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.