The strangest movie ever made comes to Baltimore
Kumiko Oba from "Hausu" (Photo courtesy of Janus Films)
Take six giggling, breathless Japanese schoolgirls and plop them into a gorgeous summer house in the remote countryside of Japan. Add cartoons, a psychotic cat, a dead aunt, a butt-biting decapitated head and hand-less piano-playing fingers and you have Hausu (House), a breathtaking, absurd and irreverent Japanese horror film spawned from the imagination of Director Nobuhiko Obayashi’a eleven-year-old daughter in 1977.
This weekend, Hausu, one of the most bizarre films in existence, will be changing lives at the Senator Theatre in Baltimore, not a bad value considering it’s only an $8 and 87 minute investment.
Hausu was recently released in the United States for the first time, and I had the great fortune to see it at IFC in New York, where I spent an hour and a half attempting to unlearn everything I know and surrender to the tidal wave of mind-boggling eye candy washing over the screen.
Official Hausu description from Janus Films:
How to describe Nobuhiko Obayahshi’s 1977 movie House? As a psychedelic ghost tale? A stream-of-consciousness bedtime story? An episode of Scooby Doo as directed by Dario Argento? Any of the above will do for this hallucinatory head trip about a schoolgirl who travels with six classmates to her ailing aunt’s creaky country home, only to come face to face with evil spirits, bloodthirsty pianos, and a demonic housecat. Too absurd to be genuinely terrifying, yet too nightmarish to be merely comic, House seems like it was beamed to Earth from another planet. Or perhaps the mind of a child: the director fashioned the script after the eccentric musings of his eleven-year-old daughter, then employed all the tricks in his analog arsenal (mattes, animation, and collage) to make them a visually astonishing, raucous reality. Never before released in the United States, and a bonafide cult classic in the making, House is one of the most exciting genre discoveries in years.
Put yet another way, Hausu is kind of like New York City. There is no real way to describe it, and yet annals of literature could be dedicated to defining it’s existence. It is a film whose plot cannot nor should be described in any kind of sensical, logical or chronological way. But all of this is okay. All you really need to know is that you should go see the movie.
Hausu Trailer
Showtimes:
Friday, April 23rd – 8:00 pm, 10:00 pm AND MIDNIGHT!
Saturday, April 24th – 8:00 pm, 10:00 pm AND MIDNIGHT!
Sunday, April 25th – 8:00 pm
The SENATOR
5904 York Rd
Baltimore, MD
Tickets $8 (cash only)