Steven Spielberg’s Jaws was a massive worldwide hit in 1975. Naturally, studios from all over tried to find ways to replicate that success. The Japanese studio Toho was no exception and they hired Nobuhiko Obayashi to write something Jaws-like. What he came up with was one of the strangest, incomprehensible films I’ve ever seen.
The basic plot, if you want to call it that, is actually pretty simple. A teenaged girl nick-named Gorgeous (Kimiko Ikegami) (most of the characters in this film have goofy names like Kung Fu, Fantasy, and Sweet) invites several of her friends to spend summer vacation at her Aunt’s (Yōko Minamida) house. Strange things begin happening almost immediately once they arrive. It seems the house is haunted.
But any type of plot outline will do nothing to explain just how completely nuts this film is. Criterion describes it by saying that it’s like if an episode of Scooby Doo were directed by Mario Bava. I’d add that it’s a psychedelic cartoon turned into a live-action nightmare.
There is a floating head that bites one girl in the butt checks, a piano that eats people, an evil cat, a murderous futon, and so much more. The sets’ backdrops are gorgeous and intentionally designed to call attention to their fakeness. Obayashi uses fisheye lenses, superimposed images, freeze-frames, matte paintings, periodical animation, and every other cinematic trick at his disposal.
It feels both thrown together and tightly scripted. It is more comedic than horrifying, and more bizarre than thematically satisfying, but it truly is a film worth watching.
It is one of those films I’ve been hearing about for ages. The Criterion Collection got ahold of it a few years back and it’s been talked about ever since. But for one reason or another, I kept putting off watching it. I like weird films but I feel like I need to be in the mood for them, and I rarely feel like I’m really in the mood. But I needed a foreign language horror film and was struggling to find something so I put it on.
I’m so glad I did.
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