Mathieu Langlois
8Jan12
It's a girl and her school friends going on vacation... What kind of porn do you watch? Are you saying that you often watch schoolgirl orgies?
This film is so outlandish it almost defies description. Essentially it's a goofy horror comedy with the emphasis on comedy in which a group of schoolgirls spend their summer holidays at a haunted country house. One by one they are picked off in bizarre ways but despite this the film is strangely childish which comes as no surprise as the basic scenario came from the director's young daughter. A very baffling oddity!
There's something disquieting at play beneath the amped-up silliness and pop-art aesthetic. This is like a sneak peak into the malignant, closed-off, TV-fueled daydreams of a maladjusted pre-adolescent imagination. Not that I would know from experience or anything.
"Hausu" seems to try combining two 70s trends (the zany live-action Saturday morning show and the Supernatural Horror movie) with some schoolgirls fetishism. You'd think that would be a winning lunatic combination, but the movie gets the pacing wrong and drags along much of the time.
Singularly bizarre Japanese horror film about 6 schoolgirls, with names like Fantasy and Gorgeous, who travel to an aunt's secluded mansion where they are bombarded by evil spirits. Visually inventive, this delirious fever dream of a film plays out with a surreal adherence to dream logic, combining nonsensical imagery and idiosyncratic music. It's like the strangest nightmare you've ever had.
It has more schoolgirls than a Japanese porno. It also gave me a headache. The stupidity was just out of control.
It's a girl and her school friends going on vacation... What kind of porn do you watch? Are you saying that you often watch schoolgirl orgies?
Nothing like that, but I've been inside enough seedy shops in Chinatown to know what I'm talking about.
Kung Fu gets attacked by ghostly animated objects then just shrugs it off seconds after saying "Must have been my imagination"? ...What? I love this film.
Absolutely a riot. I shan't say anything more about it than quote the back of the Criterion film edition: "How to describe Nobuhiko Obayashi's indescribable 1977 movie House? As a psychedelic ghost tale? A stream-of-consciousness bedtime story?" ...and I'll also quote Chuck Stevens: "House is a film that must be seen to be believed, and then seen again to believe that you really did see what you think you saw."