tlavideo.com

Review

The Happiness of the Katakuris is over-the-top cinematic lunacy from the incredibly prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike. The film is, astonishingly, perhaps Miike's most gleefully anarchic and delirious production to date — a hysterical horror-comedy about the efforts of a desperate hotel-owning family to dispose of a series of deceased guests. Oh, there's one thing that we forgot to mention: Happiness is also a musical. Family members burst into song during stylized production numbers, romantic interests croon and literally fly through the air to declare their love, and rotting corpses crawl from the ground and initiate a chorus line of dancing zombies. There are also extended stop-motion "claymation" fantasy sequences and fatal sexual interludes between schoolgirls and Sumo wrestlers. Happiness is most remarkable in that underneath all of the on-screen insanity, from dancing corpses to animated severed tongues, Miike's film is a surprisingly sweet-natured feel-good tribute to family values! After a series of gangster sagas, Happiness is Miike's best film in years — an exuberantly wild and playful adventure in the possibilities of film, and you can't help but smile as you experience Miike's giddy movie madness. (Japanese with English subtitles)

 -- Travis Crawford