A young school girl (Kimiko Ikegami) invites six of her school chums to spend their summer vacation with her at her aunt's (Yoko Minimida) isolated country house despite the fact that she hasn't seen her aunt in years. Once there, as the girls disappear one by one, it's clear that something evil inhabits the house. What to make of Nobuhiko Obayashi's surreal, stylized horror fantasy? You've never seen anything like it. Often very (intentionally) silly, funny yet still with a genuine sense of horror, Obayashi uses everything from animation to obvious painted backdrops to pull us into this strange supernatural world. When one of the characters says, "This doesn't make sense", we nod in agreement, it doesn't make sense but I don't think it's supposed to. Decapitated heads that bite you on the ass, the cat from (literally) Hell, homicidal pianos, severed legs performing kung fu, etc. but it works so ..... The girls have names like Gorgeous, Fantasy, Sweet and Melody so they seem like fragmented feminine stereotypes (sugar 'n spice and everything nice) that I began to wonder if the film were some kind of odd treatise on pubescent female sexuality. A one of a kind film, that's for sure and I'm not too sure how seriously we're supposed to take it but it's a lot of fun.
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