Criterion Horror Reviews

Criterion Horror Reviews

So for President’s Day weekend 2013 Hulu is allowing free access to their entire collection of Criterion Collection films. There’s a lot of great stuff in there obviously, and I figured I’d use this opportunity to check out some highbrow classics I’ve been meaning to check off my list.

House (Hausu) 3/5

It’s no secret that Japan has an affinity for the bizarre. A lot of the kitschy appeal of Japanese pop culture comes from the weirdness factor, especially when said weirdness is presented without explanation; just look at Super Mario, so much about that series is just completely random nonsense and yet it’s a household name all over the world. House is a movie made in Japan in 1977, and while America loves weird Japanese movies nowadays, that probably wasn’t so much the case back in ’77, so it only just got a stateside release in recent years. Honestly, I think they should have given it a shot, 1977 being the year that punk music flourished and all, I think a lot of subculturalists would have got a kick out of it.

So basically, 7 Japanese schoolgirls with nicknames based on their attributes head out to one girl’s Grandma’s house for the summer. This chick’s grandma lost her husband in World War 2 and ever since then her MO has been to use her psychic cat to possess household objects to kill unwed girls and absorb their energy. But really it’s just a haunted house movie. I can’t think of another film to compare it to really, it’s like equal parts The Haunting, Evil Dead 2, Suspiria, and Scooby Doo. The movie is obviously supposed to be making a statement on Japanese youth at the time or something like that, but even with the ridiculous amount of time I’ve spent reading manga and watching anime I can’t exactly tell you what that message is, but I get the feeling that 20^th Century Boys author/artist Naoki Urasawa probably enjoys this movie.

They really went nuts with the effects in this one, trying just about every trick in the book up to that pre-cgi point. There’s a lot of bad blue screen effects and animation that seems to be drawn directly onto the film. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Some of the cooler stuff you get to see include a piano eating a girl, a girl being sucked into a light fixture, a floating head biting another girl on the ass, and a crazy looking fuzzy gas station portrait of a cat named Blanche that spews blood into the house until the living room is flooded and the last girl floats around on a broken door and falls asleep in the arms of a girl in a traditional Japanese wedding gown with the top pulled down to expose her boobs.

The film is bugfuck batshit crazy, but it’s also really, really, slow at times. You would think it would be an easy recommendation, but there are scenes in this movie where you watch girls talk to each other while saccharine music plays in the background for 30 minutes at a time. I’d say if you like weird movies check it out, if you want something more straightforward definitely don’t bother with this.

Man Bites Dog 4/5

Man Bites Dog is a French mockumentary from 1992 that makes a great companion piece to American Psycho. Like American Psycho or Funny Games, it’s one of those movies that are violent and shocking specifically to make you, the viewer, question whether you might have an obsession with violence in film. I’ve never been a fan of this style of filmmaking, it’s a sick kind of entrapment really, to make a violent film and then turn around and say that the viewer is the one with the problem. That being said, it is a good movie, but I think some pacing issues make it fall just short of being a great movie. It’s not quite as preachy as Funny Games, but never gets as exciting as American Psycho, but it does retain the dry black humor of those two films and really builds on its own atmosphere to create a unique movie.

Right from the start, you can tell we’re watching events play out in a fantasy world. No real world film crew would follow around a legit literal serial killer, though I’m guessing that’s meant to be a shot at the media (specifically American media) and their absolute devotion to sensationalism since the Vietnam war. To further distance this film’s reality from our own, it’s shot entirely in black and white, giving it a dreamlike quality in certain scenes, and at times it borders on Lynchian territory. In a late scene the film’s star (protagonist? Antagonist?) unapologetically shoots a dinner guest to “try out” a gun holster he receives as a birthday gift from the film crew. There is no aftermath, only a quiet discomfort and then more gifts to be unwrapped. Man Bites Dog and American Psycho clearly share the same consequence-free world.

The big point everybody focuses on with this movie is the film crew, and for good reason. At the start of the film, the crew maintains a fly-on-the-wall distance where they film the action without reactions. Eventually, one of the crew is shot and killed; afterwards, another crew member writes it off as an “occupational hazard.” After the death of the first crew member, the rest of them are not only dedicated to filming as much as they possibly can, but they actually go on to help with the murders and eventually a murder/rape in the apartment of an unfortunate young couple. You could almost call it a reverse Stockholm syndrome.

As you’d expect, the film never really goes into exactly why the killer needs to kill, instead you get scenes that show off his sociopathic tendencies and his eerily close relationship with his parents. Personally, I think the point is supposed to be that his character is as blank as possible, the shock comes not from his murders but from the way the film crew interacts with him. It’s definitely worth checking out, but I can see why its early cult status sort of wore off over the years, whereas American Psycho still captures everyone’s imagination so many years down the road. Then again, I can’t help but wonder if maybe the French approach to filmmaking is just too foreign for my tastes at this point. I’ve seen a number of foreign films in my time, and generally after a few movies you get a hang of what their audiences like and expect from a movie; my experience with French cinema is admittedly minimal so maybe I just didn’t “get it.”