HOUSE (1977, JAPAN)
 
Delirious, deranged, gonzo or just gone, baby, gone — no single adjective or even a pileup does justice to "House," a 1977 Japanese haunted-house freakout directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi. The yelps you’ll hear and possibly emit, though, will be of surprise and delight, not terror. “House,” which turns on a misbegotten, increasingly violent trip taken by seven teenage girls, is not in the least scary, despite its body count and gore. If the hairs on your neck snap to attention, it will be only because of Mr. Obayashi’s flamboyant visual style, his comic flights of fancy and genre manipulations. “House” was Mr. Obayashi’s first feature, and at times it feels as if he threw everything — every movie he had ever seen, every idea he had ever entertained — at the screen, using the horror genre as a big box into which he could combine the bits and pieces he wanted to sample from avant-garde cinema, Looney Tunes cartoons, schlock Italian horror and martial arts movies.