Oh my goodness, what at trippy, crazy, cheesy little movie this is. I don't think it has a single scene in it which doesn't have some type of campy, surreal special effect. Early on it seems like part Wes Anderson, part after-school special, part J-pop, part … I don't know, just 'out there', and certainly unique. It gets weirder and weirder as it goes. If you love the bizarre and the downright silly, movies which don't take themselves too seriously and are out to throw wild images at you, you'll probably love this film. Director Nobuhiko Obayashi has a real flair, and he's not out to make things look super-realistic, he's out to entertain. If you're looking for a ghost story, real drama, or horror, well, this isn't it. You never feel real tension, even as the cute little girls are attacked by mattresses, devoured by a piano, etc etc. For me I suppose I fell more in the latter camp, wishing the film had some balance in creating a film about the supernatural, but you can easily see why it has a bit of a cult attraction to it, and your mileage may vary.

The one thing I will grant the picture is that it's a unique and strange visual experience. It starts out interestingly enough in a creatively stylized manner, but then gets too clever by half, much too gimmicky, and ultimately incoherent as the story progresses. Well, maybe not incoherent entirely, because you can follow the story well enough, as a group of Japanese teenage girls falls victim to a demonic house in the countryside of Satoyama Village.In checking the credits page, it appears that the version I caught on Turner Classics changed the name of all the principal characters, so that the main character named 'Angel' on the IMDb title page became 'Gorgeous' in the film I saw. In no particular order, the remaining six girls went by the names of Fantasy, Sweet, Mac, Kung-Fu, Prof and Melody. Their English names in general referenced a character trait, so that 'Melody' was accomplished as a musician, and 'Kung-Fu' was a martial artist. Even the cat's name was changed, another reviewer called it 'Snowflake', while in the story I watched it had the very non-Japanese name of 'Blanche' - how they came up with that one I'll never know.Although it seems that the director's take on this movie was to produce something resembling horror, there's just too much goofy stuff occurring that takes the horror element right out of it. I'll refer to just two of the deaths in the story - one by a piano eating Melody (how appropriate!), the other involving Kung-Fu getting chomped by a ceiling light. After a while, one's interest in the story wanes because it's all just a bit too bizarre.As for the main protagonist, Angel/Gorgeous winds up being 'consumed' by the Auntie the girls originally intended to visit. Gorgeous was upset that her widowed father was going to remarry after eight years, so a change in vacation plans brought Gorgeous and her friends to Auntie's home in the country. In an effort to make friends with Gorgeous, the fiancé Ryoko Ema set out for Auntie's home, and upon arriving, the picture somehow totally disconnects from the comic/horror element, dissolving to a message about how the 'spirit of love can live forever'. Maybe it all had to do with the translation, but whatever it was, any message the director was attempting to convey was simply lost on this viewer. And I don't get lost too easily.

The high-school vacation is coming and the student Oshare intends to spend the period with her father in his villa; however she finds that his girlfriend Kyouko will be with him and Oshare gives up going. Meanwhile her best friends will be camping with Keisuke Tôgôbut, but he has a problem and calls off the camping. Oshare writes a letter to her estranged aunt that lives in the country asking whether she could go with her friends Kunfû, Fanta, Gari, Makku, Merodî and Suîto to spend the summer vacation at her house. They are welcomed by Oshare's aunt but soon weird things happen since the aunt is a ghost and the house is haunted."Hausu" is a messy and annoying Japanese ghost story. The silly screenplay is irritating and the music score is awful. Hard to understand why some people consider this garbage cult. My vote is one (awful).Title (Brazil): "Hausu"

Giggling schoolgirls meet grisly ends one by one in a haunted house. Comedy-horror is a contradiction in terms and I can't see how it's ever going to work - it has to be one or the other or the story-line becomes disposable. So this film, which wants to have a foot in both genres didn't work at all for me. In fact, it didn't even work as a film, coming across more as a training manual in film technique, for which purpose it would presumably serve very well. Every trick in the book is thrown in here, including many they wouldn't print.If I managed to finish it, it was less on account of the outrageous spectacle - though some of it was genuinely impressive - than for the sake of some solemn reflection on Obayashi's preternatural freedom from artistic inhibition and why he didn't put all that creativity to better use.