I'll keep this brief, in keeping with its quality. It's a noisy haunted-house comedy about giggling school girls seeing visions and the like. It's splashy and full of lurid colors and directorial razzle dazzle. It's haunting too, or at least the irrepressible musical theme is -- a kind of children's melody that appears throughout the movie in a dozen guises: as overscore, as a waltz, as a tinkle on a music box.
I have nothing against melodies for kids. I mean, "Sesame Street" came up with some catchy tunes and look what Mozart did with "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." Brahms wrote lullabies. But this just never stops. It's going round and round in my head right now, a musical carousel. Even the voices are telling it to stop, but does it listen? Don't make me laugh; I'll lose the beat.
Anyway there is some convoluted story about one of the half dozen girls' widowed father being remarried -- to a knockout beauty too, Haruko Wanibuchi. Her name is ethnic but I think if you shook her family tree an American sailor might fall out of it.
It's not a total loss. The haunted house is colorful, intricate, and fascinating in its layout. The images are less gaudy as the camera explores its passages and its weird dove-colored garden. And there are courageous references to World War II -- "A long time ago, Japan was in a great war." And there is an unexplained and shocking shot of an exploding atomic bomb. The teen-aged girls are attractive, but only in the way that all teen-aged girls are attractive in their unself-conscious purity. They don't look like the porcelain dolls some people find in Japanese skin flicks. Oh -- and they're polite too, in an old-fashioned way, covering their mouths with their hands when they laugh or giggle.
But these virtues are swamped by the slapdash character of the film itself. I wouldn't go out of my way to watch it, unless, of course, there is some deep message in it that I missed in its entirety.
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