House

House is a Japanese film directed by Nobuhiki Obayashi in 1977. Obayashi wanted to make a picture that would attract the market of filmgoers flocking to Spielberg’s Jaws. With his ten-year old daughter, he wrote a script about a haunted house filled with furnishings that eat people. Incredibly, the film was a major commercial success in Japan but not released in this country until 2010. Obayashi had worked making commercials for Japanese TV and the movie is indescribably bizarre, hard-sell advertising gone totally berserk. The picture plays like a hybrid of Jean-Luc Godard at his most violently transgressive and a demented Japanese tampon commercial. Seven teen-age girls (a direct reference to Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai) with names like Gorgeous, Kung-Fu, Sweet, Mac, etc. go to house in the country to visit the heroine’s “Auntie”. “Auntie” turns out to be a cannibal ghost, somehow revenging the horrors of World War II, by eating teenage girls. One girl is devoured by a piano; another is smothered by an electric light; a possessed piggy bank chews up one of the protagonists and another is decapitated by a lampshade. Severed limbs continue to deliver kung fu kicks. A ghost cat vomits an ocean of blood in which one of the girls, entirely naked, swims like a mermaid. Everything is shot in a delirious style, utilizing painted backdrops that look like Maxfield Parrish canvases. Background mountains are icy spikes of rock. A man gets turned into a mannequin made of bananas and the heroines are shot like the girls in ads for perfume or lingerie, romantic breezes ruffling their hair and long scarves. Every possible camera trick that existed pre-CGI is used at breakneck pace, sometimes several in-camera tricks in evidence at one time. It’s impossible to describe the film; it literally has to be seen to be believed. The best correlate for the picture that I can come up with is Richard Lester’s early work with the Beatles or, even more close to House, episodes of The Monkees, but all of this frenzied, LSD-influenced imagery intermingled with Japanese macabre and, more disturbingly, Japanese cute – the girls are kitsch-cute and act like Disney Mousketeers and many sequences have a cloying Hello Kitty! ambience. This is a film like no other that I have seen. It’s certainly not boring, although the picture is ultimately deeply exhausting – whether it’s any good, I think, must be decided by the individual viewer. The picture is certainly extraordinary but, of course, a complete “dead end” – you’re glad that one example of this kind of thing exists. Two would be two too many.