renart | ハウス [HOUSE] (1977, JP), EMOTION (1966, JP)

ハウス [HOUSE] (1977, JP)

If you know film surrealism, wherever you are, you probably know Nobuhiko Obayashi. This is thanks in part to a more recent revival of interest in the (very) old director's experimental and psychedelic film work in the western world, but Obayashi's work has been consistently well known in his home country of Japan. HOUSE is probably his most famous film venture. Funnily enough, despite being something of a staple in experimental and surrealistic horror, it was not well received by critics when it initially aired in Japan. I guess it's not hard to see why. After all, it's hokey, silly, completely nonsensical, and has some of the weirdest and lowest budget special effects...uh, full stop. Which is exactly why it's such fun! You'll certainly find yourself wondering--probably several times--just what you're looking at when you watch it for the first time.

The plot is a bit absurd and not very scary at face value. Gorgeous, the film's protagonist, is angry with her father for his engagement to a new woman. Instead of vacationing with the two, she and a handful of friends go out to the countryside to stay with her deceased mother's sister in her large, stately home. Being a horror movie, you can easily guess that things go very, very wrong once they arrive. Turns out that Gorgeous' aunt isn't very accommodating to any of them, and things quickly turn into a bloodbath. The girls are killed off in the most bizarre of ways...trampled by futons, eaten by carnivorous pianos, drowned in torrents of blood, strangled by phones, possessed... Really, their deaths are the most entertaining, magical parts of the film, as they're always accompanied by endless flashing lights, stop-motion animations, and action-packed, hyper-violent imagery. It's like watching a slasher film on LSD, only the house is doing the killing. There's also a more macabre war-themed undercurrent pulsing through the film's thematic veins, which is sadly inspired by Obayashi's own heart-breaking experiences in WWII. It certainly gives everything a heavier tone when you realize what he's been through and will certainly make you applaud his ability to spin personal tragedy into the camp background of a psychedelic summer horror flick.

EMOTION (1966, JP)

Another interesting feature on the HOUSE DVD is the shorter experimental film Emotion, one of Obayashi's earlier works and one of the founding Japanese ventures into experimental cinema. It's a little less linear in nature than HOUSE, so it's harder to follow. It's really beholden to its own progressive logic, but you can easily see where HOUSE gets its camp, mind-bending film legacy from. Emi is the main character in Emotion, and the film follows her exploits as she moves from the sea to the city and meets someone "just like her", the introspective Sari. A strange sequence of events follows for Emi, involving love affairs with a Dracula-type figure and Sari's mother, all culminating in a lust-driven suicide and her eventual return to the sea. Much like HOUSE, the plot here is not the point. Just get some good drugs and enjoy the ride.