Hidden Flick: Oshare, Can You See?

Finally, and most importantly, at least from my ridiculously skewed and twisted point of view, Obayashi seems to be a Head. The man’s film appears to have dropped acid, taken the process of making the film away from the writer, producer, director, and cast, and tripped out on a cosmic kung fu skullfuck like a slasher version of Apocalypse Now. Only this time, it is young maidens who are sacrificed in the end, and not a water buffalo.

Music has a clear and sublime motif in the film, and, again, it is a testament to Obayashi’s hepcat “shit, why don’t we have this weird band play some tunes in this thing” vibe that he is able to insert this sort of spacey and trippy acid pop without missing a beat in his rather bizarre tale of ghosts and animation run amuck. The film travels along at its own unique pace with special effects neither attempting to get the viewer to suspend disbelief or confirm credibility. Hausu HAPPENS, and you can either take what is going down, sifting through amazing image after strange image, all done through the thoroughly warped third eye of Obayashi, or you can’t. My guess is that if one is looking for hidden cinematic treasure, this is one film that is too much eye and ear candy to miss.

Deception IS a tricky thing, but to be weird means you must be hiding something, right? Obayashi gets extra kudos for taking quite a critical beating when Hausu came out. Little did many cinephiles realize how much his ideas of animated weirdness mixed with a rather distorted tale of horror and humor and shit hot weirdo scenes would become so de rigueur in the video wasteland of the 1980s, before his vision of what a film could really say and how one could stretch the limits of multi-dimensional imagery would endure into the 21st century. When the lights go down, minds should open up. And they do here.

– Randy Ray