A husband and wife couple (Navin Nishchal & Sharmila Tagore) reopens the Happy Home Hotel which has stood deserted for a few years after a double murder happened there.
The people of the nearby village are convinced the hotel is cursed, and whoever mentions the place is confronted with the combination of broken dishes, mad ravings by the local raving madman and panicked staring most travelers in a horror film encounter on a regular basis.
Nonetheless the hotel soon attracts a slew of young attractive woman/hairy man couples (including one guy who likes to sing the title song of Disco Dancer) as guests whose happy frolicking makes up quite an amount of the film's running time. There's also the guy (Suresh Oberoi) who once saved Mrs. Hotel Owner from being gang raped and went to jail for his efforts and a certain Lisa (Prema Narayan) who spends real-time hours to reach the hotel.
Finally, a killer strikes! Will he, she or it be able to stop the viewer from falling asleep?
Wow, 7 Saal Baad is the first Hindi horror movie I have seen I would call downright boring. It's neither as wrong as Paapi Gudia, nor as enthusiastic and sleazy (and enthusiastically sleazy) as the typical Ramsey Brothers work, nor is it as deranged as Harinam Singh's Shaitani Dracula, leaving it in the sad position of an exploitation film that seems to be ashamed of being one.
Its core problem is simple: there's nothing much of any interest happening, besides the frolicking (including the least exciting bits of full-clothed sleaze one could imagine) and the highest amount of musical numbers I have encountered in a film up to now. I lost count somewhere around song number eight. It's not even that I am one of these heartless bores who don't like picturisations on principle, I just don't like them boring, and "boring" is the mode two thirds of the songs here are in. There are two or three numbers which are quite charming in their absurdity, but the rest is just dreary. Director S.U. Saiyed also tries his hands at a few moments of masala-like melodrama that never really lead anywhere except for the land of yawns.
A very patient viewer will probably find a few other nice moments in the movie, mostly in the insane, nearly Harinam Singh-worthy mixture of bad animal imitations on the soundtrack, stock footage and ugly colour-filters that makes up the film's murder sequences, but (again) there's hardly enough of these in there to keep one awake. In fact, if you have seen the film's first few minutes, you have seen its best part and can probably find something better to do with the rest of your life.
So, what we have here are twenty minutes of movie that will be somewhat amusing for people with lowered expectations (like me) and another hundred minutes of distilled boredom, probably enough to cure most cases of insomnia.
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3 comments:
If there is one thing Bollywood should never, ever be, it's boring. Dear me, how did this go so wrong? Did they at least let Javed Jaffrey dance?
I just googled this title, and your post comes up second, right behind imdb. Clearly it's underrepresented online, and, based on your review, that's not too surprising.
PS Sulakshana Pandit, the actress from 70s films whom I always want to be Neetu, is a singer on this!
Finally, a deservedly underrepresented movie.
Two hours have seldom been this long.
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