HAUSU (HOUSE) Post-Release Discussion - Page 2

This is pretty much on the nose for me. I loved the movie, but at no point did I feel like I was incredibly engaged with it beyond a "whaaaat the fuuuuuucckk" level, which is what I usually get out of horror movies regardless of how ridiculous or lowbrow the premise/production may be.

That's what I thought after viewing the trailer. Never heard of this one till now. Chomping at the bit for it though.

Definitely doesn't feel like a 70s film. Which puts one in the weird position of calling this crazy fucking relic "ahead of its time", but there you go.

It doesn't really feel like a movie from any other era either though!

Intentional or not, the film has some odd man-hating qualities. The House seems to be a lesbian house. The man who was supposed to show up and help them out never did. And what's more, he only amounts to a pile of "bananas".

Screening in Baltimore at the Senator theater this weekend, and in Philadelphia, Exhumed Films at International House on June 5.

Wha? Everytime the movei handles gender relations it's totally submissive and man adoring. The dude's goofy, yeah, but that's just part of making him crusheable; the lesbian aunt is 1- evil and 2- only in the situation she's in because heterossexual love eluded her.

Holy shit - this movie. Tried to explain it to others who didn't see it with me tonight and every ten second snippet of the movie I tried to explain ended up taking ten minutes to describe. Loved the severed legs jump kicking the cat picture followed by "WE DID IT!" and then nothing changing whatsoever.

I'm a big fan of Rick Trembles' reviews. He nails Hausu pretty well:
http://www.montrealmirror.com/2010/051310/mpp.html

Posters from the Philly screening available...

http://www.etsy.com/shop/hauntlove

Back in February my friend and I planned an entire evening around seeing this at IFC. We ate delicious yakitori and gorged on fried oreos and drank and drank and then got lost and made it to IFC an hour later then planned. By then it was sold out and we got super depressed in that way drunk people get and went all the way back to Brooklyn and watched that Bravo show about Johnny Weir.

Until now I've always been uber depressed about what could have been. Then I saw this thread and realized that Janus was taking this show on the road and was thoroughly delighted to see that it will be playing in my area in a month.

So thank you Chud?

Sounds like a pretty rad evening even without HAUSU, to be honest.

I noticed this too, and I think the whole concept comes from an idea based on Shinto, in which all objects, whether it be a piano or a rocking chair, have a possibility of sustaining life.

Anyways, I really enjoyed this film, as its absolutely bonkers and the art design is great. For those who don't feel this film fits into its era, I'd personally disagree. Toho, like other major Japanese movie studios at the time, was suffering from the popularity of television and the recent oil crisis. Like War In Space, another film released that year by the studio, its inconsistent tone reflects the needs of the studio to try whatever works as they were desperate for a hit. This would explain the out of place and jarringly long cameos by popular bands and other stars, which slow the film down at points.

I can't wait to see this again. When does the Criterion hit?

According to this article, September 7.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/mo...eo/02stag.html

NICE. Thanks! For some reason Google didn't yield any fruit for me.

Holy fucking fuck this movie. Watching it felt like I was being disconnected from reality.

The cat sings. It SINGS!

This is showing for a couple more days here in Atlanta, if anyone didn't see the thread in the local forums.

www.plazaatlanta.com

Maaaaaan, what the WTF, though?
Highly entertaining. They had a full house for the opening night (Tuesday), and the crowd was totally into it. All the rewind/FF moments were hilarious to me, and Kung-Fu's constant action-heroing was pretty great.

Here's me being TERRIFIED of Blanche:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/el_gray...n/photostream/
(Uggghhhh I don't know how to find the image URL on the new Flickr layout!)

This starts playing tomorrow here in the DFW area. Already have my tickets.

Question, apparently the place it is screening at has a bar, should I drink while watching this?

Re: HAUSU (HOUSE) Post-Release Discussion

Finally caught this movie last night. It was so bad but so much fun. It felt like the filmmakers really thought they were making a "deep" film.

Sadly my favorite part was the trailer for Robo Geisha.


And Kung Fu.

Yeah, I'm not finding a way to see this thing before the official US video release, and its frustrating.

Eh? The filmmaker set out to, and was hired to, make a kid's movie. He is also a big Bunuel fan and interested in inserting surrealism into whatever he works with - whether or not that implies an ambition of being "deep" (such a loaded term) is debateable, but I do think the movie succeeds in this.

From what I remember, it is largely based on ideas from his daughter. The film has a very surreal stream-of-consciousness aura but I'm not sure it's trying to be "deep" per se.

Ok, I found a copy, and holy shit is did it live up to the hype. Best Japanese genre re-discovery since Horrors of Malformed Men. I find myself hoping Sam Raimi and Tsui Hark never heard of it, because it did a lot of their weird shit a few years before they did, and I want them to remain mad geniuses in my mid.

It's also perfect that Ty West is doing an extra on the upcomming DVD/Blu-ray, because this is pretty much exactly the brand of '70s horror weirdness he tried and failed to capture with House of the Devil and Cabin Fever 2.

I can't speak to Cabin Fever 2, but if he watched this film and House of the Devil was in any way inspired or informed by it, homeboy must be blind and riddled with brain tumors.

It's that dreamy style, and illogical pacing he uses. PS: Don't see Cabin Fever 2.

Seriously though, this movie is so meta I'm actually finding it hard to believe it was genuinely made in 1977. Is this an elaborate hoax and the movie was actually made like, last year? Was Obayashi really this far ahead of the genre by accident?

Just caught this last night at the Orpheum. Holy shit. What a film. I would have loved to have seen it in a packed theatre, as this seems to be best enjoyed in a group, but unfortunately, the theatre didn't market it at all. I just assumed everyone there reads Chud.

I had no problem with the pacing for most of the film, but surprisingly, I thought it did drag a little at the end. It's all so batshit insane, that the insanity seemed to wear on me a little by the 70 minute mark. I imagine I'm in the minority.

This plays like Richard Lester made a Japanese horror flick instead of A HARD DAY'S NIGHT. It's testament to the gonzo awesome of the film that you're already asking yourself what the fuck is going on before the gang even think about going to stay in the country. Every guy with a camera looking to shoot their no-budget breakthrough horror flick should watch this - there's no excuse for horror being boring, which is pretty much the number one issue with most of them today.

I have nothing new to add, but this movie just knocked me off my fucking feet. Cute Japanese schoolgirls, evil cat, bannana man, etc.. Just amazing.

My god, this movie. Delirious and trippy most of the time but also creepy as fuck when it needs to be. Funny thing is, out of all the Japanese haunted house movies I've seen this one makes the most sense.

The director wanted to make things look less realistic and bad on purpose in order to shoot the script as written and make it oddly palatable to kids. And that's the thing-- it's a kids movie that has a girl dissolving in a pool of cat's bloodpuke and a girl being mangled and chewed up by a piano. It works by always keeping you distanced with its technique. The bus stop is a glaring example; there's a billboard of a poorly painted blue sky in the middle of an open field.

Yeah, I saw this over the weekend, and I'm still reeling over it. Sam Raimi had to have seen this movie.

The music alone was horrifying.

This has come up before. You're watching and you're thinking "he HAD to have seen it!" because the influences seem so overt, but is it even possible that he saw it before making Evil Dead? I'd really like to know what the odds are that he saw it in Michigan before 1981, then NO ONE heard about this movie for decades, then it surfaces and the comparisons start. It's an intriguing mystery.

I'll take it one step further. How do we know Sam Raimi didn't actually make this movie?!

What an amazing movie. I just wish I'd never heard the intro to that My Chemical Romance song so that it wasn't in the back of my head every time the motif played. Aaargh.

I guess it's possible that he hadn't seen it. But I was constantly reminded of EVIL DEAD in so many places that it's only logical for anyone who's seen Raimi's work to compare the two. The whole piano-eating sequence felt just like the tree rape scene, and the laughing and various shots just felt very... Raimi-ish.

I actually hope that Raimi didn't see it. That way his vision remains his own. The whole viewing experience of HAUSU felt like I was watching something I really wasn't supposed to see. Really unique. I'm still trying to understand why the teacher turned into bananas. Was he afraid of bananas?!

Don't know if this was mentioned, but in the bonus features the director says that this was his attempt at replicating the success of JAWS. His 13 year-old daughter came up with a lot of the imagery in the film.

I see the EVIL DEAD comparisons but also SUSPIRIA. At least that's what my admittedly not very deep knowledge of 70s cinema is telling me.

But it's more or less tied, chronologically, with Suspiria. Unless I'm being forgetful.

No, SUSPIRIA came a few years before Evil Dead filmed.

Nevermind, misread you meant HAUSU, sorry.

Yeah, there's no way HAUSU was influenced by SUSPIRIA.

If anything the resemblance there could be from shared influences, though I can't claim to know where Obayashi got his ideas (other than his daughter), and it could just be coincidence. The technicolor look and heightened artifice of the sets and painted backdrops could be drawing a bit from Bava, but there were also precedents for that in Japanese film - like HAUSU's companions in Criterion distribution KWAIDAN and JIGOKU.

As for Raimi, EVIL DEAD II is even more like HAUSU, but it does seem unlikely he'd have seen it since apparently nobody in the US really did until recently. It seems most likely that it's a case of great minds thinking alike.

I wasn't really talking about a direct causal relationship between the 2 films as with the case of Evil Dead. But I do find it interesting that even though nobody had seen anything like Hausu at the time, Argento came really close and it was only months apart that they were working. There are a lot of similarities between the 2 films that are more than superficially deep.

I guess where I'm coming from is the idea that Raimi saw Hausu and copied its batshit tone and DIY aesthetics for Evil Dead is not as compelling to me, mostly because I don't believe that's what happened. Whereas the idea that both Obayashi and Argento both organically came to make haunted house/witch movies about girls AND to make them visually hyper-garish says a lot about the time in which both films were made.

There's also the giant face in the doorway, the mirror scene, and other specific things I could list if I had a copy of House handy.

I still say there's no way Raimi didn't see this before his EDs, because it's definitely more than just a general tone or Raimi-ish feel. I don't know how, but he saw it. As I think I said before, I'm not sure what the Michigan TV scene was like when Raimi was a young man, but I do know I saw my fair share of strange foreign horror films when I was growing up in the early 1980s thanks to UK telly. And I'm not talking movies that were famous as "cult" titles, just stuff they obliviously put on as cheap late night filler.

Soundtrack by Japanese pop sensation Godiego, of "Monkey Magic" fame!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iUMWy4hqAg

But this film was considered unreleased in the United States before last year, wasn't it? Maybe there were bootlegs out there, but before recently it didn't seem like anyone had even heard of it. I've spent my adult life and adolescence learning about cult horror movies and I never even heard it mentioned until a year or two ago. I'm not saying it's impossible, but what are the chances?

And I'm like twice his age, and I'VE never head of it.

Pete Tombs covered this film in his book Mondo Macabro. I saw it first on IFC a couple of years ago. It's not been hidden in an attic for the last three decades. I couldn't speak to it's original availability stateside, though.

Somebody needs to straight up ask Raimi, or failing that, invent a time machine and travel back to the late 70s to scour Michigan for prints of the film.

Does it really matter if Sam Raimi saw "House" or not?

I'm already halfway there!

Sure it does. It's interesting. If HAUSU was born out of a need for a horror film to copy the success of JAWS, and Raimi saw it and made EVIL DEAD, and how many other filmmakers saw EVIL DEAD and made their own films... it's just interesting to see influences happen throughout the years. JAWS inspired HAUSU inspired EVIL DEAD inspired SPACED which led to SCOTT PILGRIM... it's just really interesting to me.