Hausu (1977)

Angel (Kimiko Ikegami) and Fanta (Kumiko Ohba) are best friends looking forward to summer vacation. Unfortunately, they'll be spending it apart. Angel is planning on joining her father (Saho Sasazawa) at a seaside resort, while Fanta is joining the rest of their friends to go to a training camp with Mr. Togo (Kiyohiko Ozaki), whom she has a crush on.

Things don't work out as planned. Mr. Togo's sister is pregnant, so the inn they were staying in is closed for the summer. Angel's father comes home from Italy and introduces his new fiance Ryoko Ema (Haruko Wanibuchi). Angry that her father is replacing her mother (who has been dead for seven years), she refuses to go with him and instead writes her Auntie (Yoko Minamida) to see if she and her friends can come stay the summer at her house. Her aunt writes back and agrees. Suddenly Angel also has a new companion in Blanche, a white cat that showed up at her window.

The group goes to the house and is immediately impressed, although strange things begin to happen. Makku (Mieko Sato), the girl who is always eating, disappears when she takes a watermelon out to the well. Fanta is soon attacked by Makku's disembodied head, but none of the other girls believe her at first. That is, until Suito (Masayo Miyako) is killed by a bunch of mattresses and Merodi (Eriko Tanaka) is eaten by the piano.

It turns out the aunt has been dead for a number of years, but her spirit has become fused with that of her house, and she still waits with her cat for her husband who never returned from World War II. In the meantime, she uses the house to consume unmarried girls. Angel herself becomes fused with the house as well, and the remaining girls struggle to survive.

No plot synapsis can really explain this film. It veers wildly from slapstick comedy to reminding one of the surrealistic interludes from many of Ken Russell's films. It is at heart a ghost story, but the way it is filmed throughout, the names of the characters (the English translations all have to do with their personalities) and the pacing feel like it is one long dream. It took me a while to actually figure out if the deaths in the movie were happening or not.

One should approach this movie not expecting a straight horror film, but rather sit back and enjoy the experience of seeing it.

Hausu (1977)
Duration: 88 minutes
Starring: Kimiko Ikegami, Kumiko Ohba
Director: Nobuhiko Ohbayashi

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's worst
Read more

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman's basement, and most of the props w
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in childbirth, was born
Read more