The Greatest Movie...

... in which... uhh.... excuse me, did that piano just eat that girl, and then have sex with her various floating body parts, and then did her head float around the piano and tell us we're being naughty? Really?

Hausu (1977)

Words don't really do Hausu justice - it falls squarely into the camp of "Ya gotta see it to believe it." Which I figured going in having been drawn by the review at the New York Times which basically said the same thing, but once it's actually there in front of you mocking your eyes... well it's something. That was all I could think after it was done. Well that was something that I just actually saw. Huh.

What shocked me the most about it though was actually an extra-filmic realization - somebody needs to look at this film side-by-side with Sam Raimi's first pair of Evil Deads, and right quick. There were sooooo many similarities, it was insane. Inanimate objects flying around by themselves in ha-ha dancing movements and walls spewing torrents of blood, cackling dummy heads biting at people...


Did Raimi know of this film? The first Evil Dead came out in 1981 so he might've, although I have no idea if Hausu got any play anywhere but in its native Japan at the time it came out. So who knows... Raimi knows, that's who!

ETA So you can see some of the inanity for yourself, here's the trailer via this review by Alex at CHUD who says some of the same things I just did about the Evil Dead similarities and also being completely unable to form sentences about the experience of watching this movie. It defies not just logic, but sanity itself.

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