Formerly "A Movie A Day" :/

Friday, April 1, 2011

House - 1977 - Dir. Obayashi

I've been excited about this movie for a really long time. I had hoped to make a screening of it back in NY last year but THE TIME JUST WASN'T RIGHT. When someone tells me there's a Japanese movie where the directors eight year old daughter helped out and the special effects are outrageous, I get pretty excited and skeptical. Preferring to watch it in the right frame of mind. And the movie is certainly a handful, beginning with hyper melodramatic sequences of schoolgirl's "normal" everyday life. Oh, and the girls names are just descriptions (Prof, Gorgeous, Sweet). The movie is so insistently innocent and cutesy, I think I was a little surprised when the horror aspects ended being somewhat gory. It's certainly more goofy than scary or violent, probably no one under ten would be intimidated. The special effects make no attempt to convey realism and are more of a tool to say "Look what we can do with film!" So they end up being fun. The movie is fun when you get right down to it. It's silly, unpretentious, and paced really well. I didn't find myself getting impatient, "waiting for the good stuff." It's all good stuff. About as genuine as you can get trying to translate a child's vision to film. I would certainly be on board to watch it again.

http://www.beyondhollywood.com/uploads/2010/05/house-1977-movie1.jpg
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