number, complete with dance routine, fail to make an iota of sense, and this bizarre unpredictability is precisely what makes it enjoyable. I don’t know what the hell happened, all I know it kept me amused enough for its duration and perhaps next time I’ll finally figure it all out.