NOBUHIKO OBAYASHI'S WEIRD "HOUSE"

house In an era when affected quirkiness stands in for originality (eg, Diablo Cody, "My Life As Liz", taxidermy as hip decor and anything with Michael Cera), it is rare and refreshing to behold the real thing. "House" (1977), Nobuhiko Obayashi’s absurdist horror classic, is now being screened in American cinemas for the first time, thanks to a new 35mm print from Janus Films. To call "House" original is an understatement. "Dizzyingly, effervescently insane" might be more appropriate. What exists of a narrative unravels over the first third of the 87-minute film, which begins with a duo of schoolgirls taking glamour shots of each other and gabbing about summer vacations. More schoolgirls appear. For a moment the film is all love, pigtails, and knee-socks, with a central character named Gorgeous and a giggling retinue of pals who worship her. When Gorgeous heads home one day to find that her father has acquired a girlfriend to accompany the two on their summer vacation, she flips out and devises a plan to spend the summer instead with her aunt, a mysterious figure who is happy to accommodate Gorgeous and her six friends for the summer. Here's where things get weird. Gorgeous's aunt is a ghostly woman who wears tinted John Lennon-style glasses and keeps up her sprawling house by giving piano lessons to the neighbours. Welcoming the girls into her foyer, she makes creepy pronouncements from a wheelchair, and a shard of glass falls from a chandelier and stabs a newt to the ground mid-skitter. After dinner one of the girls is decapitated and winds up at the bottom of the well. It is not long before a cat moonwalks across a piano and the aunt is revealed to be a child-eating witch. house "House" is a film of persistent and multivalent weirdness. It is "Pee-wee's Playhouse"-weird, Salvador Dalí-weird, Hello Kitty-weird and a dozen other weirds besides. Characters say things like, "Chocolate, candy, bread, love and dreams!" and "What a landscape! We're lost in another world!" as they are attacked by flying logs and stripped of their clothing. A man is transformed into a pile of bananas; a girl is attacked by mattresses, there are mummies and skeletons and porno music and kung-fu. Tickets to this film should perhaps bear the warning "Abandon logic, all ye who enter here". The film's manic imagery is united by a certain sensibility, just not a coherent one. Like many cult films, "House" requires an act of will to enjoy. The experience is grating and boring by turns, but also funny and occasionally joyful. (I would guess that Lady Gaga has seen and assimilated the film into her act.) A shiver-inducing detail from its origin myth seals its cult status in stone: according to the film's press notes, the idea for "House" originated in the "eccentric musings" of Obayashi's own 11-year-old daughter. This may be the most haunting detail of all. "House" is now on tour at select cinemas in America. See Janus Films' website for playdates. ~ MOLLY YOUNG