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THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS
(Katakuri-ke no Kofuku)
Rating:  ½
Japan. 2001.
Director – Takashi Miike, Screenplay – Kikumi Yamagishe, Based on the film The Quiet Family, Producers – Tetsuo Sacho & Hirotsugu Yoshida, Photography – Akio Nomura, Music – Koji Endo & Koji Makaino. Production Company – Shochiku/Mainichi Broadcasting/Eisei Gekijo/Spike/Sedic International/Dentsu Gentosha/Little Garage/Gammo.
Cast:
Kenji Sawada (Masao Katakuri), Keiko Matsuzaka (Terue Katakuri), Tetsuro Tamba (Grandfather Nihei Katakuri), Naomi Nishida (Shizue Katakuri), Shinja Takeda (Masayuki Katakuri), Tamaki Miyazaki (Yurie Katakuri), Kiyoshiro Imawano (Richard Sagawa)
Plot: The Katakuri family, including husband Masao, wife Terue, son Masayuki, daughter Shizue and her young daughter Yurie, and the grandfather Nihei, have left the city after the father lost his job as a shoe salesman. They have bought the White Lover’s Guesthouse on a remote mountainside. In doing so they believed that a new road development nearby would soon bring custom their way, but so far they have not had a single guest. But now their first customer turns up. However in the morning the man is found dead, having plunged a knife into his own neck. They agree to bury the body by the lake, as news of their first customer’s death would be bad for business. But then a sumo wrestler and his girlfriend also die during sex and must be buried. Other guests continue to arrive but each befalls a fatal accident.
Japanese director Takashi Miike has become a cult figure in the last few years. Takashi Miike is an amazingly prolific director and has put his fingers into almost every genre imaginable, ranging from sf, horror and fantasy to children’s films, genteel dramas and a whole lot of Yakuza films. It is however Miike’s way-out films – the likes of Audition (1999), Ichi the Killer (2001) and Visitor Q (2001) – that have developed a cult following due to their scenes of extreme torture and perversity.
The poster/video cover of The Happiness of the Katakuris notes “The hills are alive with the sound of screaming,” of course parodying the famous line from The Sound of Music (1965). This however tends to give a wrong impression about what type of film The Happiness of the Katakuris is. It is not really a horror film, even though the advertising tries to categorize it along with Miike’s other horrors. Indeed The Happiness of the Katakuris is an almost completely unclassifiable film. The only real precedent might by the wackiness of the musical version of Little Shop of Horrors (1986). Maybe the nearest one might come would be to envision The Happiness of the Katakuris as Little Shop crossbred with the blackly deadpan surrealism of the Coen Brothers, and with Czech Claymation animator Jan Svankmajer brought in on the project too. Miike however lets loose with an anything-goes type of lunacy way above and beyond either of these. The Happiness of the Katakuris is actually a remake of a South Korean effort called The Quiet Family (1998), although this film has not been widely seen in the West. The Quiet Family was a black comedy about a family who own an inn where the guests keep dying, although unlike The Happiness of the Katakuris there are no musical or Claymation sequences or dancing zombies.
The Happiness of the Katakuris is a completely madcap film. A rain-soaked stranger arrives, the first guest at the lodge, and the whole family burst into song; the man goes to his room and floats up off his bed and flies away to the stars, only to fall back down to ground when the son knocks on his door with the beer he ordered. In the morning the family discover the man’s body with a knife buried in his neck whereupon they burst into song. Daughter Naomi Nishida’s encounter with a sailor at a cafe becomes an opportunity for a love song, replete with choruses in the background, rains of confetti and they flying off to drift through starscape and flower patterns. The musical sequences even come with little karaoke subtitles with a bouncing ball illuminating the words being sung so that the audiences can sing along. On a tv screen, a news broadcaster gets an insect up her nose and struggles to complete her item in straight-face. There’s an hysterical sequence in a junkyard with conman Kiyoshiro Imawano flying into the air amid blowing paper and singing lines like “The blood’s not rushing to my nose because I’m horny” in the midst of a nosebleed, before cutting to Claymation figures of Imawano and Naomi Nishida hanging on the edge of a cliff. There’s another song-and-dance number with all the dead coming out of the graves to sing along as a chorus and a bizarre song about dying from a knife wound, before the wound is revealed to only be a graze. The film climaxes with a volcanic eruption that is again depicted by Claymation, before the family reunite (in live-action) to sing a song and the grandfather is bodily taken up to Heaven.
The film also has a truly bizarre Claymation animated beginning. A girl sits in a restaurant, only to fish a tiny angel out of her soup. The angel promptly tears her uvula out and flies away, leaving her to collapse, only for the angel to then be devoured by a crow. The crow is then killed by a cloth monster with a ziplock head, teeth and claws, only to be reborn from an egg and be devoured all over again. It is a sequence that seems like something out of a Svankmajer film like Alice (1988).
Takashi Miike’s other genre films are:– Full Metal Yakuza (1997), a yakuza/cyborg film; the teen film Andromedia (1998) about a schoolgirl resurrected as a computer program; The Bird People in China (1998) about the discovery of a lost culture; the truly amazing Audition (1999); the Yakuza film Dead or Alive (1999), which comes with a totally gonzo sf ending; the surreal Dead or Alive 2 – Birds (2000); the 6-hour tv mini-series MPD Psycho (2000) about a split-personalitied cop tracking a serial killer; Ichi the Killer (2001), a yakuza film with some extreme torture scenes; the controversial taboo-defying Visitor Q (2001); the outrightly science-fictional, future-set Dead or Alive: Final (2002); Gozu (2003), featuring Yakuza up against a mystic monster; One Missed Call (2003) about ghostly cellphone calls; the ultra-violent Izo (2004) about a cursed, immortal samurai; an episode of the horror anthology Three ... Extremes (2004); the comic superhero film Zebraman (2004); the supernatural fantasy epic The Great Yokai War (2005); the mystical/SF prison film Big Bang Love, Juvenile A (2006); and the SF film God’s Puzzle (2008).
Copyright Richard Scheib 2006
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