On DVD: This Halloween, Bring Home the Crazy, Voluptuous Horror of House
Singularly eccentric filmmakers making flat-out bonkers movies has led to a treasure-trove of films that are so uniquely awful in an outsider-art kind of way that audiences just can't get enough: The Room, Dangerous Men, Birdemic, After Last Season, and -- if early reviews are to be believed -- the recently released N-Secure have viewers scratching their heads and howling with laughter at the same time.
But we have to come up with a whole new category for Hausu (House), a 1977 Japanese horror epic making its US DVD debut this week courtesy of the Criterion Collection. This is a movie so bizarrely entertaining and on its own wavelength that it supercedes such simple terms as "bad" or "melodramatic" or "over-the-top." Truly, this is a film that exists on its own plane of reality and forces us to meet up with it there. Even the trailer is a trip:
With Halloween around the corner, there's no better time to acquaint yourself with Hausu's hallucinatory scares and candy-colored girls' adventure. Seven schoolgirls travel to a house in the far-off countryside, and soon they find that everything around them -- from the mirrors to the piano to the fruit stand to the cat -- are potential deathtraps. Words, frankly, can't do justice to this loopy and spooky Japanese import. Get the right kind of friends over for the night and take the plunge together.
To whet your appetite, check out the TV spots that director Chigumi Obayashi directed in the early '70s with action icon Charles Bronson for a line of Japanese toiletries "for him" called Mandom. Those commercials -- and the extras-packed Hausu DVD -- will most likely add a new name to your list of favorite unhinged directors. To wit: