After 20 years of IMDb-reviewing and more than 5.000 essays submitted, of which several hundreds of them are for obscure and practically unknown titles, I daresay I'm reviewing today what is probably the rarest film of my entire "career". And I owe it all to a modest but magnificent cult/horror festival, named Off-Screen, organized in my beloved country and their collaboration with a Swedish cinema expert/documentary maker named Rickard Gramfors.
The background info and trivia-elements that I'll be sharing in this review were told to me - and the rest of a small audience - during the introduction of "The House of Beasts" by guest of honor Rickard Gramfors at the festival. Everything I know of this utterly obscure film, I know thanks to Mr. Gramfors, so I want to thank him and dedicate this user-comment to him.
Mr. Gramfors said, for instance, the Off-Screen festival programming was the first screening of the film outside of Japan...ever! "House of the Beasts" hasn't been shown anywhere else for fifty years. Not even in Sweden, where it was filmed by a Japanese crew. That's the reason why you, me, or anyone has ever heard of it. It's insane. He also explained the "reason of existence" of this film and a handful of other titles, and that story is even more insane! Apparently, soft-erotic movies from Sweden were so incredibly popular in Japan during the early 1970s that the demand was bigger than the offer. So much bigger even, that Japanese studios sent crews and financial means to Sweden to make the films there and bring them back to Japan.
What really boggles my mind is the contrast between perversion and prudishness. This film features all imaginable taboos and offensive themes (adultery, rape, incest, provoked rape, homosexuality, ...) but whenever there's the slightest bit of sexual content on display, the screen gets blurred.
The plot itself can best be described as a home-invasion thriller, probably inspired by "Last House on the Left" or Sweden's own "The Virgin Spring", but without the revenge elements. After robbing a gun store in Stockholm, three fugitive criminals strand in the middle of nowhere and seek shelter in the only house in a rural area. Unknowingly, they end up in Sweden's most dysfunctional and sexually deviant household. The father sleeps with the maid, the mother sleeps with her stepson, the stepson with the maid again, etc. One of the criminals joyously has sex - both with permission and without - with all the women in the house, another one falls madly in love with the daughter, and the leader of the pack only craves homosexual attention. It's a big mess, but a lot of fun. The dialogues are insane, the filming locations and music are excellent, and in the final act of the film there's quite a lot of violence.
"House of the Beasts" primarily revolves around softcore sex, and thus there is plenty of nudity provided by the unearthly beautiful (and prototypically Swedish) actresses Britten Larsson, Inger Sundh and Tina Möller. The father, Per-Axel Arosenius from "Thriller - En Grym Film", bears a lot of physical resemblance to director Werner Herzog, while the leading thug - Lennart Norbäck - is a dead ringer for the famous Norwegian actor Kristoffer Joner. "House of the Beasts" obviously isn't a great film, but it's never boring and contains a handful of memorable highlights. And, due to its obscurity, it's the biggest cult-discovery in years for me.
