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Saw "House" on Blu-ray earlier in the week, my second viewing after an early '09 overnight showing on the IFC cable channel (the last before the movie went into the vault for its Janus theatrical/Criterion home 2010 releases) that left me incredulous at what I had just witnessed. "House" is like the demented grindhouse cousin of "Evil Dead 2" and "Happiness of the Kutakuris" except it has more creativity and energy than those two movies combined times 100. Think Sam Raimi and Dario Argento (complete with constantly-repeating musical cues) meet Takashi Miike minus the misogyny that characterizes Dario's work. The girls all develop endearing archtype personalities of their own which, combined with the 'happy' music and the colorful backgrounds, makes them come across as a 'sentai' anime troop come to life. No more than a minute goes by without a shot, prop, frame-rate change and/or camera trick (often a matte painting or blue screen shot to make a distance background look deliberately phony) turning what should be a standard-issue 'haunted house' story into one of the most cinematically insane 'house of horror' rides I have ever experienced. Even if some of the special effects are crude (it was shot in 1976) every frame of this movie is alive with the joy of filmmaking, which most contemporary movies have forgotten about.

That was just from my first and only viewing in standard definition on a compressed cable channel of a years-old print of the movie. Even though it's not showcase material (too soft and grainy) "House" on Blu-ray is a revelation. Colors jump out but aren't (except for select scenes like Gorgeous' balcony meet with her dad and stepmom-to-be) too strong or attention-grabbing. Though some of the SFX work looks more crude and simplistic the integration of matte paintings and drawings in the background survives high-def scrutiny. I fully expected the illusion that foreground/background would be shattered by the extra resolution but, except for the views of Auntie's house from the watermelon stand (which also looked rough in standard definition), I was blown away by how picturesque and bigger-than-life a 33 year-old movie primarily shot in studios with analog chroma key technology/matte paintings supplying most of the backgrounds could look. Even better, since I'd already seen it I picked up little things about the characters that made their 'sentai anime troop' live action antics more endearing. Surprisingly, for a Japanse horror-fantasy movie in which

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young nubile girls are dismembered (Melody) or stripped naked (Prof, who early in the story is told she has a great figure but doesn't show it)

, "House" doesn't come across as mean-spirited or hateful of women. If anything it's men (the watermelon salesman and the teacher) that are made to look like ineffective fools. The final scene's

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sad lament about lovers

goes a long way to closing the "House" spectacle with a healthy dose of respect for emotion (and creepiness) that doesn't explain anything and yet says all that needs to be said. Kudos also to Obayashi-san for the insanely-cool and backstory-packed segment involving silent B&W footage-of-the-mind that Gorgeous' friends comment on as they 'watch it' on the bus ride to Satoyama Village. The arrival to the bus stop is my favorite scene in the movie, when Asei Kobayashi and Mickie Yoshimo's fetishistic repetition of their main theme song becomes narcoleptic and endearing. Cult classic, indeed.

I was more than a little surprised by how depressing this film ended up. It's a really sad story when you get down to it.

knives wrote:I was more than a little surprised by how depressing this film ended up. It's a really sad story when you get down to it.

I totally agree, which is exactly why I loathed it; it also serves as an example why Hollywood studio films with similar situations come up with the endings that they do, even though they may be accused of being derivative and unoriginal. But

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you have to have hope, and if you're not going to, then you need to come up with an ending where it does not feel like evil totally won and negativity reigns.

Even though I can understand that it is a potential cash cow, I really wish Criterion and MoC had not put this one on their list.

There's no need to have a hopeful conclusion to every film. Many of my favorites, indeed many of the greatest films ever made (CITIZEN KANE, THE GODFATHER, CHINATOWN), have utterly downbeat endings when the "bad" go unpunished or the "good" have no chance at salvation. If the finale has a ring of truth to it (in relation to the rest of the story), it works for me.

Having said that, I can't say that HOUSE really had much of an emotional effect on me; it's just way too self-consciously wacky to make me care about the characters and their fate.

I accept that not every film has to have a happy ending - for instance, several of Melville's films such as Army of Shadows, Le Cercle Rouge and La Silence de la mer have hard-hitting endings. But their endings felt organically right - these were the consequences for the figures who chose to live their lives a certain way. But the problem with Hausu for me was that

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I actually did not dislike any of the group or at least I did not find them offensive; it's fine if there are characters that you are meant to dislike, as you will in the typical Hollywood slasher. It was fine up until Melody, but once Kung Fu bought it (who was rather a cool character and the type that would be the last survivor) I knew Prof was up next (the trailer rather spoiled that) and the superstitious girl whose name I cannot remember had no chance. And then for good measure, the financee had to go. It was gratuitous and incredibly depressing.

I actually loved it because of that, though like I said it was rather surprising. I don't think it held purpose or anything like that. The movie ended that way because a 80 year old ghost isn't stupid. It's very organic in that sense and works far more logically than any other ending I can conceive. I just didn't expect it to go there.

I was fine with the ending. It's supposed to be a Gotcha! ending that one would usually have in a ghost story, so it felt appropriate. Besides, if we didn't get the ending, we wouldn't have seen

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Mr. Togo turned into a pile of bananas.

Watching this again with some friends of mine (what a howlingly funny and entertaining movie), we couldn't help but wonder if they made a cheesy spin-off tv show for The Adventures of Mr. Togo, since he does get into the craziest shenanigans! \:D/

I just watched this with my family -- and we all agreed it was probably the worst movie we'd ever seen. The characters were too thin for this to be "depressing". It was too stupid and random to even be funny as a bad movie. So add us to the "minority report" on this film.

(As to me, this totally pushed the execrable Cherry Falls from its place of (dis)honor as worst movie I ever watched -- and that was only because I was traveling for work and couldn't get to sleep and watched this for lack of anything else to do).

I doubt very much the characters were intended to be anything other than thin and really don't see how that relates to the emotions that can be had from it.

Given that the characters all have names that identify them by a single quirk which is the only way they can be differentiated, it's pretty obvious that supposed to be flat as cardboard. To me the film was clearly mocking crappy TV melodramas and 'shoujo' shows/literature that barely bother to develop characters beyond this stage. Really, the point here is that the film barely has to change anything about this set-up/characters to reveal how stupid and flimsy it is, and the over-the-top stylistics further emphasize the point. The annoyingly perky score and braindead kawaii girls could be out of any such genre piece. Which makes it perversely fun when all that sugary cuteness gets drenched in the blood of the horror genre.

Though all that sugariness is still nauseating to me, and the deaths do feel exponentially cruel and exhausting. The randomness of everything starts to grate on me too, though moments like the ghost/cat/skeleton dance and Mr. Togo's bananas are just wonderfully clever and fun that they rise above plain random. I've also got problems with the film playing a fine line between objectifying these girls (Kung-Fu's lack of pants) and mocking that same objectification. That said, the film's still good fun, and certainly far better than the horrid Cherry Falls, which I remember watching as a horny 13 year-old.

Though oddly, I feel like a lot of these tropes have become further integrated into a lot bad anime. I was reminded a lot of the insane Excel Saga while watching this, which also manages to mock all the cliches of all sorts of anime by making them only just a wee-little-bit more absurd. Granted, most of what I've seen of Japanese TV/anime is from the 90s/2000s, so maybe this film wasn't really mocking the equivalents in the 70s, but rather got taken seriously as a blueprint for making things in later decades, but I seriously doubt that. Or at least I don't want to believe that.

Your theory holds water. What I've seen/ read from the '70s is few, but still has a few that fit into what you were saying.

Oh well, no one in our household found much fun in this -- though we could _guess_ that certain aspects were supposed to be funny. This had higher production values (including animation) that Obayashi's so-so Girl Who Leapt Over (Cut?) Time -- but Girl seemed more entertaining. In any event, I see no reason (based on these two examples) to ever seek out other Obayashi films.

I certainly loved every minute of it. But I love exploitation/cult/horror/bizarre films so it falls directly into everything I love. Talking to friends in Japan, the people who know it seem to love it (as they watched it on VHS as kids and thought it was great), or the other obvious category, the ones who'd never heard of it.

My problem with this is probably that it feels like too much parody and not enough satire. In other words, it's mocking these tropes and constructions, but not really mocking the society that produces and consumes them en masse. Granted, the problems addressed here (vapid female characterizations) are far from the worst product of Japanese society, but they're still annoying, and they play into that troublesome question of objectification. It's funny when Kung Fu loses her pants, but then a few decades later anime is consumed by panty shots and ecchi comedy, and it all gets a bit horrifying in a way no demon cat ever could.

But for those that liked this because of its zaniness, I would really recommend Excel Saga if you haven't already seen it. Granted, it made me hate most anime thanks to the accuracy of its attacks on every genre, but I consider that a valuable eye-opening experience. Otherwise I might still be watching claptrap like Getbackers. Plus, it often goes that extra step into criticizing the audience and not just the trope.

Plus it has a character named Space Butler.

I've had this for like two years and just got around to watching it- I'm kind of torn. On the one hand, I really liked the sort of Axe Cop realization of a child's vision, with the bizarre leaps of logic and inexplicable happenings that entails, but I think that even with consciously one-trait-per-person grindhouse fodder such as this movie's cast, I have a hard time both with horror movies where there's no way to fight the supernatural threat and with character deaths that I'm not supposed to take seriously. It reminds me a bit of both Joe Dante and Sam Raimi, who both have a habit of killing people off in ways that are supposed to be comical that still just bug me and make me feel a little ill- I think it's a consequence of never having watched a whole lot of horror movies, more than anything.

In a lot of ways, the absurdly gratuitous T&A is at least as objectionable as the deaths, but those just seemed funny.

matrixschmatrix wrote:I'm kind of torn. On the one hand, I really liked the sort of Axe Cop realization of a child's vision, with the bizarre leaps of logic and inexplicable happenings that entails...

Ok, I'm in EXACTLY the same boat. And glad you appreciate Axe Cop. I'm not trying to be flip, but I wonder if I'm not quite getting the movie because I'm not a preteen girl. On the one hand, there is that whole balls-out-insanity-of-a-demented-sixth-grader quality that I can get behind 100% (for a another webcomic comparison, see Thorsby's Hitmen for Destiny), but then there is something a little darker, a little deeper, that doesn't seem to dovetail with that. The last scene with the voiceover, AFTER our "gotcha" ending, where we muse on loss and the fundamental similarity between Gorgeous and Aunty...

I don't know. I kinda want to to love this movie, but I'm not sure I can. I was excited to see it after seeing the "piano scene," but after my first viewing, it seems like it's nothing more than the ancestor of The Machine Girl and RoboGeisha.

Fascinating that this was a hit in its home country, however.

EDIT: I should have spent more time with this movie before I opened my yap. It's quite a challenging lil movie, but it pretends not to be. All that sugar-rush is a cover for the dark stuff. Maybe not cover, but it makes it go down easier - if the movie's mood were consistent with it's subject matter, you'd want to slash your wrists at the end. It was Emotion and the Obayashi interview that helped clue me into what was going on. The narration in Emotion mentions that it is also a story about the actors, and a record of their youth. In Obayashi's interview, he mentions things like skipping hand-in-hand with the girls on the set to get them into the mood for their roles...that seemed significant, somehow. "I always talk to children about important decisions..."

It's not a picture about "coming of age" as so many reviews (and the essay "the Housemaidens") state - it's the other side of that coin. House is about the death of innocence, the death of youth, and that's a subtle but important difference. In that context, the nudity makes more sense, even becoming important to the narrative in a way. I'm going to invoke another Japanese film (forgive me), the nowhere-near-as-good (forgive me) Terror of Mechagodzilla (please forgive me). There's a brief shot of some nudity in that film when the female lead is being operated upon by her "benefactors." we see bared breasts and inside the incision, we see wired and gears. Where some call this scene gratuitous, Honda's aim is fairly obvious - here's a beautiful young girl, transformed into an abomination of science. It's similar to Prof shedding her jumpsuit in the blood flood: A pure, innocent cherry bud of a girl who will never fully bloom. From there it's a short leap to the blood flood being menstrual symbolism if you want to read THAT much into things. And the song "Cherries are made for Eating" in the soundtrack...this is a movie about the inevitability of disappointment, heartbreak, and the death of childhood innocence.

Gimme another bourbon, barkeep - it's a cold one out there.

So, did I think it was completely effective? Not sure, since I'm not sure if Obayshi was shooting for some particular effect. But it is crazy in the best way, and it sure as hell sticks with you if you let it in even a little bit.

I recently got the Blu-ray of House and it just won't load in my Sony player. I read on Blu-ray.com that there are problems with some older Criterion Blu-rays. Anybody else had problems with this title of some of similar vintage (2010) ?

There were a number of problems with discs produced in 2010, you can read about them here.

EDIT: Corrected link

Thanks ! Back it goes.

I had a frustrating near-miss in trying to see this at the New York Asian Film Festival back in 2009 (at which festival the film was essentially (re-)discovered by an American audience); it screened literally directly opposite a wedding I had flown to New York specifically for and of course couldn't miss. In light of Nobuhiko Obayashi's upcoming appearance at the Harvard Film Archive, I was wondering if anyone from the board was at that NYAFF screening I missed, and if so, if Obayashi was in attendance. I think he wasn't (I seem to recall NYAFF's program listing that it was going to be introduced by "superfans," or something to that effect), but I'm still curious enough to ask.