Hausu (1977) - Nobuhiko Obayashi

like lewis carroll's alice's adventures in wonderland, nobuhiko obayashi's hausu is based on the ludicrous daydreams of an ADD girl-child with too much imagination on her hands. we may be made of sugar, spice, and other nice things, but i've often suspected that our insides run on spiders and coal. and apparently i'm not alone: carroll's exploitation of little liddel seduces readers, filmmakers, and the more lewdly speculative members of the literary community; obayashi's "gorgeous" daughter seduces her virgin girlfriends and feeds them to crazy aunt elizabeth báthory and her hungry house on haunted hill.

although this sounds like the perfect recipe for a japanese horrorfest, the film is also composed - and i quote the subtitles directly - of "chocolate, candy, bread, love, and dreams." a gaggle of schoolgirls on summer vacation travel through painted landscapes via happy train and magic bus to a village populated by singing cobblers and other shopkeepers of the musical theatre variety whose jazz-hands fail to point out the dangers that lurk behind the walls of what appears to be the only house in town. everything turns topsy-turvy once the girls go inside: auntie's a nutter, the house is a death-trap, and blanche the cat shoots green laserbeams out of its eyes.

distributor janus films calls hausu "an episode of scooby doo as directed by dario argento." they're not wrong. while the house tries to gobble up the visitors in an effort to feed the starved libido of its owner - jilted of the joys of her wedding night by WWII - the giggling girls get their shit together and go kung-fu nancy drew on its ass. fortunately, their scooby skillz prove little match for the appetites of auntie unhinged. there is no way to describe the mayhem that ensues.

Mac's decapitated head rises up from a well to bite Fantasy's backside, Sweet strips and leaves behind her suspicious-smelling skivvies in a pile of malevolent mattresses, and skeletons dance to a romantic piano number played by Melody's severed fingers while Gorgeous plays dress-up in her dead mother's wedding clothes. "this is ridiculous!" states the Prof, and we can only nod in fourth-wall agreement as the house devours its inhabitants in increasingly surreal scenarios. the promise of rescue is thwarted when the girls' heartthrob teacher, en route to the house, gets into an argument with a watermelon vendor over which is the superior fruit and dissembles into a pile of that which he defends. this shit is, indeed, bananas. b-a-n-a-n-a-s.

the night goes tits up for the girls after this - a point rather aptly driven home with appropriate visual representation. but naked underdeveloped teens is perhaps the least of obayashi's achievements in 1970s film production. his techniques are actually brilliant. clever cuts, soft-focus slo-mo, animation, and avant garde special effects enable obayashi to visually realise the potential of his plot. inside and out, this house is genius.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) - Samuel Bayer

in the eighties, childhood development was synonymous with the cultivation of a particular sensibility accustomed to darkness, depravity, and indelicacy. from the goonies to the garbage pail kids, labyrinth to the lost boys, evil abounded and we young things were acutely aware of what lurked in the shadows or under the stairs. it was height of horror in the youthful imagination and the heyday of the slasher franchise, and yr humble narrator grew up grimly fiendish as a result. though much of my movie time was spent accordingly, i never lived on elm street. little chaingun was a born sceptic; newly human and strangely literal, i hadn't patience for tales of mystics, messiahs, or a man who could kill me in my dreams. freddy krueger wasn't scary, and neither were his movies.

flash forward twenty years: the film industry is flooded with remakes and reboots, michael bay has already exploited the essence of my childhood, i have zero investment in this franchise, and expect nothing from some combination thereof. so while it wasn't exactly difficult not to disappoint me, i was still surprised to find myself not hating every second of the new nightmare.

take, for example, the cast. it's full of people i like: john connor (thomas dekker) from the sarah connor chronicles, father justin (clancy brown) of carnivàle, and even beaver/cassidy (kyle gallner) from veronica mars (you may remember him from such trailers as the haunting in connecticut - that shit's been on every dvd i've rented in the past year). but nevermind all that, freddy krueger is played by fucking rorschach!

jackie earle haley brought residual pedophilia to watchmen, and then brought the watchmen to elm street when he returned to pedophilia. his résumé couldn't be more perfect. freddy krueger was only ever creepy to me as a sexual predator - a far more formidable foe than anything from a dream. michael meyers is a Shape, jason voorhees a retard, both something bordering on evil incarnate in their absence of humanity. freddy, on the other hand, is a bad man with a bad touch, and his lechery is all he has going for him. without it, he's just an ugly edward scissorhands with similarly poor table manners.

unlike its predecessors, this nightmare is aurally stunning. the ambient noise of the boiler room is reminiscent of terminator, the jump rope song (more familiar to me in its adaptation by buffy's "gentlemen") resonates appropriately, and freddy's nails across various chalkboards and other surfaces is successfully unnerving. the soundscape is good enough to compensate for the movie's ridiculous plot-holes, and it renders terrifying what is otherwise largely trite and mundane.

the main problem with the elm street series is that it just isn't scary, and the remake doesn't do much to correct this. the nightmare isn't nightmarish enough - it doesn't live up to its surrealist potential due to utter lack of imagination. that said, there are some random pleasing bits that interrupt the predictability characteristic of the franchise, including the tossing about of some far-too-clothed blonde in a manner worthy of the exorcist (and hence better than the original), her later reappearance as a barbie in a blood-bag, and a rather heavy-handed nod to pulp fiction. oh, and the final shot is rad.

it's almost good enough to make me want to watch the rest of the franchise. almost.