Jan. 24, 2013 - Issue #901: Children can’t choose

House

An aggressively playful, grotesque fantasia, House (1977), Nobuhiko Obayashis's freaky cult classic, is oblivious to generic orientation—okay, it's oblivious to many forms of orientation, yet it also has a perfectly coherent narrative throughline with roots in the Western Gothic tradition, Japanese ghost stories and Hansel and Gretel. You could call it a cautionary tale, but then you'd just have to look out for everything. Especially cats. And watermelons. And, yes, houses.

House follows seven teenage girls with seven smurfy names as they retire to the countryside for summer vacation and wind up staying with a wheelchair-bound spinster. Before the girls arrive, the sky is always glowing warm and soft like some hazy dream, perhaps built on crude memories of Technicolor musicals. Once they're installed in the titular dwelling, the world turns crepuscular and shadowy, and malice becomes boundless. Futons and pianos eat people. Cats' eyes shimmer as though sending cryptic signals from the abyss. Heads emerge from wells and bite asses. Everything is deadly, yet these girls just wanna have fun. It's a realm of trap doors and illusion, of cornball effects executed with verve, of preposterous panty-clad derring-do, of music and morbid delight, a realm where every childish suspicion about adults is wholly confirmed, and then some. Tanoshinde! 

Metro Cinema at the Garneau vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus