Watch The Happiness of the Katakuris For Free

Truly Dreadful Film

Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

An extended family move out to the country to run a B&B, only to find that each rare and sorely-needed guest winds up dead on their property. Naturally this prompts a series of frantic musical sing-along productions before the shovels come out. One of Seven films made in 2001 alone by the absurdly prolific Takashi Miike (best known in the west for his more intense horror works such as the magnificent "Audition" and "Ichi The Killer"), this loose remake of Korean film "The Quiet Family" has all the rough edges and scatter-shot structure you'd expect of a film presumably made over a quiet weekend between projects. But for all that, it's frequently very funny, admirably off-kilter, and features quite the finest claymation soup- sprite that I've seen this year.Should you find that "Les Miserables" simply doesn't have the epic scope and emotional punch you want in a musical, then this combination of "The Sound Of Music", "Saturday Night Fever", "Shallow Grave" and "Shaun Of The Dead" is absolutely what you've been looking for.

The maverick like Takashi Miike, who sends up Japanese culture in many of his films, directed this film about a family who have a guest house in the middle of nowhere, where the (few) lodgers end up dead by morning. And, its a musical! The film is all over the map and even includes some claymation. It is not bad, but it is somewhat uneven. I wish I cared more for the characters, they are somewhat one dimensional. However, Takashi is always interesting as a film maker, so I do recommend it, but he has done better. Its strange in its approach, a black comedy if you will. Once you understand it, you can watch it. Be warned, though, its a little out there.

'The Happiness of the Katakuris' may be a remake (to the very sober and also amazing 'Quiet Family' from the highly talented Ji-woon Kim) but it does not rehash the original. Instead it turns it upside down to create a movie that manipulates the same plot with very different results. Miike adds his trippy aesthetics to the story, adds more characters and takes the viewer on a very strange journey that can only be described as a dark musical comedy. Dead bodies keep piling but that is precisely the thrust for the family to break into song and dance routines, at times even with karaoke lines. Hilarity is never absent and lends an aura of surrealism along with the odd clay animation sequences.The movie is exuberant and completely over the top with parodies aimed at plenty of conventions such as sugary love declarations (including a very gullible young mother) and final last words speeches. Somewhere along the line there are even singing and dancing zombies neatly in tune with the family, all joined in a jarringly positive song that seems to poke fun at the obsession of being upbeat that seems so prevailing in Japanese culture.And yet throughout the insanity emerges a surprisingly moving story about family bonds. The end confirms this even as it takes the movie to a whole new level of pure weirdness. 'The Happiness of the Katakuris' is a genuinely original take on family centered cinema and for mingling such disparate elements it deserves respect.

The Happiness of the Katakuris is probably Takashi Miike's strangest film (or at least, stranger than any of the others that I've seen so far; which is quite an accomplishment when you consider that some of those films include the equally bizarre delights of Gozu, Dead or Alive, Ichi the Killer and Visitor Q). Where The Happiness of the Katakuris exceeds the strangeness of those particular films is in the not so subtle blending of genres, styles and influences; making reference to and pastiche of everything from Japanese television and post-war family melodrama, to Hollywood musicals and zombie exploitation.The overall result is like a kind of giddy burst of merry, kaleidoscopic excess; as sounds, sights, colours and textures all blend amidst the barrage of stop-motion horror, live action character development and scenes of Technicolor, all-singing/all-dancing delirium! The basic plot was loosely inspired by an earlier Korean film called The Quiet Family - the first film from Kim-Ji Woon, director of A Tale of Two Sisters and A Bittersweet Life - which was more of a straight horror/comedy story about a typical nuclear family that set up a hunting lodge in the countryside, only to find that their first wave of clients are dying off one by one in mysterious circumstances. Miike transports the action to rural Japan and spins a yarn of staggering imagination; adding broader strokes of slap-stick humour, campy musical numbers and a colourful zombie pastiche.Still, don't come to this expecting a horror film or something that continues the brutality of Ichi the Killer or Agitator (two other films that Miike directed alongside this in 2001); The Happiness of the Katakuris is a comedy at its most satirical and absurd; using the frame-work of the story to look at the backgrounds of three generations of Japanese men and the women that support them, and tying it all into a subtle reference about Japanese culture, from the post war to the present. And even if you chose to ignore the more satirical angle presented in both the humour and the narrative design there's still so much left to enjoy; with the constant barrage of sight gags and colourful musical numbers erupting from the seemingly calm veneer of a "normal" family life.For me, Miike is a genius filmmaker, and The Happiness of the Katakuris is easily one of his must-see works! From the Buñuel-ian tinged opening that descends into a sequence of stop-motion animation that introduces us to both the themes and story of the film we're about to see, to the grand finalé which moves spasmodically from musical, to farce, to high tension; before eventually ending on a dual moment of tragedy and jubilation. The performances throughout are superb, with each member of the family feeling like a proper three-dimensional character that we can really relate to and believe in. It's also worth pointing out that for a director with a reputation as brutal and offencive as Miike's this is the second film he made in the year 2001 alone in which the ultimate point of the film was the importance of family and tradition (the other being the similarly brilliant and outlandish satire, Visitor Q).The Happiness of the Katakuris is masterpiece film for me; inventive, irreverent but also filled with empathy and compassion. I'd place it on the list of essential films by Takashi Miike, with some of the others being the well-known likes of Audition, Gozu and Visitor Q, but also more understated works like The Bird People in China, The Great Yokai War and Shinjuku Triad Society. A must have for anyone with an interest in original, intelligent and highly imaginative film-making!