Best known for his dark splatterfests (AUDITION, ICHI THE KILLER), director Takeshi Miike takes a detour from his usual style with HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS. After losing his job at a department store, patriarch Masao (Kenji Sawada) has opened a country inn at which the whole family can work. The trouble is, whenever someone checks in, they seem to die before checking out! The inn spells a different adventure for each member of the family, and Miike somehow finds the ability to work in some surreal clay animation along with several elaborate karaoke-style musical numbers. KATAKURIS is a one-of-a-kind film which will certainly deliver the goods to adventurous cinephiles!

DVD Features:

Region 1
NTSC
Keep Case
Anamorphic Widescreen - 1.78
Full Frame - 1.33
Audio:
Dolby Digital - Japanese
Additional Release Material:
Behind the Scenes: Animating The Katakuris
Featuette - Making Of Special
Trailers: Original Theatrical Trailer
Audio Commentary: Takashi Miike, Director
Interviews:
1. Takashi Miike, Director
2. The Katakuris

Distributor Notes: The Katakuris are a four-generation family of failures (grandfather, father and mother, children and granddaughter, who narrates the film) who use the father's redundancy pay to buy a guest house in the country. Somehow, each of their guests ends up dead-by suicide, accident or murder-and once they have made the decision to save their business by burying the bodies and concealing the deaths, they find themselves sucked into a nightmare of lies and fear. None of this is helped by the arrival of the daughter's con-man boyfriend, an escaped murderer with police in hot pursuit, and an erupting volcano. Filled with surreal musical numbers, disturbed animated characters, killer zombies and an array of gruesome deaths, this delirious black comedy has to be seen to be believed!

Source: Ryko Distribution

Kenji Sawada: Japanese Actor, HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS (2001)
Naomi Nishida: GODZILLA 2000
Keiko Matsuzaka: Japanese Actor, HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS (2001)
Shinji Takeda: Japanese actor, TABOO (1999)
Naoto Takenaka: Japenese Actor

Takashi Miike: Director, DEAD OR ALIVE (2001)

Kikumi Yamagishi: Japanese Screenwriter, HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS (2001)

"...It feels of a piece with its director's output....Miike has added a great deal of more bizarre material..."