| House (not to be confused
with the 1986 American horror flick of the same
name) is no doubt the strangest film ever to bear
the famous Toho logo and be financed by Tomoyuki
Tanaka himself. It’s also a highly offbeat
and wonderfully entertaining film filled with
absolutely arresting imagery and brilliant filmmaking.
Now as sadly no subtitled version
of the film exists and as my knowledge of the
Japanese language is shaky at this time, please
excuse me if I make a few minor plot errors. The
film introduces us to Oshare, a gorgeous schoolgirl,
who, with six friends (all with bizarre Anglo
names like Sweet, Melody, Fanta, Kung Fu, etc),
goes to spend some time at her grandmother’s
house. However, soon things start to get increasingly
strange and it turns out that, in fact, Oshare's
grandmother is dead and the house itself is possessed
by her sexually frustrated soul. Soon, it begins
consuming the girls one by one.
House is directed by one
Nobuhiko Obayashi, who got his start directing
commercials, including some featuring such Western
actors as Kirk Douglas and Charles Bronson, before
debuting with this film in 1977. His direction
in House is absolutely ingenious. The
film uses every single filmic technique under
the sun, including double exposures, cross fades,
split screens, optical printing, cell animation
integrated with live action footage, stop motion
animation, mattes, fast motion, slow motion, etc.
Like a horror themed music video 10 times more
impressive than Thriller, House
barrages the viewer with wild set piece after
wild set piece, often resembling a nasty LSD trip.
Its most incredible sequence being one where one
of the girls is devoured and hacked into bits
by a grand piano. The film is so manic and wild
that it seriously makes Godzilla
vs. Hedorah (1971) look kind of dull
and routine in comparison.
The film also boasts an amazing
production design that brings everything from
Masaki Kobayashi’s supernatural anthology
epic Kwaidan
(1965) to Dario Argento’s masterpiece Suspiria
to mind and like both Kwaidan
(1965) and Mario Bava and Argento’s films,
the movie boasts an excellent and often quite
eyepopping use of color. The music, by frequent
anime composers Asei Kobayashi and Mickey Yoshino
(with a few 70s pop tunes sung in English by the
band Godeigo, who provided the theme to the Galaxy
Express 999 movie) is quite catchy and perfectly
supplements the film’s manic and arresting
imagery.
Most of the acting in the film
is quite decent, but I think the lovely Kimiko
Ikegami does a particularly nice job in the lead
as Oshare. The character development was kind
of lost to me since I could only watch the film
in raw Japanese, but the film appeared to not
really rely on it much anyways. One character
development bit I did catch involved Oshare. Her
mother died when she was just a little girl and
her father now has a new fiancee, whom Oshare
hates and eventually uses the power of the house
to destroy in the final sequence.
House turned out to be
a big hit in Japan and director Obayashi then
went on to direct such popular films as School
in the Crosshairs (1981), Transfer
Student (essentially the Japanese equivalent
to Freaky Friday) and The Little
Girl Who Conquered Time. Overall, House
is a positively amazing piece of filmmaking and
a highly entertaining little horror film that
I would highly recommend the more adventurous
Toho or Japanese film fan check out.
|
(4/5)