Horror Comedy of the Day: House (Hausu, 1977)
Gorgeous is a high-school student who wants to spend her vacation with her widowed father now that he's back from Italy. To her surprise, however, he's to be married a second time! She wants none of that, so she writes to her aunt if she can come over to her house in the mountain. As the vacation trip with a teacher is canceled, there's an opportunity for her friends to come along: Prof, Meoldy, Kung fu, Mac, Sweet and Fantasy. So they stay only to be greeted by a night of supernatural terror.
…and yes, they're called after their character archetypes which should be telling of what kind of film this is.
Described by the Criterion collection as “an episode of Scooby-Doo as directed by Mario Bava", this film by Nobuhiko Obayashi just defies logic on so many levels. Deliberately, actively and gleefully so too: it was heavily inspired by the nightmares and fears of his own daughter, who was consulted at multiple points to contribute to the script in a desire to create a style of horror that wasn't rooted on the rational.
To that effect it uses intentionally crude visual effects that make the film look like a literal collage, and some of the most eccentric editing choices. What you get feels like the result of throwing a live action re-enactment of a school life anime with incongruously placed music (and a sliver of fanservice too), a good dose of camp, the color design of freaking Suspiria and the occasional bit of martial arts in a blender with some LSD for good measure. In other words, absolute batshit insanity of the highest order, with the creepiness laying in how incomprehensible the fucked up things that actually do happen can get.
Seriously, if there's one thing that you can't deny is how creative it all is; not a single frame of this film is visually dull. Would you enjoy it though? Well, that depends how much you crave for surreal absurdity bursting at the seams from the strange ideas put into it.
