Weekly Film Rec: Hausu

I feel like all I've been doing this past week is Halloween recommendations and really, I have (you can see for yourself here). This will be my last horror recommendation in this space for a while just to give you all a break. Fortunately, I saw Hausu before the end of October so I can squeeze it in before the self-imposed moratorium.

Without question, this is the most insane, off-the-wall, bonkers, nusto film I've ever seen and I took a whole semester on avant garde filmmaking (ok... so most of that stuff is just boring). It's a hallucinatory haunted house movie with an identity crisis. It's almost too wacky to be scary and too crazy to be funny. The effects are ridiculous but do their job completely.

The plot sends a group of girls (all named for their dominant feature or personality trait) to a friend's aunt's house which happens to be haunted. There's some ghostly back story about her aunt and an old love the doesn't really make too much sense, but nothing here really does. Eventually, the girls go missing through increasingly bizarre circumstances. My favorite has to be Kung Fu, who fights off an attacking horde of flaming logs, among other things, with her awesome kung fu skills. Also, there's an evil cat (aren't they all?).

Words can't do this film justice. You simply need to look at the DVD cover art to find out all you need to know. I'm kicking myself for not checking it out when a local theater showed a 35mm print. This will become a regular in the scary film rotation. And if you don't watch it on your own, I will eventually make you watch it. Thank you Criterion for bring this movie into my life!