Oh boy, where to begin with this one. Forgive me for running long, but this film deserves the digital ink.

Let us start with this: if I were to receive some moderate sum of money, and be given complete creative control, House is the film that I would make. Please note that I am not necessarily saying this is a good thing.

This also gives you a pretty good idea about how this movie is going to go, i.e. FUCKING CRAZY.

Promo Image

House is unlike anything you’ve ever seen. It’s a big (by the standards of late 70s Japanese cinema) budget art-house experiment horror-but-maybe-not-kind-of-black-comedy. To properly understand this film, you must ingest consciousness-altering substances. Drop some acid, rip as much as you can out of a bong 10 times, eat some mushrooms, get drunk, whatever you have to do to open your mind to the higher mysteries – just do it.

Looking wistfully across the sea at the success of Jaws, in 1975 director Nobuhiko Obayashi was approached by Toho Films (makers of my favorite franchise, Godzilla) to produce a treatment for a summer thriller blockbuster. While only being a director of commercials, he was known as a creative eccentric who had produced films on the art-house circuit years before. Working with his friend Chiho Katsura, they quickly turned in a script for a haunted house film.

The gag was, Obayashi had gone to his 10-year-old daughter and asked her for ideas of what frightened her. So impressed by the creativeness of what scares a little girl, he decided to treat the entire picture as if it was from the perspective of a young girl. This meant the inclusion of nonsensical plot elements, shallow archetypes, purposefully hokey effects and animations, all tied together with traditional Japanese ghost story elements.

Toho green-lit the project and shopped the script for two years, but no director would touch it because they all thought it would ruin their careers. That’s how off the wall this film already was. Fearing that it would never be produced, Obayashi asked the studio if he could at least announce that it had been green-lit. They agreed, and the wild-haired filmmaker began a two-year media blitz to promote the film. He shot promo pictures with the cast, commissioned and released the soundtrack, and even had the film novelized and performed as a radio drama, all for a film that didn’t exist yet!

That's a weird glory hole.

So…that just happened.

Eventually bowing to public pressure in 1977, Toho agreed to allow Obayashi to direct the film himself, even though he had only helmed commercials as a professional, and he wasn’t under contract with the studio (a highly unusual move for a Japanese studio to take at that time). His cast primarily consisted of a gaggle of 17-year-old girls who had been in his commercials previously.

Without giving away too many details of the plot, our heroines Fantasy, Gorgeous, Melody, Mac, Sweet, Prof, and Kung Fu are slowly consumed by the house, as personified by its evil avatar, a fluffy cat named Blanche. We have an attack by a severed head from a well, which bites one girl in the rear, then vomits blood and throws itself back down the well. We have attacks by chandeliers, attacks by flying log piles, attacks by mirrors, attacks by cannibalistic pianos, attacks by futons and linens, and attacks by telephones. By the end, the house has regenerated itself, showing shades of Burnt Offerings, which had come out in the United States the year before (if you get the chance to see it, Burnt Offerings is a passable haunted house film mostly notable for being mediocre despite a fantastic cast including Oliver Reed, Karen Black, Bette Davis, and even a few minutes of Burges Meredith playing, shockingly, a curmudgeonly old man).

The plot, though, is not the point of this film. This film is entirely focused on the telling, rather than the tale. The Austin Chronicle perhaps said it best, “there’s surprisingly little to recommend House as a film. But as an experience, well, that’s a whole other story.” We have scenes in which one character tells the others a story, which is shown as a sepia-tone film reel which the other girls can see and comment on. One girl describes a mushroom cloud as looking like cotton candy. There are animations, matte paintings, animals that are clearly being thrown at the actors from off screen, a man who mysteriously turns into a pile of bananas, and several scenes involving 17-year-old girl titties…sometimes disembodied and floating around.

Obayashi went on to a prolific film career, and eventually in 2009 earned the Order of the Badge of the Rising Sun for contributions to Japanese culture. However, he never managed to match the beautiful insanity of his first effort. The film was a hit in Japan, due to being a breath of fresh air in a completely stagnant industry (by this time, most Japanese directors were churning out Toro-san rip-offs or pinku eiga, which is softcore porn).

And yes, you get to see some of their little girl titties

Our intrepid band of potential victims

The Criterion Collection DVD has several excellent bonus features, including Obayashi’s 1966 experimental film Emotion, a lengthy interview with the director, and a retrospective by Ti West, director of House of the Devil. I had quite liked that film, but Mr. West comes across as somewhat of a smug film-school student spouting platitudes about “challenging the audience”.

To sum up, I cannot recommend this film highly enough – if you’re a person like me, who takes most of your personal philosophy concerning the nature of existence from the Joker. If you’re a Very Serious Person who likes to Seriously Discuss Very Serious Things, and have a silly hang-up by which you insist that your films follow a coherent narrative structure and conventional character arcs, then…have an adventure and watch it anyway. But get really fucking high or drunk first. It’s worth it.

I rate this film 8 drug-using dogs out of 10.

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