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.

Three Films Make A Post: Winning was just the beginning.

Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (2021): If the first Escape Room didn’t feel random and contrived enough to you, Adam Robitel’s sequel has you covered. The characters are even thinner than in the first movie – and what good is a diverse cast when none of the diverse characters is even the least bit interesting? – the plot is non-existent, and the film’s attempt at a big reveal in the final act is so stupid, it’s laughable.

The escape rooms themselves manage to be at once implausible, random and just ever so faintly stupid, showing as much imagination as the rest of the film, which is to say, none. That its idea of excitement mostly seems to consist of random editing tics and screeching actresses is only par for the course for this one.

Ek Tha Tiger aka Once There Was a Tiger (2012): Despite not being much of a fan of its lead couple Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif as far as I know their bodies of work, I had quite a bit of fun with this Bollywood spy romance by Kabir Khan. The film puts heavy emphasis on the romance, so much so, the handful of action sequences and the rest of the spy business sometimes feel as if they’ve slipped in from another movie. Since the action is still good fun, and the romance actually works pretty well, that’s not really a problem, though – one does not venture into an early 2010s Bollywood hit expecting the same ideas about tonal consistency you’d find in Hollywood at the same time, and blaming a film for not following rules it doesn’t actually set out to follow seems pointless, and a bit boring, like complaining about the lack of veggies in your ice cream.

Plus, there’s something deeply likeable about a Hindi movie that uses the enmity between India and Pakistan without ever becoming jingoistic (because love beats politics, here, obviously), and whose romance actually affords its female lead some agency.

Street View aka Reikai no tobira Street View (2011): A curious figure in street view seems connected to the disappearance of our protagonist’s sister. A lot of only mildly changed beats from old Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Hideo Nakata movies follow. Alas, director Soichiro Koga doesn’t really manage to turn his cobbled together bits of great movies into a decent one of its own.

From time to time, there’s a scene or a moment here that manages to create something of a frisson, a suggestion of something truly ghastly lurking on the other side of one’s monitor, but more often than not, this looks and feels like a cheap rip-off of much better things, without the thought that could have turned it into something special, or even just interesting.

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.

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.

1921 (2018)

Surprisingly enough, It’s 1921. Young aspiring musician (or kitsch pianist, given some of the stuff he is mimicking to play) Ayush (Karan Kundra) has hit the jackpot: a rich Hindu gentleman is not only sponsoring his studies at the world-renowned music school of York, England but has also given him the run of his usually empty mansion there, as long as he’s watering the plants. But Ayush’s happiness is short-lived, for he is terrorized by a variety of supernatural occurrences that climax in an ugly black spot growing ever larger on his body.

Fortunately, destiny (as a matter of fact, Destiny with a capital D, it’s that sort of a movie), leads him to another student at the University of York, Rose (Zarine Khan). Rose is a typical movie or TV ghost seer, always helping out the dead people she sees so they can find rest, her own social life be damned. However, Rose is usually working with ghosts that want to be laid to rest, whereas Ayush’s problem really rather seems to ask for a big damn exorcism. Of course, Rose and Ayush fall in huge romantic love during the process of finding out what kind of spookery he suffers from, but will that be enough to solve some really rather intense ghost troubles?

For my tastes, Vikram Bhatt’s 1921 is the weakest in the not terribly connected series of horror movies about the misadventures of various pretty young Hindus in an absurd, yet also very pretty and atmospheric version of fantasy England in the early 1920s, a pleasant place full of ghosts but with only the tiniest smidgen of racism and colonialist spirit. This fantasy England is one of the elements of the 192x films I particularly enjoy. There’s nothing not to like about the film industry from a former colony making up a version of their old colonizer's home just as absurd as that of India you’ll find in many British films, turning England exotic. This approach is historically fair, usually lush to look at and just much more interesting than another attempt at realism.

Now, in 1921, Bhatt doesn’t do this romantic bizarro version of England populated by a couple of professional Hindi actors and actresses and two handful of absolutely terrible English language ones (how do films, wherever they are made, always find the least competent actors working in another language?) as much justice as the other films in the series do. The film is just not reaching the heights of Indian/British Gothic of particularly 1920: London, and weakening many a scene of horror by a tendency to overlight everything for no good reason whatsoever, banning shadows from a movie that really should contain a lot of them. While Khan makes a fine romantic heroine, I found Kundra a bit too one-note, using one puzzled facial expression for every emotion his character is supposed to feel. Even when he is possessed by a ghost, his non-expression doesn’t really change all that much.

The film’s plot isn’t exactly tight, with so many plot twists and flashbacks it borders on the absurd. Not all of them are terribly effective or necessary, either, the film seemingly taking a quantity over quality approach here. However, one central twist not atypical for films about seers of dead people is handled effectively, leading into a finale that is as crazy as one could wish for, with a couple of scenes of horror that may be staged in much too chipper a tone to frighten anyone but which are also so plain fun in conception and execution nobody with a sense of silly joy in their heart will ever complain about their flaws.

The horror scenes are generally neither frightening nor disturbing, yet they are – just as the film’s plot twist mania – enthusiastically realized and in the spirit of good fun. Particular favourites are the random (or is it?) poisoning by femme fatale, the ghostly inn full of bad gore CGI, and of course the axe business in the finale, a moment you, as they say, gotta see to believe.


What 1921 doesn’t achieve but what its predecessors managed is to actually sweep me up in its romantic horror tale and involve me emotionally, so the melodramatic moments tend to fall flat, more than bordering (as all intense emotion does) on involuntary humour. Still, the film’s crazy moment, its daredevil plotting and its general sense of fun are still more than enough to make for an enjoyable evening.