a review of 鬼怪屋

This was my first viewing as well. I'd heard about this movie for years, but was waiting for just the right time to take the plunge, and this was also one of the rare times that I intentionally avoided looking up trailers or YouTube clips to maximize the effect. I think maybe I was expecting something along the lines of other Japanese horror comedies (Wild Zero, Tokyo Gore Police), but this wasn't quite like anything else I'd ever seen. At the very least, I can see why Japanese critics were baffled by it at the time of release, and also why its particular blend of scary/campy/arty tones has never been quite duplicated. I found a lot to enjoy about the movie from the standpoint of postmodern aesthetics: The obvious soundstage exteriors, the general mixed-media approach to special effects, the way the girls riffed on the "archival" flashback footage, even the little action-movie theme that came up whenever "Kung Fu" did a flying kick at something. I appreciated the massive amount of intentionality that went into a lot of the individual shots, like how Gorgeous' father and stepmother were shown almost entirely behind that weird beveled patio window, or the way they filmed Sweet getting crushed by the futons through a glass floor made to look like a wooden floor. The "Constructing A House" documentary short is definitely required viewing for those who have access to it. Learning that the film originally existed as a crazy multimedia pop-culture marketing blitz a couple of years before it even began shooting seems gloriously backwards to me, like if the Star Wars films had started out as action figures and Underoos before they even had a greenlight. And Obayashi strikes me as a filmmaker deserving of a certain level of cult approbation, and I'm curious to learn more about his overall career. That said, there's also a ton of stuff brought up in the doc that they kind of bring up and drop, and I felt like more explanation was sorely needed. I understand that mid-70s Japan was a very different time and place, but I was still kind of boggled by Obayashi's approach to his young female actors. I don't want to make any intimations without anything to back them up, but I had a hard time telling whether or not certain aspects of the production (including but not limited to the sporadic nudity{1}) were just harmless Japanese cultural quirks or intended to be, in the words of one Don DiMello, "a little something for Daddy". I agree with Ian A.T. that the net effect isn't necessarily prurient, but I really had to let go of some of my baked-in assumptions to get there. All in all, I'm glad I finally got a chance to watch (and discuss) this film, and I'm definitely curious about everyone else's reading of it. {1} Which I definitely wasn't expecting, given what I knew of the film's reputation as a wacky Wonka-esque romp.