Twenty-one: House

aka Hausu

aka my new favorite movie.

This movie is bananas! And I LOVE it!

I don't really know how to describe this movie. Neither does its jacket. Here's the summary given for its first-ever DVD and Blu-ray release (as a part of the Criterion Collection). They do a much better job than I ever could:

How to describe Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 movie House? As a psychedelic ghost tale? A stream-of-consciousness bedtime story? An episode of Scooby Doo as directed by Dario Argento? Any of the above will do for this hallucinatory head trip about a schoolgirl who travels with six classmates to her ailing aunt’s creaky country home, only to come face to face with evil spirits, bloodthirsty pianos, and a demonic housecat. Too absurd to be genuinely terrifying, yet too nightmarish to be merely comic, House seems like it was beamed to Earth from another planet. Or perhaps the mind of a child: the director fashioned the script after the eccentric musings of his eleven-year-old daughter, then employed all the tricks in his analog arsenal (mattes, animation, and collage) to make them a visually astonishing, raucous reality. Never before released in the United States, and a bona fide cult classic in the making, House is one of the most exciting genre discoveries in years.

I honestly don't know what to say about it. I giggled throughout the entire movie, beginning to end. I was also pretty scared by parts of it. It was a series of "What the f*#@" moments, both gleeful and terrifying. My favorite things about this movie:

-The soundtrack. 70s pop. Funk. Sticky-sweet piano. Random, wind-machine fueled songs with translated lyrics that are sooo ridiculous.

-The characters' names. Each of the 7 girls is aptly named for her personality: Gorgeous, Fantasy, Sweet, Melody, Prof (the brain), Mac (the "fat" one?), and Kung Fu (obviously my favorite). Kung Fu even gets an awesome fight scene in the end.

-Animation. No amount of CGI or 3D could ever top the inventiveness of this movie.

Oh, and most of the random comic relief moments involve only the male characters. Actually, I'm pretty sure all the scenes with the male characters are intended solely for comic relief.

I hope this movie trailer will help you understand-no... No, there's no way anyone could ever truly understand this movie. But it's still awesome.