This is the best movie I've seen in months. Hausu is an extremely strange and surreal Japanese horror film from 1977, about a bunch of teenaged girls visiting a foreboding old house and encountering all sorts of weird supernatural stuff there. The film is full of amazing cinematography and bizarre, innovative special effects, and has a very, very peculiar tone: the horrific moments that come later on in the film are made all the more disturbing by the fact that the movie never completely loses the sugary-sweet feel that characterizes the giddy first act.

There's also an oddly modern, self-aware quality to it all: in one scene, a girl getting eaten by a grand piano (yes, you read that right) notices her bare, severed legs flailing about and stops to comment about how indecent the sight is -- a little hint from director Nobuhiko Obayashi that he understood exactly how ridiculously over-the-top the scene was (and that's just one scene -- the whole movie is full of crazy stuff like that).

I've honestly never seen anything like it. (Click on over to Teleport City for more on this one).