I’m sorry to say - and I understand this is a shocking thing to hear for all the hipsters out there - I have a hard time getting into Hausu. While I understand the uniqueness of the visuals and the entertainment value is pretty high, but it also feels pretty empty. Empty barrels makes the loudest noises, you know. I have a hard time getting into the characters psyche, I can’t understand them - and I’m not inexperienced with surreal and wacky movies. It just feels like director Ôbayashi was more interested in showing camera tricks and what you can do with a blue screen. Like a Japanese Michael Bay of the 70’s to make a rude comparison.
But enough with the bashing. Hausu, with all its faults and problems, is still an entertaining and original haunted house movie with a couple of very awesome scenes of absurdity and mayhem. Maybe a movie mostly for people with a Japanese schoolgirl fetish, lacking the true and honest camp only director who’s not so contrived can create, it’s at least not boring with a couple of whisky in your body. I can’t even imagine what some smokin’ would to, if you get my drift. I need to be a stoner when I get even older, and when it’s legal in Sweden. Mark my words on that.
After hearing their annual trip is cancelled, a half a dozen schoolgirls goes to the aunt of one of them. The auntie is bound to a wheelchair since many years back, mourning her greatest love who died in the war, Now she just waits for some young feet to run over the floors again. But when the girls have made themselves more comfortable one of them disappears going out to get a watermelon, and soon all hell breaks loose. The house is haunted and one by one they go missing…
Even if the script fights with long lost love, a father finding a new wife, the different (deliberately stereotypical) characters trying to hold on to each other when shit hits the fan, the story never grips you like it should. Instead Hausu becomes a unique, wild and totally fucking crazy gimmick movie, jam-packed with the wildest ideas I’ve seen in a movie of this kind. The girl being eaten by the piano must be one of a kind and - which is the first time I saw it this time around - one character obviously being transformed into a huge pile of bananas is even weirder in away. Aimed to a teen audience, Hausu is a unique experience with rapid editing, pop songs, blood, nudity, bizarre jokes, a cat and girl power deluxe. It’s an odd movie to come from legendary production company Toho!
When the movie finally calms down, during the final moments, it also manages to capture some true emotions (which also means me), and it ends on a poetic, beautiful note. I can fully understand it gets. It’s an imaginative and crazy ride, creative like few other movies. But that also makes it similar to the works of criminally overrated director Wes Anderson, who’s movies always put design before interesting character. But hey, don’t misunderstand me; Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s Hausu is superior to everything Anderson have made, even if it doesn’t go all the way telling the story of the characters in an interesting way.
In the end Hausu maybe is mostly for those who needs a crazy wild movie to tell their friends about, but it’s still worth watching - and it certainly grows a bit with the help of substance abuse ;)
"I’m sorry to say - and I understand this is a shocking thing to hear for all the hipsters out there - I have a hard time getting into Hausu. While I understand the uniqueness of the visuals and the entertainment value is pretty high, but it also feels pretty empty."
Many people seem like this...I don´t understand why....but it is entertaining.
"Like a Japanese Michael Bay of the 70’s to make a rude comparison."
Bay is entertaining......I always been amused by his films.
"I can’t even imagine what some smokin’ would to, if you get my drift. I need to be a stoner when I get even older, and when it’s legal in Sweden. Mark my words on that."
Maybe you should somewhere where it is legal...?
Wink, wink.....but I think you should stay away from it.
"Aimed to a teen audience, Hausu is a unique experience with rapid editing, pop songs, blood, nudity, bizarre jokes, a cat and girl power deluxe. It’s an odd movie to come from legendary production company Toho!"
Yeah, and with script ideas from his daughter......what else can you expect?
"Obayashi spent nearly two years preparing the narrative and commercial particulars of his feature film debut, first concocting House’s script from the collection of frights his preteen daughter suggested,"
http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1634-house-the-housemaidens
"But that also makes it similar to the works of criminally overrated director Wes Anderson, who’s movies always put design before interesting character. But hey, don’t misunderstand me; Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s Hausu is superior to everything Anderson have made, even if it doesn’t go all the way telling the story of the characters in an interesting way."
No, I have to disagree with you there.....Anderson is interested in design but his characters are usually wellwritten......and his films way better than Hausu/House (1977) at least to me.
"In the end Hausu maybe is mostly for those who needs a crazy wild movie to tell their friends about, but it’s still worth watching - and it certainly grows a bit with the help of substance abuse"
Yeah, could be....good review.
Posted by: Megatron | March 25, 2014 at 00:00