House

House is a film that seems to set out to defy all attempts at categorization or even comprehension.

If you were to imagine a version of Evil Dead directed by Luis Buñuel using overly-colorized sets from H. R. Pufnstuf... from the point of view of a half-dozen Japanese schoolgirls that are simultaneously having the same nightmare about it... that is House.

But I'm getting a little ahead of myself. This movie has a lot of interesting history so I'll need to back up a bit.

In the mid-70's, after emerging from an art group that included the likes of Yoko Ono, a lifelong film-experimenter by the name of Nobuhiko Obayashi was working as a director of strangely avant-garde television commercials. After a few of these...

One of his most famous series of commercials starred Charles Bronson for Mandom cologne.

...he managed to catch the eye of Nagaharu Yodogawa, a journalist, who wrote "If Obayashi can make such TV commercials, he should be able to make Japanese films more exciting." Only a year later, Obayashi was approached by Toho Studios about trying to make a film "as exciting as Jaws," and he was finally given a chance to make his first commercial feature.

After his initial meeting however, Obayashi found that he didn't really want to go in the direction the studio was hoping for at all. He just couldn't find any artistic appeal in trying to make some sort of man-eating animal Jaws clone like they were suggesting. When he got home afterward he found his 13 year-old daughter Chigumi brushing her hair in front of a mirror, so he asked her what she thought about his predicament. Her reply was, "If my reflection in the mirror could jump out and eat me, that'd be scary." Obayashi knew she was onto something altogether different than Jaws, so he immediately followed that by asking what else she thought might be scary. Her reply? "I love playing theme tunes on the piano after watching the films, but I can't play as well as you dad... and it feels as if the keys are biting my fingers."

Pictured: Not Jaws. I think we're onto something...

Later, while visiting relatives in the country, Nobuhiko and Chigumi retrieved a watermelon from a well, split it open with a cleaver and ate it. Afterwards Chigumi remarked, "As the watermelon came out of the well, it looked like it was a smiling head and it was scary."

Pictured: Also not Jaws

The story's generation proceeded along those lines until what emerged was a strange fantasy about a group of girls who go to stay for a while in a house belonging to one girl's widowed aunt... who's a cannibal... and can possess the house itself to make it do her bidding.

Also, this cat's involved.

Now just in case those glowing eyes were a little too subtle for the viewer to pick up on, the film goes out of its way to rationally explain why this is a paranormal cat...

Anyway, the aunt/house proceeds to try "eating" the girls and has some degree of success. The pretty girl's face shatters and falls off, men are reduced to skeletons and/or piles of bananas (in a scene I couldn't even begin to describe), and eventually we find ourselves at a climax that must include every crazy camera effect Obayashi had available to him. That clip is long enough to shows how the movie resolves the little haunted-house problem: at the last minute disembodied legs kick a painting of the cat, which kills the cat, which kills the aunt... Now at this point I'm sure the more logically minded readers are thinking, "Wait, wouldn't that cause the room to fill with cat's blood?"

Well yes... yes it would.

As strange as all of this might have been, as it turned out this was the first time in Japanese history that a film studio had been willing to risk getting behind a filmmaker that wasn't one of their contracted employee-directors, so, whatever Obayashi produced, it was very important that it be well-received. Luckily for Obayashi and the rest of Japan's stranger filmmakers, it was a huge success... The industry was changed and actual film-making was now a realistic ambition for Japanese artists with crazy movie ideas everywhere.

Visually, House is an hour and a half of interesting-looking and historically significant art. As strange as the images we see are, it's obvious that every single thing in the film was specifically intended to look exactly as it does.

I think the trailer said it right by introducing this film as: A FEAR TOO BEAUTIFUL TO RESIST! If you're as interested in not resisting as I am, tour dates for screenings are posted on the Janus Janus site. DVD and Blu-Ray are available on Amazon.


Note: As for the title, House seems to usually be referred to as the Japanese word, "Hausu." The English word "House" is used as the actual title on even the original Japanese promo artwork... so I'll be sticking with that.

Trailer:

Zombie Self-Defense Force

Zombie Self-Defense Force is the first of Naoyuki Tomomatsu's trio of zombie productions. I've had this movie for probably six months before I actually got around to watching it, but now that I have I think I just might be intrigued enough to look into those other two. That's not to say that it's a great film (it's not), but in this case I think that this trainwreck turned out to be hilarious enough for repeat viewings, from several angles.

The movie starts out with a ridiculous CGI spaceship being seen over Fujiyama, Japan. After a drawn out display of every single Japanese citizen's reactions to the U.F.O. the thing crashes, bathing the surrounding landscape in an electric green light.


As luck would have it, the Kibara platoon of the Japanese Self-Defense Force is in the forest already, on a "routine mission."

When we meet them they're just arriving at a corpse hanging from a tree. They see the spaceship, but decide to take care of the body before heading out to the crash site. While they're digging a grave for her, the dead woman suddenly springs back to life as a green-skinned zombie.

Also we find out the forest is haunted by ghost soldiers...

Wow. Things are really picking up fast now, and it hardly ever slows down again. We get one ridiculously gory gag after another as we plod along a truly skeletal plot. Essentially if you were to take zombies, aliens, ghosts, robots, and volcano eruptions (and the rest of this post's tag list), and come up with some ridiculous way to string them all together and throw them on screen in the span of 45 minutes or so, then you'd pretty much have the plot of Zombie Self-Defense Force... so long as you sprinkled in a healthy dose of sword fighting and arterial spray. With that being said, this isn't exactly a plot-driven movie anyway. As a cheap romp through a sequence of sight-gags and gore effects, this is actually pretty entertaining.

It's most easily compared to the scores of Troma films that follow about the same formula. While I personally don't mind some of Troma's more self-indulgent melon-crushing escapades, the quality bar's not set very high on a lot of those, and that's about what I was expecting going into Zombie Self-Defense Force. To my surprise, this actually turned out to actually be better than a lot of the Troma stuff.

Here are some of the high points:

Long, weird, but interesting opening propaganda spiel about why the U.S. government and its military actions are bad, but hamburgers and George Romero are good.

A flying zombie fetus that explodes from the womb of a dead, but pregnant, zombie...

... which then immediately lassos the innkeeper with his umbilical cord and goes Blanka on the innkeeper's face.

We eventually meet the aliens that are causing all of these problems... this is what they look like. As it turns out they're not built for dealing with robots + swords.

The final showdown between robot-lady and ghost-man. Same as all the other fights, but with even more sparks and hilariously inappropriate sound-effects than usual to indicate how epic it is.

Machine Girl

Machine Girl is a Japanese action/horror film about a highschool girl, Ami, who's life gets flipped, turned upside down when her family is attacked by another family of ninjas/Yakuza. She loses an arm in the process. Soon after she decides to go for her revenge, so she gets a bit of Evil-Dead-style arm enhancement gadgetry and goes to work.

These sorts of things aren't for everyone, but seeing the cover is probably enough to decide one way or the other. Either you're on board for machine gun arms, drill bras, and enjoy a good 20 foot arterial spray... or not.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I'd assume Robert Rodriguez must've liked the idea too since he made his own and called it Planet Terror.

Available on Amazon: The Machine Girl