Sam Panico All four generations of Katakuris live on a house built over a garbage dump near Mt. Fuji. It's not much to write home about, but they dream of calling it the White Lover's Inn, a bed and breakfast that will serve the visitors that the road that runs nearby is sure to bring.Finally, after much waiting, a TV personality shows up and the family is overjoyed. Yet he soon kills himself and they find his naked body. So they do what any family would do: they bury it and move on. A second guest, a sumo wrestler, dies having sex with his underage girlfriend.In fact, every guest they get dies, whether by accident or murder or suicide. And the backyard is filling up!Oh yeah - there's also a con man in love with the youngest daughter, the police investigating all these murders and an active volcano.Takeshi Miike (Dead or Alive, Blade of the Immortal, Visitor Q) has directed everything from light-hearted children's films to movies so controversial governments have stepped in to block them. Here, he creates a musical that combines Japanese pop, karaoke and traditional musicals to make one of the most legitimately bonkers films I've ever watched. The film can quickly turn into flashbacks or claymation at a moment's notice, sometimes multiple times within the same scene.The leader of the Katakuris, Masao, is played by Kenji Sawada, who was a crossover pop star at the end of the 1960's. He was nicknamed Julie for his love of Julie Andrews. He's one of only two Japanese artists to ever appear on the cover of Rolling Stone and even had Barry Gibb write songs for him!Shizue's boyfriend, the sailor who claims to be a British relative of Queen Elizabeth, is played by Kiyoshiro Imawano, who was known as Japan's king of rock, even recording with Booker T & the M.G.'s. His funeral, dubbed The Aoyama Rock n' Roll Show, drew 42,000 mourners.The father, Jinpei, is Tetsuro Tamba, who was Tiger Tanaka in You Only Live Twice. And Naoto Takenaka, who plays a reporter, is the Japanese voice of Batman and Nick Fury.This is a movie that demands to be experienced. From animated fairies ending up in people's soup to heroic dogs that surf through lava, this is a demented version of The Sound of Music.

Paul Magne Haakonsen When I bought "The Happiness of the Katakuris" from Amazon it was under the impression that it was a musical with zombies, plus it is a Takashi Miike movie, two good things combined, or so it would appear.First of all, you had to wait 76 minutes into the movie before the zombies make their appearance, and then even so, you see them for less than 5 minutes. So don't acquire this movie under the impression that it is a zombie musical, which I did. You will be sorely disappointed.I do enjoy Takashi Miike's work and have most of it on DVD, this however, I will say it not amongst his best work. Sure the movie in itself was entertaining enough, it had a perverse dark comical touch to it, which is one of Takashi Miike's trademarks. But the movie was fairly slowly moving with very little actually happening, which in my opinion weighed the movie down.Also, the DVD cover has 'the hills are alive with the sound of screaming!' boasted on the front cover. Yeah, that was false advertising of a grand scale. And on the back of the cover it boasted 'The Sound of Music meets Dawn of the Dead" ... yeah, right!The story itself was entertaining, especially since all those people tragically died at the family's guest-house, which was kind of strange and coincidental. And the family itself was quite interesting and weird at the same time. The characters in the movie were nicely portrayed and had lots of depths to them, which really worked in favor of the movie. And the make-up of the zombies was actually quite good, I enjoyed that quite a lot, even though it was less than 5 minutes of screen time.If you enjoy Asian musicals, then "The Happiness of the Katakuris" is perhaps a great choice for you, personally, I enjoyed the Korean musical "The Fox Family" a lot more than I did this movie. But hey, it is all a matter of preference.

Zarathustra Iscariot Takashi Miike is the kind of director who makes you confront the grotesque, the beautiful, the exciting and the mundane all in one sitting. His other films often contain moments which, for the faint of heart, may be a moment of Bataillean transgression; something no doubt likely to become a summit experience. 'Happiness of the Katakuris' isn't one of them. It's not as shocking as 'Audition', not as frenetic as 'Dead or Alive' and certainly not as grotesque as 'Ichi the Killer'. It's different. Some might even say better than his other works. 'Happiness..' is an example of ingenuity within the bounds of what might normally have been the mundane. The story is essentially a simple one. A family start up a hotel in a mountainous region of Japan, and for a while they have no customers. Just when they begin to worry a guest turns up. Unfortunately things go awry, as he appears to have only chosen their hotel to commit suicide. From that point on things get from bad to worse for the family and their hotel. It's a simple enough premise, but Miike really builds on it and mixes in cheesy songs, spontaneous dance routines complete with operatic gestures, zombies, hyperbolised family drama and, surprisingly, claymation. The cinematography is, as one might expect from Miike, excellent. There's a wide array of beautifully shot sequences showing off Japan's stunning rural landscapes, and there's camera work during the musical routines which perfectly mimic any famous musical film productions you'd care to think of. Miike also excels himself with his use of wonderfully rendered and skillfully executed claymation sequences, similar to those found in Kazuaki Kiriya's masterpiece 'Casshern', or Gen Sekiguchi's 'Survive Style 5'. The acting is, frankly, excellent. There's little room for criticism. Regardless of whether the cast were performing surreal song and dance routines, engaging in heated family disputes or making jokes at the dinner table, the actors are fantastic. They really help to add substance and humour to the movie. Those playing the Katakuri family are all perfectly cast. The grandfather, the daughter and the desperate father are a pleasure to watch, as they add nuances and depth to their characters, and by extension, the family itself. Special mention also goes to the actor playing the 'foreign' military officer and the daughter's love interest; he's probably one of the most amusing characters I've ever come across. He had me in stitches on several occasions! There's so much off-the-wall humour and cinematic ingenuity that it's hard not to be impressed by this movie. Frankly, when I first had heard mention of this film I was very sceptical, ''A zombie musical? Surely not!'', but once I sat down and began to watch it, I was in awe. From the strangely endearing opening claymation sequence to the epic finale, 'Happiness of the Katakuris' is a film well worth a watch. Whether you're a fan of Takashi Miike, a fan of East Asian cinema, a fan of strange movies or just looking to watch something different, I strongly urge you to watch this movie.

CountZero313 From my rating, you'll know which side of the divide I am on. This is a tired, unfunny film that is too predictable to be zany and aims too hard at off-the-wall to make you care about the characters. It seems to reference a lot of films; the dark comedy isn't as effective as Shallow Grave, the horror less visceral than Swallowtail Butterfly, the dance sequences don't get your foot tapping like Zatoichi, and the songs are putrid, clumsily interspersed rather than effortlessly woven in as in Dancer in the Dark.As for the comedy, from the moment the Dad sits on the swing you know it is going to break and he'll come crashing down. In this vein, all the so-called gags are telegraphed way ahead of time. I smiled twice during the film; when they drop the dead sumo guy out the window, and when the mountain first puffs out smoke to signal it is a volcano. This is lazy, sloppy storytelling - a policeman on a wobbly bicycle?? Are we regurgitating the Keystone Cops now? Downright embarrassing is the casting of and performance by Kiyoshiro Imawano as a conman. That whole pidgin Japanese routine went out with late eighties variety TV here in Japan.Miike has his fans, but after this stale, unpalatable effort I won't be tempted to re-visit any time soon.