As you and Roland carefully pick your way through the undergrowth the picture becomes clearer. The house is not abandoned, far from it, several figures are exiting the building.
Some have shovels and two of them are carrying…is that…a body?
Roland gestures for you to stop.
“I don’t know these people. The place was abandoned, I swear on my life.”
Keeping your eyes on the group you watch as they walk, procession like, deeper into the woods. Reluctantly you follow, Roland slightly ahead, his years of silvan living allowing him near silent movement.
You have no such advantage.
Crack
As the stick breaks beneath your foot, the sound is like a gunshot in the silence of the night.
“Run, back to the camp, fetch the others!” shouts Roland.
As you crash through the undergrowth, you hear music behind you.
Something I love about making the decision to collect any and all horror is that you get such variation. OK so horror tends to have a general theme running through it of…well…not actually horror, not all ‘horror’ related films are scary, or horrifying in fact. I think the theme that links them all is something like the macabre.
Now I may be wrong, perhaps it’s still too strong a word to cover all horror but it works for me. Something can be both funny and macabre at the same time, something like Casper isn’t scary but it IS macabre, we’re hanging out with a dead kid. Now the theory maybe falls apart a bit with creature features, though they usually involve death and dismemberment so actually, yeah, that works.
Anyway, where was I? Macabre. Is covering up a bunch of deaths whilst singing about it macabre? I think so.
It’s Takashi Miike’s, 2001 film, The Happiness of the Katakuris.
This is another film that I acquired recently but saw many years ago. I actually bought it as a birthday present for a friend back in the early 2000’s, back when the only Japanese films that made it over to the UK were generally the weirdest ones, it’s what you came to expect at the time, it gave the impression that all of Japanese media is just nuts. Now I’m certainly no expert and I happen to like that side of filmmaking but I would hazard a guess that in reality there’s plenty of mundane films and TV available to Japanese audiences. This…isn’t one of those.
The film follows 4 generations of a family who live together at, and run, a B&B. Business isn’t going particularly well as the promised road that was supposed to be built hasn’t materialised and so they have no guests. Eventually they do receive some guests but they all start dying under various odd circumstances, then as a side plot we have a man claiming to be related to Queen Elizabeth seducing the young mother of the family. Eventually these two plots coincide and we reach a dramatic finale. I’ll go into some of this in more detail in the spoilers sections but what makes this stand out, apart from the black comedy aspect of it, are the musical numbers.
Now there aren’t songs ALL the time, this isn’t a full fledged horror musical a-la the Little Shop of Horrors remake or Repo the Genetic Opera, but there are a fair few of them and they really raise this film for me, they’re what makes it stand out. I love how ridiculous they are as well, whether it’s a song about love where a character is flying through the air, a dramatic backlit song about discovering a dead body, or a zombie dance number straight out of Thriller, they’re just a huge amount of fun and contrast well with the sombre tone of some scenes.
I do need to rewind a little here and talk about the intro. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the plot of the film but it’s a wonderful grim little stop-motion, yes that’s right, sequence where we transition from real actors to following the journey of creepy little cherub as we witness the cycle of life and love and death…or something like that, anyway, it’s fantastic! You can never go wrong with some stop-motion I say.
Something else which stood out to me, or rather didn’t, was how believable the cast were as a family. They really gelled together and weren’t either too nice to each other or too antagonistic, just the usual family ups and downs…well except maybe the grandad, he’s pretty out there. With surreal comedies like this it’s often hard to judge the acting but there’s enough somewhat serious portions of the film to say the acting is good, nothing stands out as excellent but as I mentioned it’s all believable. Interestingly enough the father of the family, Kenji Sawada, and the Con Artist character, Kiyoshiro Imawano, were in fairly well known bands in Japan.
In terms of this being a horror film I already touched on that in my intro, this is in no way a scary film. What it does have is a good amount of black comedy, dead bodies and even some zombies at one point, pretty damn good looking ones as well, out doing some dedicated Zombie films.
This is an odd film…very odd. It’s 100% an acquired taste, a marmite movie, you’ll either love it or hate it, you’re unlikely to think it’s simply ‘average’.
On that note I should probably tell you what I think of it. I definitely fall into the love camp, I’m a big fan of very strange films, however…very strange films are rarely going to be a 5 for me. I enjoy the craziness, I enjoy the songs, but I would be hard pressed to say that the story is truly engaging. It’s not bad by any means but if it wasn’t for all the madness then I think I’d find myself a little bored, maybe that’s a little unfair, it was never going to be anything other than what it is, a mad musical about love and death, it just doesn’t have that little bit extra. I’m therefore going to give The Happiness of the Katakuris 4 logs out of 5.
If you enjoy musicals, black comedy and something a little out of the ordinary, then give it a watch!
**WARNING** SPOILERS BELOW **WARNING**
Welcome to the spoiler section. This is the part where I can bring up some specific parts of the film which I’d like to talk about more, whether they be good, or bad.
I mentioned earlier about the stop motion into, well I’ll go into a bit more detail. This section is absolutely bizarre and is one of those scenes I’ll show to people on it’s own as a “What the fuck” sequence. It starts with a live action scene of a lady eating a bowl of soup in a restaurant. She soon finds something odd in there, the aforementioned cherub, she screams, we switch to stop motion and the little guy see’s her very heart shaped uvula in her mouth, grabs it, rips it out and flies through the window! We then get a fairly decent length combo of the cherub being eaten by a crow, which is then killed by a creepy toy…bear I guess…with wolverine claws. Then a poster of a crow, turns into an egg, which gets eaten by a snake, which gets picked up by a vulture, it drops the egg, which hatches into another cherub, which gets immediately eaten by another crow who then gets taken out with a log by the grandad from the main portion of the film. So yeah, weird! Sorry for the long ramble but you’ll be just as confused watching it.
OK so I have a favourite character. He’s not a nice character but the premise is just bizarre. Richard Sagawa is a conman who convinces the character Shizue that he is a British Royal Navy Pilot who’s related to The Queen. It’s such an outlandish claim but Shizue falls for him entirely. To be fair to him he wears a rented uniform when they first meet, then speaks to her on the phone whilst mimicking the sounds of battle so he goes pretty hard with the deception. In reality he’s just a swindler, out to get some money from Shizue and meets his end at her and her grandfather’s hands.
The strangest part of an already strange film is the ending. A nearby volcano erupts and we get another stop motion scene where a lava flow picks up the guesthouse and floats it to a beautiful verdant pasture. Next we get a Sound of Music style song which is a scene that anybody who has seen the cover art or trailer will be familiar with. It’s a happy ending for the family, then suddenly we are informed that the Grandad dropped dead a year later, but hey, “That’s life”.
I wasn’t really sure how to sign this one off but I figured keep it simple, no need to make a song and dance about it.
Summerisle 