This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

look. If there's a movie you need to see at five in the morning, when half of your friends have already passed out, leaving you and your remaining friends to struggle to stay awake and comprehend it, it's this one. I've already seen this movie, so I already knew what to expect, but the borderline drug-induced insanity seen in the film is intensified when trying to stay awake during it. The editing is so friggin bizarre and the tone is so inconsistent that dozing off and waking up one minute later will convince you you're watching an entirely different movie. When viewed from a critical standpoint, much of the movie's bizarre content could be seen as a result of incompetency from the director, but everything somehow manages to collide together to create an extremely entertaining experience. Highly recommended.

Well, I finally watched house. I felt lucky to find it at vintage stock. It is crazy. I loved the blood effects though. I never got sick of hearing the main theme play through the ENTIRE movie lol. If yoy like surreal horror this is a good watch. There is plenty of groovy 70s tunes featured as well.

Oh my goodness, what at trippy, crazy, cheesy little movie this is. I don't think it has a single scene in it which doesn't have some type of campy, surreal special effect. Early on it seems like part Wes Anderson, part after-school special, part J-pop, part … I don't know, just 'out there', and certainly unique. It gets weirder and weirder as it goes. If you love the bizarre and the downright silly, movies which don't take themselves too seriously and are out to throw wild images at you, you'll probably love this film. Director Nobuhiko Obayashi has a real flair, and he's not out to make things look super-realistic, he's out to entertain. If you're looking for a ghost story, real drama, or horror, well, this isn't it. You never feel real tension, even as the cute little girls are attacked by mattresses, devoured by a piano, etc etc. For me I suppose I fell more in the latter camp, wishing the film had some balance in creating a film about the supernatural, but you can easily see why it has a bit of a cult attraction to it, and your mileage may vary.

The one thing I will grant the picture is that it's a unique and strange visual experience. It starts out interestingly enough in a creatively stylized manner, but then gets too clever by half, much too gimmicky, and ultimately incoherent as the story progresses. Well, maybe not incoherent entirely, because you can follow the story well enough, as a group of Japanese teenage girls falls victim to a demonic house in the countryside of Satoyama Village.In checking the credits page, it appears that the version I caught on Turner Classics changed the name of all the principal characters, so that the main character named 'Angel' on the IMDb title page became 'Gorgeous' in the film I saw. In no particular order, the remaining six girls went by the names of Fantasy, Sweet, Mac, Kung-Fu, Prof and Melody. Their English names in general referenced a character trait, so that 'Melody' was accomplished as a musician, and 'Kung-Fu' was a martial artist. Even the cat's name was changed, another reviewer called it 'Snowflake', while in the story I watched it had the very non-Japanese name of 'Blanche' - how they came up with that one I'll never know.Although it seems that the director's take on this movie was to produce something resembling horror, there's just too much goofy stuff occurring that takes the horror element right out of it. I'll refer to just two of the deaths in the story - one by a piano eating Melody (how appropriate!), the other involving Kung-Fu getting chomped by a ceiling light. After a while, one's interest in the story wanes because it's all just a bit too bizarre.As for the main protagonist, Angel/Gorgeous winds up being 'consumed' by the Auntie the girls originally intended to visit. Gorgeous was upset that her widowed father was going to remarry after eight years, so a change in vacation plans brought Gorgeous and her friends to Auntie's home in the country. In an effort to make friends with Gorgeous, the fiancé Ryoko Ema set out for Auntie's home, and upon arriving, the picture somehow totally disconnects from the comic/horror element, dissolving to a message about how the 'spirit of love can live forever'. Maybe it all had to do with the translation, but whatever it was, any message the director was attempting to convey was simply lost on this viewer. And I don't get lost too easily.