Toho Co. Ltd [1977] 87′
country: Japan
director: NOBUHIKO OBAYASHI
cast: KIMIKO IKEGAMI, KUMIKO OHBA,
cast: YOKO MINAMIDA, MITSUTOSHI ISHIGAMI

Oshare (Ikegami) is just your average everyday schoolgirl. One day she comes home from school to find that her musician dad (who apparently works with Sergio Leone) is about to remarry. Not willing to accept a replacement for her deceased mother, Oshare tries to visit her mom’s home where her aunt currently lives. The aunt (Minamida) invites her to come for a visit.

Oshare and her pals Fanta, Kung Fu, Melody, Sweet, and Gari hightail it to the country where they find Auntie’s miniature house sitting on a set hilltop. Residents try to dissuade them from going, but they move on. Once there, they are greeted by the charming, but wheelchair-bound Auntie, who may just be the most attractive elderly person ever.

Almost immediately weird crap starts happening. Gari swears she sees a head in the well, but when the girls investigate, it turns out to have been a cooling watermelon – or was it? She summarily disappears, as does everyone else in a “Ten Little Indians”, or perhaps more “Friday the 13th” kind of fashion. Auntie takes off (seen devouring what’s left of Gari) and the girls attempt to find her. While resting in Auntie’s bedroom, Oshare is possessed by Auntie. It seems that Auntie died years ago, but because she was never married and enjoy the fruits of womanhood, she is unable to come to grips with that and uses her house to feed off the life force of young girls. Um, yeah . . .

The girls are subsequently murdered in increasingly outlandish ways right at home in an “A Nightmare on Elm Street” movie. One is literally eaten by a piano. One is dismembered by a huge fan. Trying to take matters into her own hands, Kung Fu battles with the Auntie-possessed Oshare and gets beheaded with a lampshade for her trouble (a technique that would later be reused in “The Heroic Trio”). Eventually, survivor Fanta is able to get away by destroying an image of Auntie’s evil-evil Persian cat. Oshare/Auntie remains behind, awaiting more young women (particularly her dad’s fiancé) and pontificating about the sharing of love. Huh?

“HOUSE” (the film’s on-screen title and voice-covered by a narrator for the audience as “Hausu” [HOW-SOO] ) may well be the strangest motion picture every released by Toho Co., LTD. While it may sound like your average run-of-the-mill haunted house movie (It plays a lot like the Richard Crenna creeper “The Evil”), it is anything but. The way it’s put together is unlike any other movie you’ve ever seen. The writer/director Nobuhiko Obayashi may be the absolute craziest director you’ve ever seen. Nothing about this picture is normal. Even the aspect ratio bucks the norm – 1:33. Nope, this isn’t in Tohoscope or even standard widescreen.

Some have said this is the strangest picture ever to be produced by Tomoyuki Tanaka. While that can be said of Toho, Tanaka’s out of the equation – his name appears nowhere in the credits, which is only sensical since “HOUSE” makes “Godzilla vs. Hedorah” look like “Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla ’02″ by comparison. Just when you think the movie’s going to go one way, it goes the other. When we’re introduced to sweet, crippled Auntie, we find out she’s a Japanese ghost (watching the others through an eyeball in her mouth at dinnertime). Just when you think Kung Fu’s gonna cowboy up and save the day, boom, her head’s yanked off and she’s sucked into the ghost world. The movie can only be described in one word: “mind-fuck”. After seeing “HOUSE”, you will be disturbed. The one point of comfort in the film is the score. Its main theme, in fact, appears to have been ripped off by Jerry Goldsmith as “Carol Anne’s Theme” in “Poltergeist”. But as for everything else, as the end titles roll and the laid-back end theme plays (sounding a LOT like the Alan Parson’s Project’s “Time”), you will be left either scratching your head or sputtering on the floor.

I can say this movie is strange 100 times, but it’s not going to do you any good unless you see it yourself. It is literally that sort of weird. An indescribable sort of weird.

But be warned: proceed with extreme caution.