House

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This movie is insane.

A young girl named Oshare (Ikegami) gets miffed that she has to spend her vacation with her dad's new girlfriend and spitefully sets off to holiday at the mansion of her maiden aunt instead. She brings along six giggling school chums and they all climb aboard a cartoon train (literally, a cartoon train) and sing and laugh and gossip while causing the audience to go into sugar shock. They all have fun at auntie's mansion until the evil house starts eating everybody — one by one.

Sure, the plot sounds kinda ordinary — it's the execution that's insane. The whole thing's photographed like one of those 1970s feminine hygiene commercials wherein the daughter tearfully asks the mother what products can help you to feel really fresh. The focus is soft and dreamlike, the camera has about a kilo of Vaseline smeared on it, the background music is aggressively cheerful and ridiculous things keep happening! It's like the movie keeps trying to slip them by you. You keep asking yourself; “Did I just see a chandelier kill a newt?”

“...a human leg fall out of a piano?”

“...a man-shaped pile of bananas, seated in a jeep and wearing a hat?!?”

All of the girls with the exception of Oshare have exactly one character trait apiece (apart from weapons-grade cheerfulness, of course). “Mac” is a compulsive eater, “Melody” likes music, and so on. My favourite character is “Kung Fu” (skilled in... guess what?) who actually fights back effectively when she gets attacked by a flying woodpile.

The special effects are hilariously cheesy. Rubber skeletons dance on strings, disembodied breasts fly around via green screen and underwater photography takes us under the surface of a lake of blood, in a scene that recalls Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977). Come to think of it, Hausu (House) has plenty of things in common with that film; they were both made in 1977, neither one got released in North America and they're both completely ludicrous. Call this Death House: The House That Eats.