This running commentary on the Wild Japan Film Festival has become more of a staggering commentary. However i think i have caught up with myself, until the double bill tonight that is... Imagine, if you can, a combination of Sailor Moon, The Wizard of Oz, Scooby Doo and The Evil Dead. Then imagine that this bizarre hybrid was shot on the cheap with special effects and backgrounds applied directly onto the frame in gaudy primary colours (by director Nobuhiko Obayashi personally), with a saccharine sweet soundtrack that occasionally descends into incongruous sections of funk, the whole thing being shot with pop art visuals so wonderfully and excruciatingly kitsch that they would make Andy Warhol pale in shame. The strange image that is now pirouetting in your brain is still a million miles off the synaesthetic madness of Hausu, which is quite frankly beyond the capabilities of language to describe.
Six Japanese Schoolgirls, who are introduced with cheesy poses as Melody, Mac, Sweet, Fantasy, Scholar and Kung-fu, take their school vacation in a mansion owned by the wheelchair bound aunt of one of their classmates. It soon transpires (to the audience at least – the girls, though cute, are far from bright) that the house is possessed by the bitter spirit of the aunt, who actually died waiting for her husband to return from war - his departure is shown as a flashback in silent movie footage, which in any other context would seem stylised. She has now taken it upon herself to kill all virgins dreaming of marriage who have the misfortune of wandering, like Goldilocks or Hansel and Gretal, into the imposing crooked house on the hill.
The film’s humour lies in the girl’s utterly naïve worldview, which is expressed by the film’s twee visual style and consciously cheesy acting, being very slowly hacked away by the schlock horror unleashed upon them by the house and an evil white cat named Blanche with glowing green eyes. One girl is electrocuted by a light, the screen flashing white with yellow lightning bolt sparks in the fashion of a child’s drawing, another is decapitated, her head levitating around the screen biting backsides until it is finally turned into a melon and served for dinner. But the film’s most triumphant, silly and grotesque set-piece occurs when Melody is eaten by the grand piano shot from above as her mangled limbs fly around the room and the piano fills with blood, painted on the screen in bright scarlet. The only things that remain are her severed fingers, bouncing up and down on the blood-spattered keys.
Trapped in the house the girls dream of their prince charming Mr Togo, a man with far too large sideburns to ever be a reliable hero, coming to rescue them. However after he is turned into a pile of bananas(!) after an argument with an insane melon salesman, the rescue mission falls on the new stepmother of one of the girls, eager to demonstrate her maternal worth. This is a woman who is so perfect that her scenes are shot like 70s haut-couture adverts, with her silk scarf and preened hair billowing out behind her by an industrial fan that seems to follow her wherever she goes. In short she is too perfect, too oblivious to the violent reality of the world that she spontaneously combusts on entering the house, an image of flames superimposed onto her petite silhouette.
Six Japanese Schoolgirls, who are introduced with cheesy poses as Melody, Mac, Sweet, Fantasy, Scholar and Kung-fu, take their school vacation in a mansion owned by the wheelchair bound aunt of one of their classmates. It soon transpires (to the audience at least – the girls, though cute, are far from bright) that the house is possessed by the bitter spirit of the aunt, who actually died waiting for her husband to return from war - his departure is shown as a flashback in silent movie footage, which in any other context would seem stylised. She has now taken it upon herself to kill all virgins dreaming of marriage who have the misfortune of wandering, like Goldilocks or Hansel and Gretal, into the imposing crooked house on the hill.
The film’s humour lies in the girl’s utterly naïve worldview, which is expressed by the film’s twee visual style and consciously cheesy acting, being very slowly hacked away by the schlock horror unleashed upon them by the house and an evil white cat named Blanche with glowing green eyes. One girl is electrocuted by a light, the screen flashing white with yellow lightning bolt sparks in the fashion of a child’s drawing, another is decapitated, her head levitating around the screen biting backsides until it is finally turned into a melon and served for dinner. But the film’s most triumphant, silly and grotesque set-piece occurs when Melody is eaten by the grand piano shot from above as her mangled limbs fly around the room and the piano fills with blood, painted on the screen in bright scarlet. The only things that remain are her severed fingers, bouncing up and down on the blood-spattered keys.
Trapped in the house the girls dream of their prince charming Mr Togo, a man with far too large sideburns to ever be a reliable hero, coming to rescue them. However after he is turned into a pile of bananas(!) after an argument with an insane melon salesman, the rescue mission falls on the new stepmother of one of the girls, eager to demonstrate her maternal worth. This is a woman who is so perfect that her scenes are shot like 70s haut-couture adverts, with her silk scarf and preened hair billowing out behind her by an industrial fan that seems to follow her wherever she goes. In short she is too perfect, too oblivious to the violent reality of the world that she spontaneously combusts on entering the house, an image of flames superimposed onto her petite silhouette.
If you thought that A Chinese Ghost Story (Siu-Tung Ching) was strange, with its incompetent stop-motion zombies and break dancing monk, then this will take you to a new transcendent realm of strangeness. It is quite simply the essence of cinematic innovation, or in the words of someone I met outside the screening ‘I feel like I never need to go to the cinema again’.
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