Pathaan (2023)

In a needlessly flashback-heavy plot, Indian super spy Pathaan (Shar Rukh Khan) has to thwart the fiendish and just as needlessly byzantine plans of super mercenary and ex Indian super spy Jim (John Abraham, presence-wise completely outplayed by everyone else on screen) to loosen a genetically modified small pox virus on, ahem, “Mother India”. Because this is a YRF Spy Universe film, Pathaan also falls for Pakistani super spy Rubai (Deepika Padukone), who may or may not be on his side.

This is much easier to stomach than Siddarth Anand’s earlier entry into the YRF spy universe franchise, the so jingoistic it took all of the joy out of the silly action War. It’s still plenty jingoistic, mind you, but it’s mild for the standards of what comes out of India these days, and keeps to the general tenets of the international action movies. It even manages to do something nearly unheard of these days in Bollywood – its hero is an adopted Muslim, and that’s a good thing, which only Shah Rukh Khan can get away with now. And come to think of it, Rubai is probably Muslim as well, though clearly not a very conservative one, given her fashion style, which leaves us with a contemporary Bollywood movie whose heroes are both Muslims.

Deepika, as it turns out, like quite a lot of her contemporary female peers in Bollywood is also a pretty convincing action heroine and appears to have genuine fun strutting more than just bikinis and opening her tear ducts. That SRK is still a well of off-handed charisma, who makes even machismo look not all that unpleasant should be taken as a given.

For most of the time, Pathaan gives up on all pretences at even a sort-of realism, or even just mild believability, and turns into a full-on live action cartoon, with impossibly beautiful people strutting through insane (that’s a compliment) action set pieces with terrible (but who cares) CGI, making goofy (but likeable) jokes, and demonstrating a cheerful hatred for that boring reality business. Imagine a Tom Cruise Mission Impossible with a sense of humour, and a lead whose ego doesn’t get in the way of letting the other actors on screen shine, too. Which also allows for an incredibly silly and fun Salman Khan cameo as his own YRF hero Tiger, making dad jokes while helping SRK out in an impossible/awesome fight on top of a train.

Until the film suddenly remembers that all of its main characters have torture and dead parents in their past and goes all gritty for five minutes. Fortunately, it will proceed to get distracted by yet another explosion in few minutes, so all is well in the YRF Spy Universe.

Three Films Make A Post: If you can't smoke it, drink it, spend it or love it… forget it.

Payday (1973): Sleazy country star Maury Dann (Rip Torn) is on the road, lying, bullying and sliming his way across the USA while growing increasingly deranged.

I’m a big fan of 70s grimdark, but this nearly plotless portrait of a horrible man doing horrible things, horribly, by Daryl Duke actually beats me. It’s not that I can’t appreciate its skewering of the 70s country star, Duke’s version of hyperrealist style, or the great, though somewhat one-note performances, it’s just that I miss some moments of genuine humanity to measure Maury’s horridness against. Or, come to think of it, Maury showing one or two not redeeming but not horrible character traits to put some shading into the black and black of the movie at hand. Hell, the guy can’t even sing.

Tiger Zinda Hai (2017): This Bollywood piece of action-heavy super spy cinema sequel certainly charms with its series of overblown, wonderfully unrealistic action sequences, its treatment of BIG EMOTIONS that makes its predecessor look downright restrained, and its larger than life (in the best way) star performances by Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif.

Director Ali Abbas Zafar (who also co-wrote) also puts a lot of effort into fulfilling the increasingly mandatory quota of Indian jingoism while at the same time doing subtle and not so subtle things that complicate and humanize this jingoism, in ways I’m not at all sure I’m interpreting in the way they are meant to be understood. It’s a fun big damn action blockbuster in any case.

Girl in the Case (1944): A lawyer (Edmund Lowe) who is also an expert on safecracking and lockpicking (it’s a hobby) and his wife (Janis Carter) are sucked into an increasingly complicated case, concerning Nazi spies, a locked trunk, and a particularly stupid police force.

Tonally, William Berke’s B-movie marries mystery and screwball comedy, probably in an attempt to reach the same tone as the later of the Thin Man films. Lowe and Carter are no Powell and Loy – and really should acquire a dog – and Berke no W.S. Van Dyke, but there’s a breezy quality to the film, and a likeability to its basic silliness that makes it pretty difficult to dislike it. If one is at all interested in this era’s mystery comedies, obviously. I’m always happy about movies concerning mismatched couples solving crimes while cracking jokes.

Bhoot Bungla (1965)

Five decades before the main plot of the movie, the unsolved murder of a rich man occurred in a bungalow somewhere in India. The wife and son of the victim disappeared, never to be seen again. Despite the place now supposedly being haunted, today (well, in the mid-60s) it is the home of the descendants of the murder victim. The two businessmen – I-never-got-his-name-and-sorry-Internet-sources-he’s-not-called-Ramlal (Moni Chatterjee) and Shyamlal (Nasit Hussain) keep their old-timey-movies style crazy brother Ramlal, called Ramu, (Nana Palsikar) at home, taking care of him as well as can be expected.

The same day on which Unnamed Brother’s daughter Rekha (Tanuja) returns from her studies in London, her father dies in a car crash. While the police are at least suspicious about the circumstances, Ramu says his brother was murdered, and he knows by whom. Alas, he ain’t telling, and even if he’d want to, he’s found hung in his room the next morning after his non-revelation. Shyamlal takes Rekha, who is now the designated heiress of everything, away from the clearly cursed and most probably haunted bungalow to the city.

There, the not exactly tough girl is beleaguered by threatening phone calls, curious voices and what looks a lot like murder attempts. Fortunately, she has met-cute the leader of the local “youth club”, one Mohan (Mehmood), a guy who is really going out of his way to protect the girl he has fallen in love with, even when it means facing murderers, haunted bungalows, or “comically” dressing up like a woman.

Bhoot Bungla – which translates to “haunted house/bungalow” – is the directorial debut of Bollywood comedian Mehmood, and it is one hell of a time. Sure, the film does demonstrate the general disinterest of quite a bit of Hindi cinema of the time towards any concepts of tightness or dramatic unity, but that’s really a feature and not a bug in this sort of affair, so complaining about it is like stating your favourite cookies are really bad at being a salad. Admittedly, not all of the humour has aged well (the whole “man dresses like woman equals comedy gold” strand is really not great at all), but, this being Bollywood, there’s so much of it, for every joke that doesn’t hit, you get a dozen that do.

As a horror comedy, this stands in the same tradition as the classical Hollywood ghost comedy, where no ghost is real, people tend to react to any given haunting with pratfalls, and so on, and so forth, until only a guy in a gorilla costume is missing. It’s just that very few Hollywood movies of the same type ever dared to show quite as wild an abandon when it comes to scenes of people being freaked out by fake hauntings, and there’s not a film – at least to my knowledge – that goes to the insane excesses Mehmood gets up to here. There’s a long sequence late in the movie where Mohan and a buddy try to take on the haunted bungalow that alone would be worth the price of admission by sheer inventiveness and visual imagination, climaxing (and I use the word on purpose) in the most incredible musical number ever to feature men in skeleton suits.

Speaking of visual imagination, one of the reasons why Bhoot Bungla is as much fun as it is is Mehmood’s rather astounding ability to put his wacky ideas into visuals. There’s clever and sharp editing that often tends to be technical impressive as well as funny, and fun and funny visual transitions by the dozen. At least half a dozen of the more suspenseful scenes suddenly start to dwell in the same realm of light, shadow, and crisp black and white photography as proto-giallos and the best of the German krimis, the film taking on a visual language one, well I, would not typically connect with mid-60s Bollywood – at least until the next joke needs and gets quite something different.

Past Misdeeds: Jaal (1986)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

With his mother developing a consumption-like illness that makes it impossible for her to keep continuing the cooking work that paid for the family's food and education, and since his father has been dead for quite a few years, it now falls to kind-hearted part-time badass Shankar (Mithun Chakraborty) to earn the money that pays the rent.

His first attempts are - of course without his fault - without much success. His luck changes when a mysterious woman calling herself Sundari (Rekha) makes Shankar an offer he can't refuse. She's going to pay him quite a lot of money if he'll do whatever she asks of him for two years. Once Shankar has reluctantly agreed, Sundari tells him what his first mission for her is going to be: he is to go to a small village and somehow slime himself into the trust of the local evil Thakur, a man named Bhanu Pratap Singh (Amrit Pal).

Obviously (well, for everyone except for Shankar), Sundari has chosen Shankar for a reason. Soon enough our hero will learn the truth about the death of his father (Vinod Mehra) and a sticky and complicated past, find his true love (Mandakini), lead a minor revolution, and kick people in various parts of their anatomy with all the power his Mithun fu provides him with. And if you think I just left out about a dozen minor plot lines, detours, and flash backs, you're absolutely right.

It's been quite some time since I've last watched a Bollywood movie, and as always when I let this happen, I'm asking myself afterwards: why the heck did I take so much time to look towards India again? Thanks to the watchalong efforts of my delightful friend Beth, I'm back in the groove again, and we couldn't have chosen a better film than the delectable Jaal (which means "Trap", and is not to be confused with other Hindi movies name Jaal). Apart from being pretty damn fun to watch, Jaal also again made clear some things one really should keep in mind when watching masala of the 70s and 80s, lest one’s false expectations turn an incredible experience into something dreary and annoying.

Jaal's mixture of melodrama, a complicated backstory to be revealed sooner or later, overheated action, sudden bursts of psychedelia, musical numbers (written by Anu Malik) in at times frightening and always imaginative choreography, unfunny humour (responsible here: Jagdeep, one of the true horrors of the ages) and plain weirdness for weirdness' sake looks typical of masala movies even to a Bollywood dabbler like me; the only things missing to the formula are a death scene for Mithun's Ma and long-lost siblings at odds with each other. Of course, and that's the main thing I need to remind myself of whenever I dabble in Bollywood movies of this style, one shouldn't go into most of these films in search of originality or a sensible, linearly presented plot but to enjoy them scene for scene in a game of "whatever will they come up with next". These films were after all meant to include something for every potential member of their Indian audiences, which is not something that makes coherence as Hollywood praises it (and often doesn't achieve for completely different reasons) an easy or even useful element of what the films were supposed to be and do. The masala approach does lend itself to produce joy, though.

In Jaal's case, what the filmmakers came up with to produce that joy are delights like Mithun hitting someone with his crotch (to my disappointment only once, or I could have used the phrase "crotch fu" to describe his fighting style), Rekha's vengeance plans including awesome details like provoking one of the bad guys into a heart attack via an aerobic themed (well, nominally breakdance themed) musical number that for some reason also features mimes. Which, now that I think about it years later, is more than enough to give anyone a heart attack. There are also needle-dropped Madonna songs, the misadventures of the easiest marks for a confidence trick ever, Rekha doing her patented (and inspired/awesome) glowering, moral confusion, women getting very very wet during a musical number, magical jumping boots that appear for one scene only to forever disappear from the film afterwards, girls with guns, some deeply problematic ideas about prostitution that collide with some rather more humane and progressive ideas about prostitution and never get directly resolved into what I'd call a position, and a baseball match that ends with Moon Moon Sen being board-cified in a sexually suggestive position I'd really rather would have expected - and raised an eyebrow at - in a Japanese film.

As is so often the case with masala movies, it's difficult to talk about Jaal as the sum of its parts, because, as explained above, a lot of masala films (there are of course humungous amounts of exceptions to this rule) don't seem all that interested in being the sort of thematically coherent whole that is best looked at as the sum of its parts. Consequently, it makes little sense to judge the merits of a film like Jaal that way, or to get cranky at it for not following the rules of filmmaking made to construct and understand something with very different goals. Why, it would be like looking at a Hollywood blockbuster the same way as you would look at an arthouse movie. So instead, I like to look at these films and praise (or not) them for the amount of joy their succession of single scenes provided me with while watching.

Seen from this angle, Jaal looks pretty darn great to me, seeing as it contains not a single boring minute, and is never afraid to just throw in anything director Umesh Mehra found cool on that particular morning.

Past Misdeeds: Qurbani (1980)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.


Rajesh (Feroz Khan) leads the charmed life of a manly man Robin-Hood-like thief, a life that is more than a little sweetened by the existence of his beautiful nightclub singer girlfriend Sheela (Zeenat Aman, alas not allowed to do more than that description promises). Between random motorcycle riding and disapproving of Sheela's job (but hey, she disapproves of his job too, so they're on the same level here), there's not much that troubles him.

Until one of his jobs goes wrong and he meets his own private nemesis in the form of Inspector Amjad Khan (Amjad Khan, playing himself, but as a rather sleazy cop!?) and goes to jail for a bit.

While Rajesh is behind bars, Sheela meets single dad Amar (Vinnod Khanna), and befriends and nearly falls in love with this second hairy-chested piece of manliness, who comes with the bonus of being a widower with a highly decorative daughter. Sheela's taste in men is a little dubious, since Amar did also stand on the wrong side of the law once, working as a smuggler for Rakka (Amrish Puri), until he disagreed with his boss's personnel politic of shooting people who fail at their jobs and quit.

When Rajesh gets out of jail, he and Amar meet and fall madly in love with each other (well, the film calls it friendship, but isn't really fooling anyone).

This could be the beginning of a wonderfully progressive three person relationship with bonus child, but alas, Rajesh's jail acquaintance Vikram Singh (Shakti Kapoor) and his sister Jwala Singh (Aruna Irani and her mad contact lenses of doom) have other plans.

They really, really hate Rakka (or his afro), you see, so much so that Jwala has an illuminated portrait of the man on her living room wall next to her horse pictures.

What better method to take revenge on him could there be than to kill him and blame the deed on Rajesh whom they'll only need to rope into stealing all of Rakka's money? Rajesh isn't too enthusiastic about the whole thing - even without knowing about the scape goat part - because he has promised Sheela to give up on his wicked ways. But what is Amar's little daughter Tina (Natasha Chopra) good for if not for being kidnapped to press Rajesh into service?

Qurbani was edited, produced and directed by Bollywood's hairiest chest Feroz Khan himself and say what you will about his overly manly acting, he does handle his three other jobs very nicely indeed.

His direction shows a much finer eye for frame composition than was typical for some of Hindi cinema at the time, as well as a love for weird camera angles, and a more than a little dubious sense of fashion without ever overdoing it and getting so crazy as to be eyesight-destroying.

The obligatory musical numbers by Kalyanji Anandji are mostly Bollywood standard, not as mad as they sometimes get, but extremely useful to strengthen the emotional underpinnings of the film and delight its viewers with the lesser of Zeenat Aman's talents.

It has to be said that super macho Feroz Khan was an equal opportunity cheesecake director, and so friends of hairy, sweaty manliness will have their own moments of joy here.

Of course the film features the typically enthusiastic and slightly insane fight choreography of its time and place, with lots of jumping and kicking, a serious amount of back flipping and a friendly disinterest in physics or the way human anatomy functions. All of that is of course a good thing if you're like me and like your action scenes entertaining instead of realistic.

The whole film has a very fine flow to it that even the usual annoying scenes of comic relief (Jagdeep in the house, why does nobody burn it down?) can't disturb too much.

The plot consists of a merry randomness of incidents which are less bound by logic than by Qurbani's thematic core of male friendship and sacrifice (as the title promises). Somehow, Khan manages to tie up his plot threads satisfyingly enough to come to a tight and exciting finale and a surprisingly poignant ending that shows a spiritual connection to the brand of epics of manly friendship people like Cheng Cheh or John Woo traded in in Hong Kong.
Now, all this might sound like a million other action melodramas, and Qurbani is most certainly never original in the things it does, but the trick lies, as it often does, in the film's flawless execution of its tropes, and in the sure hand Khan shows in deciding when to use them.


There is something deeply satisfying about a film like Qurbani that knows which buttons a genre film has to push and then pushes them expertly and incessantly with a sort of relish that stops just shy of decadence.

In short: Bhoot – Part One: The Haunted Ship (2020)

Prithvi (Vicky Kaushal), a shipping officer with the mandatory tragically dead family, is tasked with the surprisingly complicated mission to get an empty dilapidated ship away from the Mumbai beach it has mysteriously stranded on. Things become rather complicated, for the ship is as haunted as a swimming haunted house, and its hauntings seem to fit disturbingly well to Prithvi’s tragically-dead-family-PTSD.

I have to admire the optimistic streak of the title of Bhanu Pratap Singh’s Hindi horror movie, yet at the same time can’t help asking myself if calling one’s horror movie “Ghost – Part One” is really much better than just calling it “Generic Contemporary Mainstream Horror Movie - Part One”. This is yet another one of those Hindi films made in the last couple of years that is clearly mainly influenced by US mainstream horror fare like the The Conjuring movies, eschewing most of the locally specific of much Indian horror for the generically “international”, losing a lot of charm and winning rather a lot of clichés in the process. So expect jump scares, false scares mostly based on pompous music, and ghosts that look exactly like all other ghosts in contemporary mainstream horror movies do. To be fair, Singh’s actually pretty good at this part of the horror game, timing much of this funhouse nonsense well enough the resulting movie is enjoyable throughout. Why, there’s even a bit of a thematic connection between the film’s guilt-ridden lead and the haunting he is investigating.


I certainly had more fun with this than with the Conjuring films, if only thanks to the film’s excision of all crazy fringe Christianity and because lead Vicky Kaushal is not quite as aggressively bland as Patrick Wilson is. Plus, there are surprisingly few decent movies about haunted ships.

Three Films Make A Post: Welcome to the Witching Hour

Aval aka Gruham aka The House Next Door (2017): Apparently shot in three of the big Indian languages in parallel, Milind Rau’s tale of ghosts, possession and eventually vengeful reincarnation is a nice example of how world pop cinema can be able to take genre elements from a popular Hollywood genre (in this case The Conjuring style horror) and at first seem to reproduce that pretty closely, only to eventually add highly specific elements from its own cultural frame that change things up considerably. This sort of thing is always at least great fun to me; in Aval’s specific case, that fun is further increased by the director’s genuine ability at creating a proper mood of the contemporary Indian gothic – with a bit of help of some genuinely beautiful locations and often wonderful set design that also finds the point where western horror and Indian horror meet (with a bit of dubious Chinese horror thrown in the mix, too). Plus, possession is always better when no Christian demons are involved.

The Craft (1996): For some, Andrew Fleming’s tale of four high school teen witches getting up to increasingly dark shenanigans, or of four girls trying to survive growing up weird (as portrayed by ridiculously attractive young actresses, of course), is at least a minor classic and an important step in the development of mainstream feminist horror. For others, it’s a camp fest that’s basically made to be incorporated into some crappy talking head TV show about the 90os. As the first, I find the film to be a sometimes frustrating experience, often getting to a point where it looks like it is going to face some shitty thing young women have to go through but then steps back from it at least a half-step again. In the second thing, I simply have no interest, and frankly think a film as genuinely trying to do something interesting while still keeping its contemporary teenage audience entertained deserves better than to be treated as camp.

As a horror movie, I find The Craft a bit harmless but also pleasantly imaginative and graced with the kind of all-out performance by Fairuza Balk as what amounts to its villainess that seems fearless in its total abandon.

Bring Back the Dead (2015): And finally for today, there’s this Singaporean horror movie about a grieving (yet also abusive when her child was still alive, which the rest of the characters comment with sad-eyed tuts) mother (Jesseca Liu) using her former nanny’s (Liu Ling Ling) contacts to a Buddhist priest of dubious morals to conjure the spirit of her dead child into her house. On a theoretical level, that plot is horror gold made for mining an abyss of grief and denial, but even though director Thean-jeen Lee is perfectly decent at the basics of Asian ghost movies, the film’s too glossy and too disinterested in exploring the depths it suggests very deeply.

It’s a fun little spook show, mind you, just one that wastes an excellent set-up on being only that.

Stree (2018)

Warning: I am going to spoil a bit of the film’s backstory!

The town of Chanderi in Bhopal is cursed. Once a year, during a local(?) festival, a female spirit the town’s inhabitants only refer to as “Stree” – The Woman – roams the streets at night attacking and abducting young men who are out and about on their own, leaving behind nothing but their clothes. At least there’s an easy way to keep one’s home safe from ghostly visits. One simply has to write “O Woman, come tomorrow” on the wall of one’s house, and the apparently very polite ghost isn’t going to bother one. So it should be easy enough keeping the town’s young men safe for four nights a year, but as it goes, the ghost does find rather a lot of victims.

It certainly doesn’t help that there are notorious sceptics like young tailor savant Vicky (Rajkummar Rao) around. Vicky doesn’t believe in the ghost at all. Though, to be fair to the guy, he is rather more involved with romancing a mysterious, apparently nameless woman (Shraddha Kapoor), who does ask increasingly curious things of him. So curious, in fact, that his two bosom buddies Bittu (Aparshakti Khurana) and Jaana (Abhishek Banerjee) begin to suspect their friend’s beloved might be The Woman herself.

Horror comedies are a problematic proposition on the best of days, and I often have problems with the humour in Hindi movies (that’s not necessarily the humour’s fault, mind you, but rather mine), so I was very pleasantly surprised by Amar Kaushik’s Stree. As a horror comedy, Stree avoids all of the main mistakes bad entries into the genre tend to make, so the film does not use its supernatural menace for any slapstick business, having a bit of fun with the folklore surrounding her but always keeping her as an actual menace when she appears. Thanks to that, there are actual stakes for the protagonists.

I also found myself rather liking the particular version of the romantic fool the film presents, the film never overdoing it with the romantic part of the character nor the foolishness. Vicky’s a sweet idiot, and it’s certainly no surprise that he’d fall for our mysterious nameless woman. Pleasantly enough, once we get to know her a little, the good lady does turn out not to be just mysterious (the kind of mystery a sequel will probably solve) but also mildly bad-ass, and not the least bit of a damsel.

And, you know, a lot of the jokes here may not be terribly deep, but they are funny, usually character and situation based (subtitles don’t really do wordplay), and are well-timed. Which parallels the spooky bits of the film, none of whom will actually frighten anyone (I very much hope) but that do feel pleasantly spooky. The film’s worst part are the small handful of musical numbers, curiously enough for a Bollywood movie, which lack in charm and visual imagination despite Kaushik demonstrating he’s quite capable of showing both quite a bit otherwise.

All this alone would make for a pleasant horror comedy, but there’s also a mildly subversive subtext involved that adds some spice to the proceedings. The ghost, you see, belongs to a prostitute (about as low on the Indian class ladder as you can get) who is rightfully angry for an historical evil committed against her and her one true love, so our heroes do in the end not destroy her, but take away her power to do evil, while acknowledging the evil committed towards her. They make amends for the sins of the past, and turn the thing that haunted their town into its supernatural protector in the end. And wouldn’t you know it, the prophesied chosen one to bring this sort of thing about must – among other things – be the son of a prostitute himself, which is not at all the sort of thing you’d expect in a Hindi mainstream movie like this (and would be hard pressed to find in any mainstream western movies, when it comes to that). But then, Stree also tends to be rather playful when it comes to gender roles, not doing any deep deconstructions but clearly approaching the whole “man” and “woman” thing and their roles in a genre movie with a degree of freedom, so it has form with this sort of thing.


All of which adds a further very likeable dimension to a film I found pretty likeable already, turning Stree into a more than pleasant horror comedy.

Past Misdeeds: Wardat (1981)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


A mysterious evil scientific genius (in whose hunchbacked, jodhpur-wearing glory the audience will be allowed to bask only much later in the movie) is sending out swarms of locusts to destroy the Indian rice harvest. Then, he uses his favourite henchman Shakti Kapoor (Shakti Kapoor; no, I have no idea why the actor is alright with having the bad guy named after himself, but that's not the first time I have seen this in a Bollywood film) to drown the food market in cheap, low quality rice that has been enriched with a drug that - on first impression - seems to make people just sort of horny (in a Bollywood way, obviously).

When Shakti's not taking care of the rice business, he is killing the people the suspicious Indian government has commissioned to investigate the mysterious case of the atypical acting locusts. And, just because he's a proactive kind of guy, Shakti is also setting up various murder attempts on that greatest of all Indian secret agents - Gopi (Mithun Chakraborty), also known as "Gun-Master G9". As it turns out, Gopi's so secret, his code name is even written on the side of his car. But while you can say less than pleasant things about Gopi's knack for secrecy, you can't fault the man's talent for survival, or his talent for kicking people in the face, and so Shakti's assassination attempts all come to nought.

Now, your typical James Bond-like agent would begin to develop an interest when people are trying to kill him, but Gopi prefers taking part in random musical numbers, accidentally picking up the kinda-sorta tomboyish Kajal (Kajal Kiran) who soon is crazily in love with him, and just lazing about to doing any actual work, until he can't escape the urgent calls of his boss, the man they call Chief (Iftekhar), anymore.

Not surprisingly, Chief wants Gopi to find out what all this business with the rice, the locusts and the dying agents is about. Soon, Gopi, his assistant Kabadi (Jagdeep - hear me sigh) and the quite competent in a fight Kajal have their hands full lazing about some more, ahem, I mean finding out what Shakti's plan is and who he is working for.
Shakti himself has all the while made contact with Anuradha (Kalpana Iyer), the sister of one of the Chief's dead agents, and has convinced her that Gopi is responsible for her brother's death. Knowing the agent's reputation as a lady killer, the evil Kapoor is planning on using the innocent woman as bait for his enemy.

In my mind, I have Mithun Chakraborty pegged as the go-to guy for the batshit insane sort of Bollywood films, so I found myself a little disappointed when Wardat's first ninety minutes turned out to be rather normal. Sure, there's the fact that the evil plan the film is about is as sane as the proverbial guy who takes himself for Napoleon, or the abundance of bizarre details surrounding Gopi (for example his idea of daily combat training, consisting as it does of fighting a big guy who breaks down his door and destroys his furniture in the mornings; I suppose the Indian government pays rather well), but in the world of the James Bond inspired super spy film, this sort of thing is rather mundane.

Fortunately, I'm trying very hard not to judge movies on what I expect of them, but on what they are delivering, so the disappointment soon turned into the sort of basic satisfaction that comes from watching terribly cheap yet vaguely competently made films like this that are throwing their all (small as it may be) into the will to entertain.

And if one lets oneself be entertained, one can have quite some fun with Mithun's adventures here. His Mithun Fu is strong and ridiculous/awesome as ever; Kajal wavers between being pretty annoying and pretty charming, and while she's not shown to be equal to Mithun's bizarre achievements, she's at least treated as competent and resourceful; Jagdeep's "comedic" bits are mercifully short (and his character is even allowed to shoot a few people, which explains why anyone would put up with him); the musical numbers are mostly okay, certainly not the best nor the most bizarre even I have heard from Bappi Lahiri, although I quite liked the early one with the pixel and red cross theme.

All that combined would make Wardat a solid yet not especially remarkable movie, but the film's director Ravikant Nagaich decides to put out all the stops for the final three quarters of an hour of his film. Suddenly everything that was alright before turns into the sort of brilliant, ridiculous fun I had hoped for from the beginning.

Mithun does SCIENCE! in front of multi-coloured, blinking lights. Suddenly, we are in Africa, at once in a jungle, a desert and on a mountain. Mithun and Kajal are drugged for a cheaply psychedelic romp of tumble-dancing. Then, we enter the lair of our true main bad guy which is probably situated in a ruin in Egypt - at least that's what the statues in it look like, though his dancing troupe (yes, of course our heroes will pretend to be part of it directly before the big finale) is dressed in a mix of Peruvian, Aztec and Hollywood Africana and his guards are wearing what looks like white kendo masks - and are suddenly confronted with some of the most eye-popping uses of red lighting that have ever touched human eyes, a baby farm, torture by shaking, a duel to the death with added sharpshooting archers, mind-control, Mithun wrestling a tiger and various explosions large and small. In other words, all the extreme, silly excitement on could wish for turns up, shouts gleefully at your face, dances a little jig, fights and leaves this always hopeful, yet oh so often disappointed watcher of dubious movies with a warm afterglow and a sudden and frightening love for Mithun Chakraborty.

1920 London (2016)

London, in some weird-looking parallel 1920s made out of Bollywood dreams (this is not a complaint). Shivangi (Meera Chopra) lives with her husband Veer (Vishal Karwal) in a palatial estate while he studies law. Both of them are Indian royalty/nobility (don’t ask me which of the two, I’m pro French Revolution), sickeningly in love, and have a chauffeur named George, so things look rather idyllic for them.

However, when some thankful peasants or other send Veer an amulet to praise his awesomeness, he becomes possessed by the evil spirit of a witch (Meenal Kapoor). Quickly, he contorts his body into the most interesting shapes, loses his luscious hair (and wins some worms), and will soon die, for the doctors are of course baffled. And who can blame them?

Shivangi quickly realizes that her husband has been cursed – she’s pretty sure his evil stepmother is the guilty party. She returns home to India to fetch help. Finding the appropriate magician to get rid of a dead witch this strong turns out to be a bit of a problem. In fact, only exorcism specialist Jai (Sharman Joshi) has any chance of succeeding at all. Unfortunately, Jai and Shivangi have a bit of a history: namely a star-crossed love between penniless shepherd and princess that ended when Jai beat up Shivangi’s evil uncle when the bastard tried to rape her, and Shivangi renounced Jai and their love in the ensuing trial, landing him in prison. Needless to say, Jai is initially not terribly keen on helping Shivangi out. But as we all know, exorcists gotta exorcise.

If you go into an Indian horror film with mainstream Bollywood sensibilities like this and expect anything like a “proper” horror movie in the less open sense of the term, you’ll end up sorely disappointed, for Dharmendra Suresh Desai’s film really is a slightly more focused masala piece with supernatural beasties, putting as much emphasis on the melodrama as it does on its witch, possession and so on, though it does leave out the odious comic relief. To me, that’s not a bad thing, at least not in a film that is as enthusiastic about entertaining me (well, its audience) as 1920 London is.

While the horror sequences certainly won’t scare the genre-savvy, the film builds such a wonderful Bollywood gothic place out of its weirdo-20s, actual locations, dubious CGI and general horror light clichés that I found myself rather in love with it for this alone. The film demonstrates ably that there’s aesthetically a lot to be said for looking at something like the 1920s in Britain through the pop-cultural lenses of a different country (even if we ignore the particularly pleasant irony inherent to this country being a former colony of the UK). It is of course about as authentic  as the depictions of India in most western cultural artefacts (read: not at all), but it is also oh so very fun, turning everything larger than life in quite a different way than Western depictions of place and era would. Besides, authenticity is not always terribly interesting in any case.

There are also quite a few perfectly decent suspense sequences in here that are about as frightening as a fun fair ride but are generally creative in their use of clichés, excellently paced, and provided regularly. For you also can’t blame the film for wasting your time once it’s gotten going, its nearly two hours of running time flying by in a series of flashbacks, melodramatic outbreaks, decorative suffering (which Meera Chopra does quite well), and scenes of general spooky action (not always at a distance). Like all good Bollywood films, 1920 London would be ashamed of itself if you were bored for longer than half a minute while watching it.

Adding additional spice to the whole affair is surprisingly tight plotting (not generally a strength of Hindi commercial cinema, mostly, I think, because that sort of thing isn’t actually important to filmmakers and audience in India in general), and some awesomely silly ideas. You will witness a game of peek-a-boo with a possessed, suspenseful chanting of mantras, a lemon chase through a haunted house as well as other fruit and nut based magic, a spiritual knife fight, and lots of awesomeness in between.

So at least for tonight, this is the best film ever made.

Past Misdeeds: Mahakaal (1988/1993)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

The life of thirty year old college teenager Anita (Archana Puran Singh) is starting to get interesting. Right now, she and her equally old student friends (among them the most terrifying monster of them all - "comedian" Johnny Lever) are still cavorting around merrily - that is when her boyfriend Prakash and his best friend Rakesh aren't dishooming the local would-be rapists - but all this is beginning to change when Anita's best friend Seela, and very soon our heroine herself, is starting to have terrible nightmares.

In them, they are hunted by a shadowy, mulletted man with a scarred face and the propensity to laugh menacingly while showing his charming iron-bladed gloves. That would probably be troubling enough for the girls, yet the worst thing is that these dreams are leaving physical traces behind. It's one thing dreaming about getting your nightshirt ripped by claws, but it's quite another when you wake up and actually find it ripped.
Still, the friends are (theoretically) young, their hair freshly sprayed and mulletted, so they decide to drive to the country-side to have a picnic and cavort some more. That works out nicely until they want to drive back home and discover that their car won't move an inch anymore. Fortunately there's a hotel nearby. Unfortunately, it's managed by another Johnny Lever and has no working phones to call home from. How immoral! Well, at least it's dry and warm.

Anita and Prakash do the boring and responsible thing by keeping chaste. Seela and Rakesh however decide to have a real picnic together in one bed. Would you believe that Seela dreams of the nice man with the interesting gloves again? Yeah, I was completely taken by surprise myself. This time, though, he's not just appearing to scare the girl; he kills her, leaving Rakesh - who of course decides to run - as the main suspect of the dastardly deed, no matter that there's no proof whatsoever against him.
Hunting Rakesh is Anita's father, your usual Bollywood patriarchal copper arsehole. Thanks to Rakesh's brilliant idea to make a visit to his school campus in bright daylight, it's a very short manhunt, and the young idiot finds himself in a nice, damp cell.

The next night, Anita dreams of Rakesh getting killed in his cell by the mullet man and his new pet snakes, and even her sceptical father looks shaken when he learns that the young man did in fact die that night.
After a few more small revelations, Dad explains who the man with the gloves is. It's a certain Shakaal, a black magician who worshipped some undefined dark gods by sacrificing children to them. Seven years ago, he kidnapped Anita's little sister to do the same to her. Her father wasn't able to save his daughter, so he poked Shakaal in the face with a torch and buried him alive in a chained box in some ruins. Obviously, the dead man has returned to take his vengeance.

If there is one thing you can count on when it comes to the films of the Ramsay Brothers, it is their absolutely shameless will to entertain in the broadest and sleaziest (for Hindi cinema) way possible. These two aren't afraid of anything, not even ripping off one of the two films by Wes Craven that are actually any good - A Nightmare On Elm Street.

Well, there is something the Ramsays were afraid of - putting their Nightmare rip-off into the cinemas when their arch enemy Mohan Bakhri had just before thrown his own version of the tale, Khooni Murdaa, on the market. Just imagine, they could have lost money! So they let the film lie and ripen for a few years and only put it out when the Bollywood horror boom had already run its course, making it their last theatrical feature before they had to flee into the land of cable TV, as far as I've heard while being hunted by villagers carrying torches.

So the fashion and the victims of Johnny Lever's "parodies" (and does Amitabh Bachchan's comeback vehicle Shahenshah truly need to be parodied?) and "satire" are very much part of the late 80s. I have a hard time imagining that this will have helped Mahakaal's financial performance, but hey, what do I know about stuff like that.

What I do know is what I find fun, and Mahakaal definitely is fun.
Sure, if you are easily angered by really brazen theft of plots, ideas, scene set-ups or musical cues, you'll probably have a hard time watching it without beginning to froth at the mouth. I find the Ramsay method here rather charming. The first half of Mahakaal copies the plot progression and characters of its model as closely as possible, but adds a lot of flavour to prepare Craven's recipe for the taste of an Indian audience. So the viewer gets to see a slightly less bloody version of A Nightmare on Elm Street plus everything he, she or it ever loved about the trashier side of Bollywood cinema - musical numbers of dubious quality (well, I actually found the last one with its golden glitter costumes from hell rather undubious, even quite delightful), heroines with an insane propensity to get very very wet, said dishooming of would-be rapists and other assorted rabble, Johnny Lever humour you can blessedly fast forward through because his scenes are not in the least relevant for anything else in the film (although you will then miss out on things like his Michael Jackson imitation, his Amitabh Bachchan in Shahenshah stick - which is actually kinda funny - and the rare Johnny action scene).

Then the last third of the film arrives, and the Ramsays have obviously had enough of following Craven, throw out the dream demon idea completely and turn the film into the monster rumble most of their films I have seen until now end in. Which is an excellent idea when it brings us a re-jigged scene stolen from Dawn of the Dead, an inexplicable, but fun bout of demonic possession and a much better water bed death scene than in the original. The only way to beat that (or bring it to an end) is of course to end the film in a bizarre beat-down that is at once gruesome, silly and absolutely insane and alone worth the price of admission.
Technically, Mahakaal is typical Ramsay Brothers filmmaking - there's not a bit of subtlety to find anywhere, yet the brothers show an exhilarating sense for hysterical in-your-face intensity when it comes to the horror sequences or the action. If it has to do with the use of zoom, manic camera movements, fog, multi-coloured lights, more fog, or bizarre interior architecture (watch out for the temple of evil!), the Ramsays know what they are doing and (or so I suspect) love it.

Memorable acting you won't find here, but at least our heroine, future TV personality Archana Puran Singh, is as game for anything as Polly (Shan) Kuan, be it fighting an invisible man, getting very very wet repeatedly, or just screaming "Nahiiiiiiiin!". Especially her screams are something I won't soon forget.
What more could I ask of a film?

Ragini MMS (2011)

The couple of Uday (Raj Kumar Yadav) and Ragini (Kainaz Motivala) are going on a trip to a place owned by a friend of Uday's in the country for a romantic weekend, or really, to get rid of Ragini's pesky virginity. What Ragini doesn't know: Uday doesn't just act like a sleazy prick most of the time, he has also agreed to help a movie producer friend of his to secretly make a sex tape, so the house is full of hidden cameras ready to turn the unknowing Ragini into a very special kind of celebrity. He's a charmer, Uday is.

Things conspire against Uday's plans, though. First, Ragini's friend Pia (Janice) and her boyfriend Vishal (Rajat) appear at the mansion in an obvious attempt at what I think is called cockblocking among experts. Then, once they've disappeared, the actual owner of the house makes herself known. Turns out the place is haunted by the ghost of a woman who wasn't a witch and didn't kill her children, and she's loathe to have guests. Uday doesn't take well to the haunting, and soon Ragini finds herself alone with a dead (asshole) boyfriend and an angry ghost. Oh, and she's cuffed to a bed with sex toy handcuffs.

By 2011 - or perhaps earlier, but I couldn't find anything about that - the POV/found footage horror wave had obviously reached India, resulting in this Hindi production directed by Pawan Kripalani. The film's sex video set-up provides the opportunity to not just have the usual hand-held shaky cam but to also use quite a few well-placed static cameras, particularly inside the bedroom where much of the film takes place.

The set-up does of course also provide another, different, opportunity, namely for quite a few scenes of very coy sleaze. That sort of thing rubs badly against the things allowed to be shown in Indian movies, and those that aren't, so what the film sells as sleaze, we around here call heavy cuddling. I'd rather wish the film had foregone the not-really-sleaze completely, for as it stands, it's neither really titillating, nor all that relevant beyond providing the film with an excuse for having more than one camera working at any given time. More negatively, its approach to its sleazy contents puts Ragini MMS very much into the group of exploitation movies that never gets around to doing anything interesting or subversive with its sleaze beyond the usual schizophrenic wagging of its finger at things it is only to happy to show in as much detail as it can get away with (which isn't much).

The ineffective sleaze drags the film's early pacing down considerably, too. The early lack of excitement is not improved by the lackluster style of the ghost's first attacks, nor by the coy use the film makes of it. It's rather typical for that part of the film that the usual "food turns creepy-crawly" scene is shot so ineffectively not even a hater of centipedes and their ilk like me felt very yucked out once it happened; other "shocks" are equally deserving of apostrophes.

Consequently, I was already mentally writing a "the same procedure as always" assertion of boredom. But then something rather wonderful happens once Ragini has been lovingly handcuffed by Uday (don't be kinky, virgins!), and Uday has been dispatched by the ghost - the remaining half hour of film turns into an effective tour de force where every seeming success of our heroine to free herself from her rather horrible situation is countered by further escalation from the ghost who suddenly isn't as harmless and boring as before anymore. Even better, while the situation Ragini finds herself in is of course rather contrived, Kripalani plays it with such earnestness and a sudden talent for creating tension and a feeling of dread, that it never feels contrived. On paper, nothing that happens is new to any even mildly experienced viewer of horror, but its execution is so well-timed this stops being a problem at all.

Motivala, who up to that point was mostly spending her time with looking "innocent yet sexy" (oh, the minds of exploitation directors), also rises to the occasion, embodying just the right mix of believable terror and determination to make it impossible not to root for her. She's also a particularly good screamer. That might sound a little glib, but a really believable scream of terror and frustration by an actress (or an actor, of course) can improve the impression a scene of horror makes considerably.

The same can be done by an excellent final thirty minutes for an up to that point charmless film, as Ragini MMS proves.

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On Exploder Button: Jaal (1986)

I'm really not watching Hindi movies, particularly masala movies, often enough, but when I do, I'm often happily swamped with the joy films bring that weren't at all meant to function like the US or UK model of movies I grew up with do.

Case in point is the theme of this week's column on Exploder Button, Jaal, featuring eternal and inexplicable house favourite Mithun "MITHUN!" Chakraborty. Please click on through if you want to see me use words like "joyful"!

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Look Ma, I'm quoted in the Wall Street Journal!

Fellow M.O.S.S. agent Beth of Beth Loves Bollywood fame spends some of the 48 hours in her day on a weekly column about Bollywood movies for the India blog of the Wall Street Journal Online.

Because she has been slowly driven insane by us other M.O.S.S.ers, Beth decided to spend this week's column exploring the world of the movies of Harinam Singh, Hindi no budget horror auteur extraordinaire/from hell. Such a thing is, of course, an endeavour best not started alone, so Beth asked me a few pointed questions about the why and wherefore of a certain part of the cult movie bloggers' set's love for the works of the kindly Mister Singh.

Read all Beth discovered, and some of what I gibbered, here!

 

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Jagir (1984)

This is part of "Bob's Your Uncle", a multi-blog-extravaganza celebrating the memory of Bollywood's great Bob Christo, who died earlier this year, initiated by the fabulous Beth of Beth Loves Bollywood. Follow this link to find out what others have to say about the wonders of Bob.

The Maharajah of Anjangarh (Kamal Kapoor) and his forefathers have amassed an incredibly shiny treasure of jewellery and gold in their times. Because the Maharajah is incredibly virtuous and devout, he's hiding the treasure away in a cave quite out of reach of everyone to praise the gods with it, instead of, say, doing something for the people he's lording over with it. Only a map hidden away in an amulet shows the way to the treasure.

But the forces of evil in form of bandit leader Lakhan Singh (Amrish Puri, of course, though for some reason not quite as often doing his goggle eyes as usual) and the Maharajah's drunken brother think there are better things to do with treasure than nothing, and assault the Maharajah's palace. As this is a masala through and through, things don't end up as anyone had planned: the Maharajah and his brother don't survive the assault, the Maharajah's loyal friend and companion Mangal Singh (Pran) loses a hand to Lakhan's anger, the Maharajah's young son (of course carrying the treasure map amulet) disappears with the help of the family falcon, as does Mangal Singh's son - the latter believed dead after having been sacrificed by his father (whose "loyalty" to the Maharajah we are supposed to admire because of this; personally, I thought he deserved every punishment he got throughout the movie for it) to distract from the flight of the heir and the amulet, but in truth saved by "gypsies".

An amount of time the film calls twenty years, but that somehow has enabled the Maharajah's son - now called Shankar - to turn into fat middle-aged Dharmendra and Amrish Puri to age not at all, later, Lakhan Singh has become a beloved pillar of the community by day and evil-doer dressing up like a Catholic missionary also by day, while Shankar has gone into the whole Robin Hood business.

Because it's that kind of movie, Shankar meets Mangal Singh's son Sanga (Mithun Chakraborty) on a treasure hunt, and both hit it off after playing around with each other's hats in a spontaneous outburst of Freudian metaphors. They also meet and learn to love a certain Danny (Danny Denzongpa, looking like he has the time of his life), who just happens to be an enemy of Lankhar's too, though he doesn't know that at this time (let's just say it has something to do with Lankhar's foster son Ranjeet - played by Ranjeet, obviously - a dead wife, and a psychosomatically mute son). This still being that kind of movie, the three will soon enough cross paths with Lakhan again, and though nobody recognizes the other, there are still enough reasons for Lakhan for trying to kill our heroes in various ways. Namely, Sanga is in love with Lakhan's daughter Asha (Shoma Anand), and the bad guy does take that whole "overprotective father" role a wee bit too seriously, while Shankar is always trying to steal the same things as Lakhan.

Obviously, Shankar also has a right to a love interest, so the lucky bastard gets to romance Seema (Zeenat Aman, as often quite underutilized, but at least allowed to kick one or two asses and shoot a few people in the finale), who is of course also slightly connected with the whole family affair. Don't worry, please, this isn't a Japanese movie, so there's not too much risk of an incest plot. Anyway, lots of other stuff happens, until old secrets are revealed, families reunited, evil doers punished and Bob Christo kicked in the face.

Honestly, when I say that "lots of stuff happens", I really mean it. Pramod Chakravorty's Jagir is one of those masalas that pack so many minor plotlines, diversions, action scenes, and moments of random awesomeness in that a running time of 170 minutes actually feel a bit short for everything the director wants to show us. There's not just always something happening, but there's always something fun happening, as if Chakravorty and writer Sachin Bhowmick had taken a long hard look at the genre they were working in and decided that there's nothing wrong with its traditions and its structures that couldn't be fixed by replacing two thirds of the regular slots for comedy scenes and one third of the regular slots for melodrama with action sequences of the patented Bollywood style. Since the film is as long as it is (and 170 minutes are quite long even in Bollywood), there are still more than enough dramatic scenes and jokes (sometimes even funny ones) to give Jagir the expectedly baroque plot.

And, because it is also that sort of movie, Jagir includes so much ridiculously awesome stuff that I'd still be quite excited about it if it had no plot at all. To wit, apart from the things already described (padre Puri!) you will see: a Bollywood super animal in form of a falcon (often stunt-doubled by a stuffed falcon, making him doubly wonderful) who not only repeatedly saves Dharmendra's enormous behind, but also knows how to shoot a gun; a guy with steel teeth - obviously not at all inspired by a certain Bond character - having a car part throwing duel with our heroic trio; Pran doing one-armed Hindi kung fu like Wang Yu's long lost brother; Mithun in red cowboy boots that I suspect were initially part of Zeenat Aman's wardrobe; people calling Dharmendra a young man; one of the best death trap rooms with magnetic shackles and a spiky cross under a Christian graveyard in India ever; religious symbols and their use as lock picks; pneumatic jumping from everyone except Amrish Puri; and of course golden oldies like the obligatory scene where our heroes and their girlfriends (poor Danny's status as a widower alas means he doesn't have one) dress up as a "gypsie" dance troupe and sneak into a bad guy's base - well, tent camp. What's not to love?

But what, you might ask, does all this have to do with Bob Christo, the supposed target of today's ramblings? Well, in his career, Mister Christo might have been in every Bollywood movie made between 1980 and 1995, but because of this astonishing workload he was in many of them only for five or ten minutes, as is the case in Jagir. As you know, Bob was usually the actor a Bollywood director used when he needed a physically impressive white guy specialised in being evil to play the main henchman of the evil mastermind's main henchman, a position where his face made contact with all the great feet in Bollywood - like in this particular case those of Mithun and Danny (I suspect only Mac Mohan - also in Jagir of course - has been kicked or hit more). There is an obvious historical fairness (and a show of a re-growing self-confidence in a former colonized country) in having a white serial bad guy in post-colonial Hindi pop cinema getting punished by the hero of the hour. Watching Christo, I can't help but imagine (though I know it's probably not true) he knew that whenever Amitabh punched him in the groin in a movie, Amitabh was actually punching the British colonial reign (see also Mard). I imagine Christo accepting that, polishing his bald head, smiling about taking on a role that has to be taken by someone, so it might as well be him, and going on to the next movie.

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Tahkhana (1986)

aka The Dungeon

The evil sorcerous son of a Thakur uses the opportunity of his father's death to make a play for the family treasure that is secreted away in a nearby dungeon and can only be found with the help of a map pendant that has been broken in two pieces - at least I think that's part of his plan. He'd also very much like to revive the evil godhood (made of clay and blood, we are informed) he is worshipping through the blood sacrifice of innocents.To keep things simple, he kills his brother and kidnaps the man's daughters to sacrifice them right in the treasure dungeon. Unfortunately for our evil sorcerer, his brother's best friend Mansingh and his men arrive just in the nick of time to ruin his plans and rescue at least one of the children, Aarti (soon to grow up to be Aarti Gupta). Sapna (growing up to be Sheetal), the other sister, is lost in the jungle somewhere together with half of the pendant. Mansingh decides that it's appropriate to entomb his sorcerous enemy in the dungeon alive together with his godhood and take Aarti in as an adoptive daughter.

Twenty years later, Aarti knows nothing of her tragic family history or her lost sister. She's in love with Mansingh's son Vijay (played by some bland guy parts of the internet - I blame the IMDB as the source of this and more errors - insist is Puneet Issar, but who definitely isn't). But the happy cavorting of the young lovers has to come to an end. Mansingh is lying on his deathbed, and before he dies, the old man tells the story of Aarti's inheritance to her, Vijay and his nephews Anand (who definitely is played by Puneet Issar) and Shakaal (Imtiaz Khan), asking them to find Sapna and help Aarti take possession of her birthright. Mansingh also hands Aarti the other half of the treasure map. The question now is just how to find Sapna.

The answer to that question is less pleasant than the usual Bollywood story of lost siblings would suggest. By chance, Sapna stumbles into the hotel Shakaal owns looking for work. Shakaal (and who would have thought that of a character in a Bollywood movie named Shakaal and played by Imtiaz Khan!?) is a proper sleazebag, and so offers Sapna a job as a dancer, but appears soon enough at her doorstep to take what he probably sees as the proper reward for his help.

Sapna isn't the kind of girl willing to prostitute herself though. During Shakaal's following attempt at raping her, Sapna is killed. It is only then that her killer sees her pendant and realizes whom he has murdered; not that he's sorry about anything he's done, mind you. Shakaal takes the pendant for himself and makes a copy to hand to his family once a proper opportunity arises, which will be soon.

Once the untrustworthy treasure map is in their hands, Aarti, Vijay and co decide to move into the Singh family's old mansion near the treasure-holding dungeon. Unfortunately, they're taking Shakaal with them, too.

But the bad guy's attempts at gaining the treasure (and trying to rape every woman he lays his eyes on) won't be the worst of our heroes' problems. The old evil sorcerer has revived his Godhood through his own death, and the unpleasant monster is now wandering the dungeon, killing whomever he can lay his claws on.

Fortunately, the local country strongman and all around swell guy He-ManHeera (Hemant Birje) is around to help put villains and monsters in their place. Or rather pillar-ly looking stone "stakes" into their hearts.

Outward appearances and a longwinded plot synopsis notwithstanding, Tahkhana is one of the less complicated films from the Indian sub-continent I've seen. Unlike many other of the horror movies made by the Ramsay Brothers, Tahkhana doesn't rejoice in the complex net of plots and subplots that make up your typical masala film. At times, the film seems consciously constructed not to be like a masala, what with it killing one of the long lost sisters off very early on. That's just not how a lost sibling plot is done in India.

I wouldn't call the film's plotting tight or lean, exactly, but it is a very simple story told in a comparatively linear way, which also explains the film's rather short (for commercial Indian cinema) running time of less than two hours. Given these time constraints, it's no wonder that there's not much room for comedic relief (although what is there is still painful enough, thankyouverymuch) or minor plots which aren't closely interleaved with the main plot. There's even only room for two musical numbers, both of which are musically forgettable and mildly sleazy - just as you'd expect of the Ramsays.

What there is room for is a number of quite entertaining action and horror set pieces, the former obviously dominated by Hemant Birje and Puneet Issar, who both also seem just too happy to show off as much chest and ass as they can get away with. The Ramsays' films are nothing if not generous with both beefcake and cheesecake; a quality I've always found highly admirable. Apart from that, Birje also is an expert in screen strongman fighting and would have played Hercules more than once if he'd gone to Italy. He's even throwing a few pillars.

The horror scenes aren't quite as great as they are in other Ramsay films. The Hammer worship filtered through an Indian style isn't as convincing as I'm used from the brothers' output, the lighting isn't as freakish, and the film's monster just isn't one of the brothers' best. The big lumbering guy is physically impressive enough, even though his combination of monk's robe, dark oatmeal face and shaggy gorilla costume is more silly than frightening, but he's just a grunting monster without any dimensions of spiritual or human evil, which seems to be a step back for a Ramsay movie.

Given the nature of Tahkhana's Big Bad, the whole film feels more like an adventure movie with an added monster than the sort of silly yet loveable and enthusiastic scream fest I by now expect of a Ramsay film. That's not to say Tahkhana is a bad film; it is entertaining enough. I just don't think it shows the Ramsay Brothers at their best.

 

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On WTF: Wardat (1981)

What's better than Eurospy movies? Obviously Bollyspy movies with Mithun Chakraborty.

Wardat is quite a recommended example of its particular sub-genre, but if you want to know exactly how much insanity it contains, and how it applies it, you'll be better off reading my write-up on WTF-Film. I promise there will be rejoicing.

 

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Shaapit (2010)

The young lovers Kaaya (Shweta Agarwal) and Aman (Aditya Narayan) are spontaneously eloping. Their ride back home is rudely interrupted by an accident caused by a ghost standing in the road.

Nobody is hurt, but when Kaaya's parents arrive at the hospital and see their daughter's engagement ring, they aren't happy at all. Their problem is not the secrecy of the elopement, though. It's just that they have until now avoided to inform their daughter  of…the family curse. About three-hundred years ago, the family's noble ancestors got into a bit of trouble. One of them, the brother of the Maharajah Rajnisingh, drove a woman soon to be married to someone else into suicide through his unwanted advances. The poor girl's father was a powerful magician, and so cursed the present and all coming generations of the Maharajah's family. Never shall one of their daughters marry and live. (In truth, the back story is more complicated than that and also includes an evil woman whose fault everything is, black-clad assassins and a musical number with fire-swallowers, but the characters will learn about it only much later.)

After having explained this, Kaaya's parents force the young lovers to part. Just living together instead of marrying seems to be an idea so alien to everyone concerned it's not even mentioned; I think it would have spared everyone a lot of trouble. After some intense sulking, Aman makes the solemn vow to find a way to break the curse, so that Kaaya and he can be together.

As luck will have it, Aman's best friend Shubh (Shubh Joshi) thinks he knows someone who can help - the parapsychologist Professor Pashupathi (Rahul Dev). While Pashupathi swallows Aman's bizarre story without blinking he is not willing to help the young man out, because he thinks that Aman's just having a fit of romantic self-aggrandizement he'll get over soon enough.

Aman is dead serious about the whole undying love business, though, and decides to prove his commitment to the Professor by stealing a haunted book from a library. Surprisingly enough, he manages this feat, if only by laying waste to the whole poor library (that barbarian). Obviously, nobody in this movie cares about things like the sanctity of libraries, so the Professor is now quite convinced of Aman's will and ability to see things through and agrees to help him. Pashupathi thinks that the only way to break the curse lying on Kaaya is to lay the ghost to rest who seems to be its focus and weapon. It's just like in a Supernatural episode, just with less classic rock and no shotguns loaded with rock salt. Remember when there were still ghosts in Supernatural? But I digress.

At first Aman, Shubh and the Professor are trying to keep Kaaya completely out of the loop of their investigations (for her own safety, etc, blah blah), but after Aman does something very stupid, they have to take her with them. Don't worry, potential reader afraid of women doing anything worthwhile in movies, Kaaya will soon enough land in a coma where she will spend the rest of the movie.

Anyway, their investigation leads the intrepid quartet (and later trio) first into a burnt-out cinema to get guidance from random ghosts and a tennis ball (a plan that is so stupid it works perfectly), then into an old prison, and then into the palace of Rajnisingh himself, until they will finally have enough information to know what to do about the ghost and the curse.

Genre movie specialist Vikram Bhatt's Shaapit (which seems to translate into "The Cursed") is a bit of a problematic one. It's a film front-loaded with flaws, but it's also a film that can be a whole lot of fun when watched with tolerance for these flaws and an appreciation for its sillier and more imaginative aspects.

First and foremost among Shaapit's flaws is its lead Aditya Narayan, who seems to come from a background as a playback singer rather than that of an actor. Now, the history of cinema is full of singers who turn out to be much better actors than anyone would have expected; unfortunately, it is just as full of singers who couldn't act their way out of their own toilet. Narayan certainly belongs to the latter class. He's pretty, in a fifteen year old (and yes, I know he's twenty-three) boygroup member sort of way, but he has neither the charisma nor the acting ability to be the character the audience has to spend most of its time with. In fact, he only has one facial expression, a rather puzzled look somewhere between "where am I?" and "what's my line?", and really nothing to recommend him as an actor.

One the plus side everyone with less screen time is perfectly serviceable.

Which is much more than one can say for the film's (mostly CGI) special effects. Those are perfectly dreadful, lacking physicality as well as any - in my book more important - sense for the design of frightening or at least threatening monsters. I suspect the ghosts wouldn't even be frightening enough for the next Scooby Doo live action movie.

There's also some terrible green screen work on display, but the film's combination of bad green screen and detailed-yet-fake sets is actually one of its good points. In contrast to the ghost(s), these things ooze charm and a sense of excitement; that they aren't "good" on a technical level seems beside the point, especially when talking about a commercial Hindi film.

So, what's good about Shaapit? Well, it really depends on what you are looking for in a film. As a horror film - that is a film out to scare, frighten, disturb or disquiet - Shaapit is a complete loss. As long as Bhatt pretends that his film is a horror film in that sense of the word - so for about its first forty minutes - it's not very good at all. The only "horror"s on display are the usual rote shocks on the level of a carnival's haunted house. If you're afraid of a film basically shouting "boo!" every few minutes, you'll be pretty afraid, though. Even the situations that should be traumatic for characters and audience don't feel that way. Bhatt also doesn't try to explore the pretty dreadful emotional situation Aman and Kaaya find themselves in any way you'd connect with "horror". Instead, he goes for a very Indian feeling version of melodrama, which would probably work just as well as the more "horror" way to go about it if there was only someone with a personality in the male lead.

Fortunately, Shaapit soon changes its track and transforms into something sitting between an actually supernatural Scooby Doo episode and an Indiana Jones knock-off, an investigative adventure movie with ghosts and Undying Love melodrama lurking in the background. And suddenly, many of the film's problem aren't all that bad anymore - the ghost that never was all that frightening now becomes more of a physical obstacle; there's room for a big flashback scene with a bit of swordfighting and the film's only musical number that has dancing (and is any good).

The film also allows itself to get silly, with a scene of time-travel based on the traditions of the Inga (no, I don't know either), which seem to be holding one's breath while submerged in a bath tub, a little séance - complete with digital headshaking, obviously, and a grand finale that is dominated by an extensive game of catch the urn. And while Bhatt doesn't manage much trying to be frightening, he turns out to be quite good at silliness and excitement, and while that's not what Shaapit initially promised, it's a lot of fun.

 

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Bach Ke Zaraa (2008? 2009?)

An archeology professor has found an evil book of magic - the sort that's only genuine with its own face -  on an excavation. He takes it with him to his house in the woods and after making sweet sweet Bollywood love to his wife, decides that it is a good idea to read a conjuration from his new book aloud. Wouldn't you know? The spirit of evil possesses his wife who is now very eager to kill him. The professor turns out to be the better knife fighter of the two, though, and then does what comes natural - bury his wife in a shallow grave in the garden. He didn't expect her to rise again and end project "husband" with an axe, I suppose.

Years, days or weeks later, a quintet of adorable young people with adorable names like Sunny and Sweetie arrives in the same patch of woods to do more Bollywood sex and freeform frolicking.

Sweetie, who is there without a partner, follows a musical number sung by the professor's wife's ghost to the house where the beginning of the film took place. The building then proceeds to have a good laugh, royally freaking the girl out.

She returns to camp, only to find that her know-nothing friends care nothing about her story. Not even the sudden appearance of the local mysterious madmen uttering dire warnings can drive these young people away. Quite the opposite, being warned that entering the house means certain death only makes our "heroes" want to enter it in the first place.

Once there, the film stops even the slightest bit of pretension that it isn't an inferior copy of The Evil Dead and steals the rest of the older film nearly scene by scene, even including the sexually deviant tree.

Bach Ke Zaraa leaves me very much in two minds. On one hand, I very much approve of every attempt to shake up the terrifyingly conservative Hindi cinema to get a worthy exploitation cinema going again, and using The Evil Dead as a blueprint certainly is an agreeable enough idea, but Bach Ke Zaraa takes the theft of ideas much too far for its own good.

It is one thing to steal the basic plot of a classic, yet holding as slavishly to the script of the classic you copy as Bach's director Salim Raza does only lead to unfortunate comparisons the newer film should not wish upon itself. Basically, the second half of the film is exactly like The Evil Dead, just worse in every aspect, be it acting, effects or the extremely important timing of the shocks, leaving me with an intense need to dig out my DVD of the original.

It's just too bad, especially because that thing Raza should have learned from Raimi's original is how to make a film in one's own way, with energy and creativity taking the place of a budget. Of course, just outright stealing other people's ideas is less strenuous.

The only thing Raza does differently after the set-up lies in the amount of blood and pus he decides not to show, and that is of course less an actual creative decision than a spineless acceptance of censorship.

Having said that, I still think you can have quite a good time with the film. There's the endearingly stiff "sexiness" of the early parts not stolen from Sam Raimi, terrible actors who just happen to be terribly enthusiastic as well, and a handful of moments when Raza's inept carbon copy turns into a technically accomplished one - all things that make it difficult to outright hate Bach Ke Zaraa.

In a sense, you also have to admire the utter shamelessness of the film's intellectual theft that doesn't stop where Roger Corman or an Italian director of the 70s or 80s would have stopped - namely at the border of what I like to call "outright plagiarism" -, but instead blithely and enthusiastically flaunts its own creative bankruptcy, as if nobody working at the production had ever heard of lawsuits. Now that I think about it, Raza has managed to make a true exploitation film. Unfortunately, I can see little future in this style of filmmaking.

 

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On WTF: Mahakaal (1988/1993)

On WTF! It's the Ramsay Brothers! It's a Nightmare on Elm Street rip-off! It's pure ecstasy!

(Yeah, this is what happens when they let me out of my cage to watch a Ramsay Brothers film and write about it)

 

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