Rating: 3 1/2 out of 5
To put it simply, House is a baffling film. In style more so than content. Essentially, it is the 1970s entertainment industry represented in one movie. Is it good? Yes and no. It depends on how you watch it. Some sequences are hard to follow, and many of its elements are blatantly unrealistic, but it is far from unentertaining.
Predominantly featuring non-actors, the film stars Kimiko Ikegami as a teenage Japanese girl named Gorgeous. At the end of the school year, she has plans to spend the summer with her widowed father, a film composer returning from Italy. When he shows up with a new bride, however, Gorgeous decides to spend the summer at her aunt's secluded house with her six aptly named classmates: Prof, Melody, Kung Fu, Mac, Sweet, and Fantasy. The film quickly sheds the purposely phony tone of the first act and becomes a bizarre, somewhat preposterous horror story as the girls begin disappearing one by one.
There is undeniable vision here; there must be to create something so odd. House is one of those rare, bold films that fully assumes a genre to parody it. It cuts corners with themes, but not with plot. The problem is, it experiences so many genres that it becomes hard to follow. It borrows ideals from horror, fantasy, satire, exploitation films, even TV action series, until it becomes utterly unclassifiable. Perhaps some of the confusion is due to the fact that it is reportedly rife with allusions to Japanese pop culture that might fly over the heads of American viewers. Director Nobuhiko Obayashi was, after all, previously known for his work in TV advertisements.
Still, there's a lot that House does right. It is consistent enough in the necessary ways to keep us into it. The camp is amusing in a muddled sort of way. The deliberately cheap visual effects are perplexingly fascinating. And of course, any film deserves points if it can make me grin stupidly in terror.
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