House is one of the most unique films I’ve ever seen if not the most unique. I think of Japanese culture in general as having a flair for style, but House is style to the nth.
From the moment the film starts with its cute (Spice) Girls saying cute, artificial lines and wearing cute, stylized clothes until the film moves on to the girls’ stylized demises as they are eaten by a lampshade, consumed by a piano or decapitated in a well, House is an outrageous, psychedelic race from one unexpected event to the other. Gorgeous’ father introduces his new fiancé, and the woman is bathed in soft light as her scarf flutters languidly behind her. She almost floats over to her stepdaughter-to-be. The entire movie is one stylization after another.
But the sheer imagination in the film is the element I like the most about it. Not only was I unable to anticipate what would happen from scene to scene, but I couldn’t even anticipate what was going to happen from one moment to the next inside a single scene. When Fantasy discovers Mac’s severed head in the well, the scared girl throws the head back in and quickly turns around to another task. No surprise there. But Mac’s disembodied head then floats out of the well behind the girl and, after a couple of aerial flourishes, descends to the unaware Fantasy and bites her in the ass. Later, the teacher/rescuer horrifies the watermelon farmer by wanting a banana, and when we next see the teacher’s car, the teacher has become a life-sized stack of bananas. House has a staggering inventiveness that never seems to refer to conventional thought.
Throughout the film, I tried to get a grasp on where this movie might be coming from. There’s certainly a little of the The Monkees TV show or Sgt. Pepper’s. Some of the more horrific elements echo Monty Python or Dario Argento. But House is one of a kind, and though its consistent tone eventually runs a little slow over the course of 90 minutes, it’s still 90 minutes of some of the most inventive experiment I’ve seen. The perfect Halloween flic.
Later note: Koganada's short, Trick or Truth, adds an important element to an understanding of this film. There's more than just flash to Ohbayashi's work. (http://kogonada.com/portfolio/trick-or-truth)
