'twas the season! Zombies one last time: The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001)

This is a Halloween recap. I couldn't decide which of the zillions zombie flicks I'd not seen I wanted to watch. I did know that I wanted one as far toward the opposite end of the spectrum as I could find. 

Fortunately, one of my favorite Japanese auteurs came to the rescue. Takashi Miike is likely best known for Audition, a riveting, genuinely horrifying and unsettling film that I've not revisited in years because I found it so disturbing. At the same time, Miike has also penned and/or directed westerns, samurai, yakuza, and family friendly fare. With over a hundred films alone (let alone theater works, TV shows, shorts, etc.), he is the Robert Pollard of movies; even his worst is fascinating (that I've seen), but frequently, he's extremely accomplished and not infrequently, very close to great. For the record, Audition is great and I'd argue that Ichi the Killer is pretty close, and 13 Ronin.

You can imagine my pleasure and surprise when I found out Miike-san had directed a musical comedy zombie film! There's a slight issue, though, I'm not one hundred percent that The Happiness of the Katakuris qualifies; I'm pretty sure it does in one sense. When the zombies show up, they're very much reanimated (and singing and dancing) dead people who died at the bed and breakfast that Masao Katakuri had opened with his family. Anyway, they vanish when the number is over, which is why I wonder; if a corpse is only reanimated for one number and then dispensed with, does it count? I think it's likely and I'm swayed to believe that's the case here.

Masao (played by Kenji Sawada, possibly best known to western audiences from Paul Schrader's Mishima: a Life in Four Parts) was fired from his job as a shoe-shiner and decided to use his pension to fund a bed and breakfast in a remote area due for development. The general theme of happiness is siphoned off for each of the members. Masao and his wife (Keiko Matsuzaka as Terue) seem genuinely content with one another and the move; their divorced daughter Shizue by contrast is looking for love, and attempts to find it by going into the city and if her current find is any indication, she is, well, pretty bad at reading red flags. Naomi Nishida nails the craziness of her character but grounds her somehow as do, if I'm being honest, everyone else in the cast. And that's a tall order.

Shizue's daughter is toddler Yurie who begins narrating the story and tells us she's pretty sure she's going to grow up to be a cool adult because of her family. I'm not going to dispute that. Masao's son is looking less for happiness than redemption. Masayuki is an ex-con who bungled an unspecified job and did time and has been trying to prove he's gone straight ever since getting out. Played by Shinji Takeda (so good in Kairō/Pulse), he's kind of tough-guy loopy, and occasionally the voice of reason/audience surrogate. Lastly, Masao's dad Jinpei (the great Tetsurō Tamba) may or may not be happy or seeking it. If anything, he seems resolved to looking forward to a peaceful exit from this world. 

All of this might sound pretty quotidian, right? Well, consider this: the film begins with a clay-motion sequence that has nothing to do with the rest of the narrative. A young woman sits at a table in a fancy restaurant with her soup before her and having difficulty scooping up a sip. She switches to a fork and stuck between the tines by its neck is a sprite bearing a slight resemblance to Mac from Mac and Me, but decidedly more, uh, animated. He's fascinated by and then plunges into her maw to retrieve her heart-shaped uvula. Quick: name one other movie where the opening line of dialog is "My uvula!") He escapes, is devoured by a crow while admiring the uvula; the crow is murdered by a toy bear that comes to life, A snake is captured by another crow and fed to hatchlings and an egg gives birth to another sprite. Cut to the White Lovers Inn and the Katakuris.

To try to rebuild the scenario is a fool's errand; just bear in mind that for the longest while no guests have come to the Inn, but when they do, they wind up very, very dead. A depressed fellow shows up and kills himself with his room key. A horny Sumo wrestler shows up with his underage girlfriend and dies of a heart attack on top of her, killing her, as well. Shizue's paramour, a con man who claims to be a nephew of Queen Elizabeth's and a spy, dies from Shizue saving Jinpei's life by pushing a large stone from a precipice, braining the guy as he falls to his death.

It IS a zombie film!

If you're thinking this is odd, get ready. Masao makes the executive decision that it's better to bury the guests. The first because suicide would be bad PR for a B&B just starting out. The Sumo wrestler and his GF? Well, that only makes sense. As for "Richard", Shizue's love interest? Once his true motives are revealed and his character, it's a no-brainer. Shizue is philosophical: "All men are assholes."

Toward the wrap-up, a random wife murderer shows up, whom Masao helps capture since the guy is holding Terue hostage. There was a moment when Jinpei was confessing to the cops and detectives that he'd committed all the murders (understandable, since the family had just finished taking care of "Richard" and were coming from the grave pretty dirty). Once the cops have the guy in custody, the volcano near where the inn is situated erupts and we're back in claymation territory. It's a delirious sequence that ends with the inn being relocated to a beautiful open savannah with elephants in the distance, and the cops and their quarry partially covered in - well, if it's lava, they're looking pretty good so I'm assuming it's - soil, applauding the happy ending.

None of this can possibly convey how extremely fun and weird this film is. It's not as weird as, say Hausu (1977), but it's got heart and a sense of its own eccentricity/strangeness. 

If you're not on the movie's wavelength, I can see how it might be tedious or a drag, but if you are, you're in for a treat.