by: Dr. Boogie

...CONTINUED

The portrait is destroyed, and we see both Blanche and the possessed Gorgeous freaking out, wherever they are. Things are finally looking up for our remaining heroines... our remaining protagonists. Prof has the nerve to declare, "we did it!" "We"? What did "we" do? All you did was read the same passage from that diary for like ten minutes while Kung Fu did all the legwork (no pun intended).

Unfortunately, the girls soon discover that Kung Fu's harsh art criticism has exposed a problem with the mansion's plumbing.

Blood starts spraying out of the remains of cat portrait, the furniture, and even the floor itself parts to reveal that it was just a handful of tatami mats floating on a sea of blood. Prof goes back to rereading Auntie's diary in the hopes that there will be a note about where she keeps the sealing tape.

In spite of this minor setback, Fantasy remains confident that Mr. Togo will come blasting through the wall in his dune buggy and carry them off to safety and a dry set of clothes. What is he up to?

Against all odds, Mr. Togo has managed to find his way to the watermelon stand. He's in view of the blood-spewing horror house, but he stops to have a quick convo with the watermelon merchant:

"Do you like watermelons?"
"No!"
"What then?"
"Bananas!"

Suffice to say, the merchant takes great offense to Mr. Togo's remarks.

Mr. Togo is so shocked that he starts yelling about bananas and collapses in a stupor.

Maybe there never was a Mr. Togo. After all, the girl obsessed with him is named "Fantasy". Maybe she just cooked him up because as a little girl, she always dreamed of one day marrying a cartoonish caricature of an inept man, but she knew deep down that no one that stupid would live past their teens.

So how about those girls, eh? Completely screwed, or just totally doomed? Well, Prof continues rereading the diary until she drops her glasses, and she is attacked by feral pottery.

A jar with teeth? I'm beginning to think that Obayashi is running out of crazy juice. Why not have the jar circle their makeshift raft like a shark before jumping out and spraying them with preserves?

The fairly mundane jar with teeth drags Prof off the raft. Panicking, Prof does the only thing she can think of:

She wriggles out of her clothes and starts swimming around in the buff. Forget what I said earlier about the nude chest shots. How did the director convince the actress playing Prof that any of this was necessary? Maybe that's one of the hallmarks of a good director: being able to talk your performers into stripping down and cavorting in front of the camera for no reason at all.

That just leaves poor Fantasy.

The blood eventually floods high enough for her to raft out of the room and back to the stairwell in the entryway of the house. Guess who's waiting for her there:

Gorgeous is ready to put a bow on this whole episode, and Fantasy is all too willing to forget how obviously possessed Gorgeous is. Gorgeous' reflection in the blood reveals that her aunt is still running the show, but Fantasy doesn't care. Tired as she is, it takes all of her strength just to reach for her friend and accidentally pull down her dress.

Someone really ought to tell Obayashi that you need to space out your T&A when you're making a horror movie, not just throw it all in at the end.

Remember what I said early on about Ryoko arriving late because she travels in slow motion? I wasn't kidding. She very slowly drives out to the mansion in a sequence that, if it were shot any slower, would just be a photograph. She stops briefly at the watermelon stand to look around.

We now see that Mr. Togo's shit is bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S!

Then Ryoko takes a long, slow walk up to the mansion and stumbles around in slow motion for a bit because it's not like we have a movie to end.

Hours later, she's greeted by Gorgeous on the mansion grounds.

Hours after that, they finally sit down to catch up on things. Ryoko asks where all of Gorgeous' friends are, and Gorgeous repays her flagrant abuse of slow motion with a long pause before she answers. When she finally does answer, she says her friends are sleeping, but when they wake up, "they'll be hungry." Ryoko smiles vacantly at the remark, so Gorgeous repeats herself. Again, Ryoko just smiles vacantly at the oddly threatening remark. Then she spontaneously combusts.

I'm not kidding.

The film closes with lingering closeup of Gorgeous slowly looking around while her aunt reads some inspirational line about the permanence of love. Because that's what a movie about a piano eating a girl is all about: love.

And so the movie ends with a few lingering questions. Questions like, "What the fuck did I just watch?" "Did this movie ever make sense to anyone ever?" "Why was the director so obsessed with getting as much footage of Gorgeous as possible, and yet we never got any solid full frontal?"

You might be thinking that the sheer insanity of this film is just a case of hidden meaning being lost in translation, but no. The documentary on the making of Hausu states that at first, no one wanted to make this movie because it was utterly incomprehensible. What's more, even the crew thought the movie was completely nuts. And all those people were right. Maybe it's because the script was based off of a collection of things a child fears, maybe it's because the director shot the movie without storyboards, and didn't know how a lot of his special effects would turn out until after the movie was finished. Nevertheless, you can't deny that Hausu did something completely different in trying to make things look as cheap and ridiculous as possible.

The other thing you can't do is accurately describe Hausu to a person who hasn't seen it.

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