Hausu is ostensibly a haunted house movie, yet it is an effort to describe precisely how bizarre this movie is. It has death scenes of unassailable ingenuity: in a popular instance, a young girl is attacked by a lamp shade, in another a woman is forced to play a piano until… yeah so there’s really nothing else as batshit as the lampshade sequence, but Hausu’s sense of macabre is consistently imaginative. It is also almost totally incomprehensible. Other than its basic premise – a group of girls go on a holiday at one of their aunt’s houses (she is obviously a witch, and her house obviously haunted) – I’m not certain of why any of the stuff that happens in this movie happens. But it is so relentlessly inventive, so relentlessly ridiculous, that there is little time to make sense of it. In its excessiveness and clothesline plotting, it’s perhaps the best Dario Argento parody ever.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: Janus Films 35mm print
20 Apr 2009 6:25 PM | Comments (3)
This movie is truly special—the piano death scene being my personal favorite.
Was this really a Janus Films print?!
Indeed it was!
In that case, I’ll start saving up for the $49.95 3-disc set.
leo
21 April 2009
8:56 AM
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