Hausu

Film review

To the best of my understanding, this film is about seven girls who end up going to a haunted house for the summer. They all have names that represent their personalities, such as Melody – who is the musical one… you get the idea.

I was not really a fan of the quirky editing style. It was often haphazard and felt quite trippy. Some of the transitions made it feel like it had been put together using Windows Movie Maker, or even Microsoft PowerPoint. At any moment, I was expecting to see a chequerboard transition.

I felt like the entire film was just experimentation of extreme editing and special effects techniques, which certainly made it interesting (although not necessarily, for me at least, enjoyable).

There was an unwarranted amount of slow motion in this film. There were also several prolonged shots where there was a very low frame rate which I found very irritating and I didn’t really understand the benefit of this technique. On more than one occasion I thought that the film was buffering or malfunctioning in some way.

This was probably not the best film to watch with a bad cold, I felt like I had no idea what the hell was going on (but perhaps that was just the random nature of the plot). I read that the director’s 12 year old daughter wrote much of the story which might explain a lot. I can only assume she helped with the editing too.

I already felt like my head was spinning before watching this film and half way through it I felt like I needed to lie down. The overly intense editing and special effects definitely made me feel worse.

Easily my favourite scene was where Mr Togo trips over a cat and falls down the stairs in stop-motion animation, ultimately landing in a bucket ass first… then in a subsequent shot, a small child is following him around banging the still attached bucket with two drumsticks. I could have quite happily watched this on a loop for 90 minutes.

This film isn’t very scary – it is probably more funny than anything else. Although I did find the scene where the Aunt is eating the watermelon and suddenly has an eyeball in her mouth particularly creepy.

There were plenty of random moments where I felt like I had to rewind a few seconds to double check what I just witnessed, such as the scene where an old fashioned camera flash transitions into shots of mushroom clouds and the Random outbursts of Kung Fu by the aptly named “Kung Fu”.

One by one, the girls start getting attacked/killed in and around the house. For example, Mac gets attacked by a floating head that comes up from the well and bites her on the rump. My favourite death was probably where Melody gets eaten by the grand piano. I did also thoroughly enjoy the part where her severed fingers are later seen playing said piano.

In summary, it was a collection of bizarre events “edited” together and featuring a surprisingly large amount of unnecessary nudity. This film is bananas. And so now is Mr Togo for some inexplicable reason.

2 creepy watermelon merchants out of 5