Back in 1977, experimental filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi was directing television commercials when Toho studios gave him the keys to the studio gates. Toho, like most Japanese film studios at the time, was getting punched in the face by TV and bleeding money from multiple wounds and they figured that releasing a movie directed by a guy who worked on TV couldn’t hurt. It might even help. Obayashi took his free pass and used it to direct HOUSE, based on a story by his eleven-year-old daughter.
It is no exaggeration to say that HOUSE is one of the most mind-melting movies ever made, a Freudian fairy tale that slowly morphs from bizarre teen comedy into dark coming-of-age psychedelia, and it stands alongside EL TOPO and ERASERHEAD as one of the most mind-blowing, surrealist works of world cinema. Subway Cinema lobbied hard to screen it at the New York Asian Film Festival back in 2009, and it has since enjoyed a lucrative theatrical re-release and is now available on a gorgeous Criterion DVD. Rent it, watch it, taste it, love it.
Obayashi went on to have a long career making movies that never quite lived up to the promise of HOUSE, but Marc Walkow (a member of Subway Cinema and the guy who pushed Criterion hard to re-release HOUSE) recently introduced me to a worthy successor: Obayashi’s 1987 film, THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM. Is it as good as HOUSE? Well, no. But it is a bugged-out slice of inappropriate sexuality and full-blown insanity that will have you clawing your eyes out while aliens pee on your face.
Published between 1972 and 1974, The Drifting Classroom is a manga by Kazuo Umezu, the official Very Strange Person of Japanese Manga (which is a world full of very strange people, so that’s saying something). Umezu’s manga are one part Gahan Wilson and one part Hershell Gordon Lewis – primitivist horror shows that have a naive kind of innocence that tempers their total and complete insanity. Classroom is his tale of an elementary school suddenly and inexplicably teleported to a post-apocalyptic hellscape and what happens next, which includes:
- teachers killing students
- students killing teachers
- students killing other students, and teachers killing other teachers
- food riots
- torture
- random disasters like monster rampages, mutant attacks, volcano eruptions and clouds of poison gas
- death by car
But if a picture is worth 1000 words, here’s the 1000 words that best sum up the sick genius of Umezu’s The Drifting Classroom:
Umezu’s manga is 11 volumes long and it’s a singular work by an artist that sets up crazy camp in your brain and confirms your suspicions that all school children are about one teleported school away from freaking out and killing everyone they can get their hands on. It’s like Edward Gorey’s Ghastlycrumb Tinies, except told in the limitless and undying alien alphabet of Cthulhu.
Edward Gorey laid the groundwork
for The Drifting Classroom.
Obayashi’s live action movie of The Drifting Classroom, on the other hand, is like the entire decade of the 80′s throwing up on your brain. While it was shot in 1987, that still doesn’t explain just how weirdly 80′s it is (and effect heightened by the fact that most dubs of the movie are taken from a VHS source). Arthur Johnson, one of the child actors in the movie, gives a great interview in which he says that McDonald’s was a sponsor of the film and the cast and crew ate McDonald’s every day of the shoot, for breakfast, lunch and dinner. This kind of forced mono-diet – created by an insane clown and consisting entirely of meat and grease – goes some way to explaining the insanity onscreen.
In a thrilling display of WTF, Obayashi has moved the action of the film to an international school and decided to film the movie mostly in English, which means that the cast (billed as “Japan & U.S. Young and All Star Cast!”) is a cross between a) Japanese actors who have learned their lines phonetically, b) amateur Western actors who have never been in a movie before, c) Troy Donahue. The movie maintains the basic plot of Umezu’s manga, and its tone of bleak survival horror, but it also adds giant cockroach monsters, a cute monster that provides fresh urine to the stranded children, a healthy dose of 70′s sci fi conventions and two musical numbers.
The tagline on this DRIFTING CLASSROOM poster reads:
“Beyond the time and space we are drifting about somewhere on the earth. Earth!? We’re really on the earth? Where is the town? Where is the people? To us, tomorrow was not another day. Tomorrow will never come until we’ll come home!” Note: they never come home.
- courtesy of Tokyo Scum Brigade
Sho is a young Japanese kid, just returned from America, whom we first meet, naked and wet from the shower, groping his mother’s chest from behind while squirming against her buttocks, thus setting the tone for the complete inappropriate sexuality of the movie. The scene ends with her slapping him (too little, too late, if you ask me) and he runs away to school in a huff. If only he wasn’t so mad at his mother maybe his entire school wouldn’t be teleported to a sandy wasteland where hundreds of his classmates will die horribly. But he is mad at his mother and his school is teleported away to a sandy wasteland where hundreds of his classmates die horribly, albeit mostly offscreen. Once arrived in their sandy hell (via one of the longest earthquakes ever put on film) the schoolkids are attacked by the handyman and eaten by giant cockroaches. One of them, Yu, makes friends with a bouncing pair of latex buttocks on stick legs that jiggles around like a horrible marionette. It keeps him clean by urinating on his face. There are also two pairs of twins who dress alike and speak in unison.
Image from HOUSE, vs….
…DRIFTING CLASSROOM, vs…
…HOUSE, vs…
…DRIFTING CLASSROOM.
In HOUSE, Obayashi stacked images on top of images, using double-exposures and an arsenal of naive optical printing effects to give his movie a trippy glow, but in DRIFTING CLASSROOM his filmmaking looks more like the result of Paul Greengrass and Michael Bay defying time and science in order to have a baby together that will grow up to be the director of THE DRIFTING CLASROOM. The editing comes fast and furious rendered even more incomprehensible by the handheld shaky, jerk-o-cam camera work. Shot mostly on indoor sets, the background matted in and the air full of dust and sand, the movie feels like a loop of the five minutes right before you start throwing up on a bad peyote trip while lost somewhere in the Arizona desert.
Scenes go on for far too long (there’s a fistfight between Sho and another of the kids that becomes a grueling endurance test, and the scene of the school being transported to this hellscape takes an eternity). Adults are almost entirely absent, except for a weird old grandma in a rocking chair wearing wooden shoes, and Troy Donahue who eventually wanders into the desert and out of the film while mumbling a string of unconnected words, “…a pair of old boots, an empty mailbox…”.
Jarringly, as the students die by the dozen the movie takes on a shrill note of forced optimism. Like prisoners on a forced march being commanded to sing at gunpoint, these kids seem to get more and more excited about the future the better it gets at killing them. By the end, a multiculti gang of the little kneebiters are staring up at the sky, smiling, wearing handmade unisex gowns and intoning inspiring lines like, “We will build a new world,” and “I want to have your baby.” Granted, that “I want to have your baby” business is foreshadowed in a long, strange scene in which Sho discovers that one of his classmates has started to menstruate, a fact which she makes him promise not to tell anyone else. A few scenes later, another of the 13 year old girls slips off her clothes and jumps in a gratuitous shower…with sand instead of water. The sexual content is slight, but there’s enough of it here to make you think that Amazon will probably never sell copies of this flick.
Disjointed and disconcerting, Obayashi’s DRIFTING CLASSROOM is a very strange movie that continues the obsession with nuclear holocaust and the breakdown of society first seen in HOUSE. It’s not the triumph of insanity that HOUSE was, but it’s too weird to be dismissed. In the interest of future film critics, I beg the folks at Criterion to reissue it now. Films come and go, and the canon is being rewritten all the time, but I feel confident in saying that any movie deserves immortality that contains lines like this:
Troy Donahue: A penny for your thoughts? (pause, smiling) That means that you tell me your thoughts, and I’ll give you a penny.
(A terrific interview with Arthur Johnson, one of the actors in the film, who describes being cast in the movie as follows: “I was walking home from school…A car pulled up along side of me with a Japanese casting crew inside of it. Asked me if I wanted to be in a movie.” This is how children disappear. Parents, warn your offspring! They might be next!)
