Hausu is an absurd, winking and blood-drenched high-wire act, the sort of movie you’d get if Quentin Tarantino had directed The Rocky Horror Picture Show using only the sets of Pee Wee’s Playhouse. It might be a masterpiece, but no one has ever been able to tell: the movie won’t stop jumping around long enough for anyone to get a good look at it. It’s stuffed to the gills with visual gags, verbal non-sequiturs, zany Technicolor in-jokes and baffling shifts in tone, style and music.
It has a plot, sort of: a pack of giggling Japanese schoolgirls are out on summer break. One of the girls impulsively writes to her mysterious aunt, asking if she and her schoolmates can visit her old house in the country. Soon a reply comes through the mail: all the girls are welcome. Once the girls arrive we quickly discern that the aunt likes them the way a spider likes flies; and in short order the house begins picking off the sailor-suited unfortunates in various horrible, demented and darkly comic ways.
But the plot doesn’t really matter; sitting through Hausu is an act of visual gluttony that makes you feel like you had a hundred Japanese game shows and a thousand episodes of Sailor Moon mainlined into your cerebral cortex. Watch the trailer below: doesn’t it look like fun? Yes, it does. And it is. It’s become a Halloween tradition at the Trylon. You don’t want to miss out, do you? – Michael Popham
Hausu screens Friday and Saturday, October 31 and November 1 at 7:00, 8:45 and 10:30; and Sunday, November 2 at 5:00, 6:45 and 8:30 at the Trylon. Purchase advance tickets here.