Hausu (aka House)

I was on the way into the supermarket last Saturday morning when I saw a family coming out with the two kids each grasping a large watermelon. What a cool family, I thought, they're doing a Hausu themed Halloween. When I got inside I realised the supermarket were out of stock on Pumpkins and that the family had obviously just settled for something similarly carveable. It's really a shame more people don't know about this film. Watermelons would make a great addition to the Halloween accoutrements.

Hausu is a hallucinogenic trip that starts as pop-coloured fairy-tale and ends in a mad Japanese nightmare. We start with seven young girls who have about as much character dimension as the seven dwarves and are named similarly for their personalities: Melody likes music, Fantasy has her head in the clouds, Prof is the clever one, Sweet is sweet and kind, Kung Fu kicks stuff, Mac eats and Gorgeous is "so stylish," she's always putting on make-up. Honestly unless they were performing their single character trait on screen, it was pretty hard to tell one from another, but I don't really think that matters. They all go on a vacation to a haunted house and absolute insanity ensues.

Ar this point in our little film club, I'm a bit concerned that I'm becoming predictable for suggesting crazy Japanese films, but I hope you can see why. When you watch a lot of films, so many feel kinda samey that I value anything out of the ordinary. Hausu might be one of the most out of the ordinary things I have ever seen. Crazy films like this give you a lot to talk about and I'm sure it's clear by now that no one does them as crazy as the Japanese.

It's easy to draw comparison to such filmmakers as David Lynch (Twin Peaks), Dario Argento (Suspiria), Sam Raimi (Evil Dead) and Takeshi Miike (Happiness of the Katakuris), but this feels as if those guys took an acid trip together in the Japanese country-side. The saturated colours, schizophrenic editing and extremely ropey visual effects only add to the spectacle and bombast of it all. Like an art installation with ADHD, there's some new visually stunning freak wonder to behold every couple of minutes, whether that be heads flying through the air to bite someone on the bum or a cat singing and playing the piano with some low-effort editing techniques. The amateur quality of everything makes the film feel like it was made by someone with passion - just because they couldn't figure out how to make it look like a cat was vomiting, did that stop them? No. The solution? Just use a 2D drawing of a cat and make that vomit.

Whilst I wouldn't consider this a scary movie it kind of gets under your skin in certain ways. The incessantly repeating piano meladody slowly grinds you down as the increasingly surreal horrors begin to beset the girls until you feel like you're in some kind of fever-dream with the girls phasing out of reality into a strange dimension where the rules don't make sense - a dimension that's home to deadly bedding and a hungry piano that will eat you bit by bit starting with your fingers. Or you may just be left with many questions. Is the video file you're watching broken? Was this intentional? Who the hell let this guy make a film? How did anyone agree to be apart of this? Was I on enough drugs to fully appreciate that?

In answer to that last question - I hope so.

4.5 Severed fingers playing the piano out of 5.