House/Hausu (1977)

A whole long time ago, back before most of you were born, I watched this completely whacked Japanese horror film at the Hanover Drive-in. It was part of an all-nighter horror fest and I can't remember any of the other titles. I'm not sure why the Hanover Drive-in was playing a Japanese horror in 1979, but they did. Strange days indeed. I'd completely forgotten about it until I was reading about a few newer PAL releases from the fabulous Eureka! Masters of Cinema series (a sort of U.K. Criterion), and stumbled across this familiar-sounding 1977 film by Nobuhiko Obayashi. Sure enough, after clearing some cob-webs out of the furthest reaches on my pot-addled teenaged memories, the film was called House (Hausu) and MoC released a restored print of it about a month ago. As I recall, this is one whacked-out film. I remember sitting in the car with a couple of other stunned/stoned dudes completely in awe of this tour-de-shite film. None of us had ever seen anything remotely close to it before. The story line (after reading a couple of refresher online plot synopsis's) has several school girls visiting one of their aunt's creepy houses in the forest and being dispatched in increasingly ridiculous ways with stupendously bad special effects. I'm sure it's a truly banal movie but it stayed with me and receives all sorts of kudos from a variety of interesting film critics.


I ordered it from the U.K. earlier this week and look forward to revisiting a forgotten moment from 30 years ago. Coleslaw/Tilly/Krissy, at the risk of stating this obvious, this might be worth a trip over to Segredos for a viewing. It sounds right up your collectively-looney alleys. Anyone else who's interested is welcome. It'll probably arrive next week and we'll set up a viewing time.

btw - I bought you FBE dudes a new computer for the cafe today. Hope to get it updated and installed next week. You've suffered long enough and I'm getting too old to chamge those drawer slides every two months.