Original title: Sûîto Homu

Long before he became internationally known for a series of chilly and intellectual horror films (Kyua/Cure (1997), Karisuma/Charisma (1999), Kōrei/Séance (2000), Kairo/Pulse (2001), Dopperugengā/Doppelganger (2003), Kurīpī: Itsuwari no Rinjin/Creepy (2016)), Kiyoshi Kurosawa cut his teeth in the genre with this spirited haunted house comedy that takes equal parts The Haunting (1963), Poltergeist (1982) and The Evil Dead (1981) and mixes them up into something pleasingly odd.

The script, also written by Kurosawa, treads no new ground. It begins with a television crew arriving at an abandoned mansion (today the film would probably be found footage) once owned by the famous artist Ichirō Mamiya. As director Kazuo Hoshino (Shingo Yamashiro), his teenage daughter Emi Hoshino (Nokko), director of photography Ryō Taguchi (Ichiro Furutachi), producer Akiko Hayakawa (Nobuko Miyamoto) and reporter Asuka (Fukumi Kuroda) explore the house, they find the walls covered with disturbing frescoes painted on the walls. They’re soon being attacked by supernatural forces that drag Emi off into a void behind a door and becomes possessed by the ghost of Lady Mamiya (Machiko Watanabe), Ichirō’s wife, who killed herself after her young son died in an incinerator accident. Kazuo, Emi and Akiko are the last members of the crew left alive and decide to retrieve the boy’s body and return it to Lady Mamiya to see if that will placate her anger.

Sweet Home is less impenetrable and enigmatic than Kurosawa’s later genre work, with a sense of humour that is often missing, or at the very least, buried deep in his later work. How much of this was a conscious decision by the still new to the game Kurosawa or the result of the post-production tinkering that led the director to disown the film is anyone’s guess at this stage. Producer Juzo Itami – who also turns up as the tramp who knows more than at first seems about the house – clashed with Kurosawa over the cut he presented him and reshot some of the scenes, re-edited the existing material and released it on video in Japan without Kurosawa’s approval. The film slipped into semi-obscurity while Kurosawa’s original cut, thought to be languishing in the vaults of distributors Toho, unseen since its initial Japanese theatrical run.

All we have to work with is the compromised Itami cut and while it lacks the intellectual rigour and innovation of Kurosawa’s more famous genre films, Sweet Home is nevertheless a fun, if tonally inconsistent, ride. It starts out as a comedy before changing gears in the late stages, putting the gory special effects – by no less a luminary than Dick Smith – front and centre. The kinetic, Sam Raimi-inspired camerawork is invigorating and the physical effects are nicely rubbery and messy – bodies melt and burn, others are cut in two by the predatory shadows that stalk the protagonists throughout (“the shadows are alive!”) and at the climax the haunting presence manifests as a multi-limbed, multi-headed monstrosity.

Kurosawa – or Itami – aren’t afraid to wear their influences on their sleeves, particularly that of Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist, another haunted house film where it’s still not clear whether it was predominantly the work of its director or its producer. There’s a scene where Emi (admittedly a young adult rather than a young child) is abducted by the evil in the house and Yamamura – the film’s equivalent of Poltergeist’s Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein) – has to venture into the beyond to get her back.

It’s never a particularly scary film – though the first physical appearance of the ghost comes close – but it is a huge amount of fun, even in this version whose parentage isn’t entirely clear. The effects-laden finale is surprisingly touching (rather undone by a jokey coda) and the whole venture is unashamedly commercial, a deliberate play for box office success. And there’s nothing particularly wrong with that, especially when the film turns out to be as affably entertaining as Sweet Home. It may not appeal much to those who favour the gloomier, slower-paced and more thoughtful films of Kurosawa’s later filmography but for those looking for a brainless, gory and spectacular caper with a dash of comedy, it should fit the bill nicely.

When it was first released, Sweet Home was accompanied by a video game of the same name, featuring the same characters, released by Capcom for the Famicom/Nintendo gaming system. In 1993, Capcom and the game’s designer Tokuro Fujiwara were working on a remake but during development it was decided that the ghosts from the original game and film should be replaced by zombies and the result was re-titled Biohazard – better known in the west as Resident Evil, the first in the phenomenally successful series of survival horror games and the subsequent film adaptations.

Sweet Home seems not have been released outside Japan and exists today only in rips taken from long out of print VHS and laserdisc releases with fan-created English subtitles. Were the rights available it would do a bold blu-ray distributor no harm at all to free the Kurosawa cut for a double-header with the Itami version, restoring a small piece of the esoteric jigsaw of Kurosawa’s career to its rightful place.