A haunted-house movie doesn’t necessarily have to spooky to be good. The horror-comedy is a hearty subgenre (see the sequel to this list’s The Evil Dead for a prime example), and this Japanese film takes great joy in being as scary-wacky as possible. A girl invites several of her classmates to hang out at her aunt’s mansion in the middle of nowhere. With its nubile young women alone in a giant house, House seems like it will go down the road of many a film before it. But it doesn’t. It goes somewhere — actually we’re not sure where it goes. It’s full of low-rent, stylized special effects — disembodied heads, random acts of animation, household items that devour the girls one by one — and is matched by a trippy, hallucinatory vibe.
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