Katakuri-ke no kôfuku (Happiness of the Katakuris)

Very, very strange, even for Takashi Miike. The best horror musical I've ever seen, but then it's the only horror musical I've ever seen - except possibly Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' video, which Miike parodies in a sequence towards the end of the movie. The movie doesn't cohere especially well, so that scenes such as the Claymation sequence at the beginning of the movie don't connect very well to similar scenes later in the movie. Some of these later scenes seem to suggest an alternate reality, but these aren't developed and the live action scenes are actually more fantastic than the animated sequences. Weirdest of all are the musical sequences which parody 80's music videos as well as traditional Broadway numbers. C+