Bhooty Call: Kaatteri

 There are horror comedies and then there are horror comedies.  Some movies mix classic Bollywood monster movie characters with a powerful social message, some movies use spooky imagery to tell a charming story about a child gaining confidence and wisdom with the help of a friendly ghost, and some movies mix Indian folklore, cosmic horror, and gritty crime drama with a heaping helping of farce.  Which makes me think that I am probably overselling Kaatteri (2022).

 Gajja, Sankar and Kaliyurunda (Karunakaran, Kutty Gopi, and Ravi Mariya) are petty gangsters working for the ancient crime boss Naina.  They aren't very good at crime, but while searching for their missing associate Maanga Mani (Yogi Babu) they manage to kidnap perky (and presumably wealthy) psychiatrist Kamini (Nathmika).  Naina is not impressed, and informs the trio that if they and their friend Kiran (Vaibhav Reddy) don't return the money that Maanga Mani ran off with in a day, he'll have them all killed.

The trio go to meet Kiran, who is trying to enjoy his wedding night with Shweta (Sonam Bajwa) and explain the situation.  Shweta adjusts surprisingly quickly, and comes up with a plan: the gang can steal Kamini back and hold her for ransom, using whatever money they can get from that to pay back Naina.  Despite their ineptitude they manage to kidnap Kamini again, but the plan goes off track when Kamini reveals that Maanga Mani actually traveled to the remote village of Kolaatipuram in search of a fabulous treasure.  Figuring that digging up treasure will be easier than arranging a ransom, the gang heads to the village, dragging Kamini with them.

And then things get weird.  the people in the village are . . . odd, and Kiran is accosted by a mysterious old man (Lollu Sabha Manohar) who gives him enigmatic warnings and a pacifier, but they manage to trace Maanga Mani to a bungalow just outside of town.  They question the residents, don't get any useful response, and bumble their way into taking the family hostage as well.  But after night falls and spooky things start happening, they realize that the house is haunted.

 While trying to escape from the house, the gang get separated, and each little group realize that the whole village is haunted by a variety of ghosts.  In fact, everyone in the village is a ghost of one kind or another, but the most dangerous spirit they meet is Mathamma, who appears as a lovely woman who approaches her victims and asks if she is beautiful, then carries them away if they answer yes or no.  Or perhaps the most dangerous spirits they meet are the withered green specters who silently surround the group and follow Weeping Angel rules, reducing their victims to dust if they can get close enough.

Mathamma has more personality, though,  and when she manages to spirit the group into her house, she tells them a story that mixes fact and fiction, a story about stifled dreams, murder, and a hungry well that promises untold wealth in exchange for human flesh.  

This is a movie with a great premise, reminiscent of the beautiful and bleak cosmic horror movie Tumbbad, but with broad farce rather than a cold and merciless universe.  The gang are incompetent buffoons as well as criminals, and nobody is particularly sympathetic, with the possible exceptions of Kamini and Mathamma herself.  Many of the jokes fall flat, but there are some moments of genuine humor, as well as a few moments of genuine unease as the gang try to escape the village and keep on winding up in the carnival at the center of town.  It's okay, but it could have been great.

 

Bhooty Call: Chandramukhi 2

 Horror comedy reigns supreme in Indian cinema at the moment, so it was probably inevitable that 2005's Chandramukhi was going to get a sequel.  And that is exactly what happened; Chandramukhi 2 (2023) shares a number of plot elements with the earlier film, including an ancestral curse, a broken family, a clever outsider charged with solving everyone's problems, and of course the Room Which Must Never Be Opened.  In this case, though, it's the same Room Which Must never be Opened, because Chandramukhi 2 is a direct sequel to the earlier movie.

Wealthy matriarch Ranganayaki (Radhika Sarathkumar) and her family have faced a series of disasters in recent years, including the family factory burning down and a car accident which put younger daughter Divya (Lakshmi Menon) in a wheelchair.  The family's Guru (Rao Ramesh) suggests that the family have neglected their ancestral deity, and the solution is for the family to gather in Vettaiyapuram and perform prayer sin the ancestral temple.  This will require the entire family, including the two orphaned children of the daughter who ran away to marry a man "from a different religion," as the subtitles delicately put it.  The daughter and her husband died in a plane crash years ago, and the family have made no effort to contact the children (Manasvi Kottachi and Sanjiv V) but now they are needed.

The children are introduced on a school bus which has been taken hostage by a band of violent and well-armed thugs.  Fortunately, the kids have a protector, their guardian Pandian (Raghava Lawrence), who arrives and defeats the bad guys in spectacular fashion, because while Superstar Rajnikanth doesn't return for the sequel, this is still very much a Rajnikanth movie.

Ranganayaki rents a castle near the temple from  Murugesan (Vadivelu), who was comic relief in the first movie and continues to be comic relief here, and the family movies in, bringing the children and Pandian along with them.  And then the movie focuses on family drama for a while, as Ranganayaki learns to stop being a jerk and accept the kids, while Pandian makes a connection with Lakshmi (mahima Nambiar), beautiful daughter of the groundskeeper.  

Lakshmi has always wanted to explore the palace, and late at night Pandian helps her sneak in.  They explore the forbidden south wing, and Lakshmi discovers The Door That Must Never Be Opened, though she does not open it at this time.  Still, the genre shifts at this point.  The family temple is overgrown and needs to be cleaned before the rituals can be performed, though the temple's priest (Y. G. Mahendran) warns them that that will release a dangerous spirit.  They hire workers from outside the area, but after a pair of tragic deaths the workers leave, and so Pandian clears the temple himself, starting a fire in the process.  He's met by a mysterious sage (so mysterious that I don't know who played him) and learns that the angry ghost of Chandramukhi (Kangana Renaut) has possessed one of the women in the household.

The possession in the previous movie was ambiguous, but probably psychological rather than supernatural.  This time it is definitely the ghost of slain dancer Chandramukhi, who is definitely here to take her revenge on Vettaiyan (Raghava Lawrence), who murdered the man she loved and then ordered her burned alive, though the backstory from the first movie is needlessly expanded and we learn that  Vettaiyan is actually a general named Sengottaiyan, who murdered the actual king (Shatru) and Dread Pirate Robertsed himself onto the throne in an effort to possess Chandramukhi.  

 Despite that twist and the added supernatural elements, though, this is basically the same plot as in the first movie, and plays out in much the same way; the giant snake from the first movie appears and does nothing again, and they even use the same trick to convince Chandramukhi to leave.  Everything is bigger, though - the special effects are flashier, the scenes set in Chandramukhi's time feature fight choreography lifted from Bahubali, Chandramukhi gets a dramatic sword fight after her big dance scene, and there are actually two ghosts, both of which are real.

Well, almost everything is bigger.  There is nothing in this movie to match Jyothika's magnetic performance in the original, and while Raghava Lawrence is doing a very good Rajnikanth impression, he's still not Rajnikanth.  The scale is bigger, but the ambiguity that made the first movie work is completely gone, leaving us with a very by-the-numbers haunted house movie and broad comedy scenes that just keep going and going.  This is skippable - you're better off watching the Bhool Bhulaiyaa sequels, which at least mix up the plot a bit.

Bhooty Call: Maa

 Maa (2025) takes place in the same universe as 2024's Shaitaan, a movie which I have not seen.  I don't think I need another cinematic universe in my life, but Maa is mostly standalone and features both Kajol and Kali, making it hard for me to resist.

 The movie starts forty years ago in the village of Chandrapur, in West Bengal.  the people of the village are performing a Kali Puja as the wife of the local landowner, gives birth to a son.  And then a daughter, and in accordance with the village's tradition and a prophecy from Kali (as interpreted by the men of the village) the newborn girl is taken into the woods and sacrificed.

 The newborn boy is not harmed in any way, and grows up to be Shubankar (Indraneil Sengupta), a family man living in Kolkata with his wife Ambika (Kajol) and twelve year old daughter Shweta (Kherin Sharma).  Shubankar has broken with decades of horror movie tradition by telling his wife all about the curse on his family and the dark traditions of home, though they have not yet explained things to Shweta, who is curious about the ancestral village that her parents refuse to talk about.

Before any further exposition can be delivered, Shubankar receives a call from Joydev (Ronit Roy), informing him that his father has died.  Subankar returns to Chandrapur for the first time in years, and makes arrangements to finally sell the family mansion, but on the way back home he's killed by a demonic tree. 

A few weeks later Joydev calls Ambika, asking her to come to the village and finalize the sale of the mansion.  Ambika agrees, but Shweta insists on coming along, and the locals are oddly hostile to the girl, though she does manage to befriend Deepika (Roopkatha Chakraborty), daughter of the mansion's caretakers.  The real estate broker says that finding a buyer will be more difficult than expected, because of the curse, so Ambika and Shweta stay a little longer than anticipated.

Meanwhile, things go horribly wrong.  Shweta convinces Deepika to take her to see the cursed tree in the nearby forest, and that night Deepika vanishes.  Ambika asks the locals, with the help of stolid policeman Sarfaraz (Jitin Gulati), and learns that in the past few months all of the young girls who started menstruating have vanished, and then returned a few days later; Joydev blames a mysterious old woman who lives in the woods (Vibha Rani), but there's no evidence that the woman did anything wrong. 

 And then Deepika's grandfather, who had been catatonic before Shweta arrived, hands Ambika a scroll, revealing the actual circumstances of the curse, involving a demon created by a single drop of blood from the demon Raktibaija, when Kali and the other incarnations of the Goddess destroyed him.  The new demon, Amsaja, seeks to use a mortal maiden of the landowner's family to reproduce, and they have been sacrificing their daughters for generations.  The girls of the village have become Amsaja's minions, and they abduct Shweta.  

Ambika wants her daughter back, but she's going to need help - divine help.  She performs the Kali Puja with the women of the village, and then enters the forest with  the blessing of Kali.

 Maa has a plot that hearkens back to classic Bollywood horror - in a lot of ways this plays out like a Ramsay Brothers film with CGI special effects and (thankfully, given the subject matter) a lot less exploitation.  It also works as parental horror; Ambika is the viewpoint character, and she's struggling with bringing up a preteen daughter in a world that is sometimes predatory, but her ordinary struggles are amplified by the supernatural elements.

But it's not just a horror movie, this is a sort of Gothic Devotional, mixing sincere religious elements with some tremendous spooky style.  (I've seen my share of Hindu devotional movies over the years, and they usually don't have so many bats.)  

In short, there's a lot going on here, and I'm not quite sure the plot actually holds together; everything runs on coincidence and a series of terrible decisions.  On the other hand, Kajol is compelling, attacking the sometimes shaky script with her trademark sincerity.  I'm not sold on the so-called "Devil's Universe," but Maa is a good reminder of just how talented she is.

Bhooty Call: Munjiya

I have a theory about ghost stories: it's never just about the ghost.  The best stories, and the best movies, use the ghost as a lens to examine something else.  And the movies of the Maddock Horror Comedy Universe certainly support my theory; Stree is about learning to see women as people, Bhediya (werewolf not ghost, but stick with me) is about preserving the environment and tearing down regional prejudice, Stree 2 is about how societal oppression hurts everybody, and Munjya (2024) - well, I'll get to that.

 The movie opens in 1954, with a boy named Gotya (Ayush Ulagadde) who is obsessed with his neighbor Munni, who is seven years older than he is.  When Munni's marriage is arranged, Gotya lashes out, going so far as to attempt to poison her fiance. The boy is punished, but he only spirals further out of control, finally dragging his sister Gita (Khushi Hajare) into the woods as a human sacrifice so that he can perform a dark magical ritual to win Munni.  Gita escapes, and Gotya accidentally sacrifices himself.  His remains are buried under a tree in order to bind his spirit, because he has become a Munjya.

 Years pass.  In the present day, Gita (now played by Suhas Joshi) lives in Pune with her widowed daughter-in-law Pammi (Mona Singh) and grandson Bittu (Abhay Verma).  Bittu is awkward and shy, but he has dreams.  He wants to study Cosmetology and is also secretly in love with his slightly older childhood friend Bela (Sjarvani), who has just returned from America with her annoying boyfriend Kuba (Richard Lovatt) in order to open a Zumba studio.  

Bittu has literal dreams as well, and they're not as nice; he's haunted by flashes of a phantom with a voice that sounds an awful lot like Gollum and keeps talking about marrying someone named Munni.  

 Bittu's cousin Rukku (Bhagyashree Limaye) is getting married, so the family travels to their ancestral village for the engagement ceremony.  Pammi clashes with her sexist and brutish brother-in-law Balu (Ajay Purkar), who blurts out the secret of Bittu's father's death: he was attempting to burn down a tree in the nearby cursed forest that the family owns.  Bittu visits the tree and is attacked by the Munjya.  he's saved by Gita (who is awesome) but Munjya manages to kill his sister and mark Bittu with a handprint.

 Bittu returns to Pune, but Munjya comes with him.  Only a blood relative can see the wicked spirit, and Munjya threatens to kill Pammi unless Bittu finds Munni for him.  With no clues, Bittu is forced to wander the streets late at night, while Munjya plays wicked pranks on everyone.  Bittu turns to his friend Spielberg Singh (Taranjot Singh) for help, and eventually figures out that Munni is Bela's grandmother Akka (Padmini Sardesai), which causes Munjya to transfer his obsession to Bela instead.

Bittu needs more help, and it is a well established fact in Indian horror movies that Christian clergymen  have magical powers, so Spielberg takes him to see revival preacher Elvis Karim Prabhakar (Sathyaraj), who seems to be and in fact is a bit of a huckster.  He does have actual knowledge of evil spirits, though, and he's dealt with munjyas before.  Elvis has a plan.  It's not a great plan, and because this is a horror comedy it's bound to go cattywampus in amusing ways, but it is a plan, so Bittu and Spielberg return to the village to arrange a wedding.  First, they'll have to find a goat.

 The other Maddock Horror Comedy Universe movies are playing with established Bollywood horror archetypes, and there's some of that here; Munjya is a more sinister version of the mischievous child ghosts you see in some Bollywood movies, crossed with the ancient and hungry grandmother from Tumbbad, and like the grandmother he draws a lot of influence from Gollum as portrayed by Andy Serkis.  I think that's actually appropriate, since all three characters have been twisted and transformed by a sense of longing, whether that's for a ring or gold or a person.

It's that longing that drives Munjya.  (Both character and film.)  In some ways this is the anti-Darr, portraying obsession as anything but romantic.  Despite the similar situations, Bittu is not tempted to become like Munjya, and instead serves as positive model of unrequited love; it's clear that Bela sees him as a friend, so he resolves to be the friend that she needs, without expecting anything in return but friendship.  The movie is not just about the ghost, it's about respecting the relationships you have rather than twisting them into something else.

 (And yeah, the werewolf makes a cameo in the end credits scene.)

Bhooty Call 2025

 It's October, and the world is a scary place.  I think a monthlong celebration of the ghosts of Bollywood would help me feel better, though, so once again it's time for a Bhooty Call.

I need some dramatic relief.

 Son of Sardaar 2 (2025) is not a direct sequel to 2012's Son of Sardaar; it shares a title, some cast members and character names, a genre (romantic action-comedy), and a general theme of an upright Punjabi man navigating sometimes brutal family politics in the name of love.  Not all of the cast returns, however.  There's no Sanjay Dutt, and sadly there's no Juhi Chawla either.

 

 

 Jassi (Ajay Devgn) is a humble and devout farmer living a simple life with his mother (Dolly Ahluwalia).  Jassi is married, but his wife Dimple (Neeru Bajwa) has been living in Scotland for the last eleven years, and Jassi has been waiting all that time for a visa so he can finally join her.  And then the day finally arrives, Jassi flies to Edinburgh, and is reunited with Dimple, who introduces him to her boyfriend and announces that she wants a divorce.  Jassi is devastated, and spends the next month moping on the couch of a friend from his ancestral village.

Jassi can't couch-surf forever, though, and after a humorous misunderstanding in which Pakistani wedding dancer Rabia (Mrunal Thakur) stabs him with a fork, she invites him to stay with her troupe.  Rabia has her own problems; her husband Danish (Chunky Panday) has abandoned her, her stepdaughter Saba (Roshni Walia) is in love with spoiled rich boy Goggi (Sahil Mehta) but refuses to let him meet her family, and her friends and roommates Mehwish (Kubbra Sait) and Gul (Deepak Dobriyal) are . . . pretty great, actually.  But Rabia is under a lot of stress.

 Things get worse when Goggi proposes; his father Raja (Ravi Kishan) is a powerful man with a huge sheep farm, a dubious past, and a bunch of heavily armed henchmen.  Raja is also a proud Indian from Punjab, and due to his own overly complicated backstory, he will not accept a daughter-in-law who is Pakistani, or even worse, a dancer.  This calls for a wacky scheme, with Jassi roped in to act as Saba's father and Rabia's husband.  And because this is a movie the lies spiral out of control from there, with Jassi posing as a retired Indian Army Colonel presiding over  a family which is definitely not from Pakistan, while Raja and his dimwitted brothers try to catch them in a lie.  Jassi wants to run, but he is a Sardaar, and he cannot turn his back on people in need, or ignore his developing feelings for Rabia.

This is a very silly movie.  I say that a lot, and usually I mean that the movie is trying to be an insubstantial bit of comedic fluff, and should be judged on those terms.  Son of Sardaar 2 is a very silly movie, and that's a bad thing.  The movie has a heart, and the performances are good, but everything is buried under a thick layer of farce, and all of the jokes land with heavy thuds, one after the other.  The basic plot is fine, but the details are baroque and need to be fixed; it's hard to take the underlying romance seriously when everything is sidetracked by the tragic accidental death of Raja's English stepmother, the former pole dancer.  

 

Still, the city is gorgeous, though they never do explain how Rabia can afford her spacious apartment located just off the Royal Mile. 

 

Ship of Fools

 As the  title implies, Housefull 5 (2025) is the latest installment in the Housefull franchise.  It's not a literal sequel; the movies in the series will share some actors, character names, and a tendency toward broad comedy, but storylines and even genres will change from installment to installment.  Housefull 4 was a reincarnation comedy that doubled as a spoof of Indian mythological epics, while 5 is a murder mystery on a boat.  It was also released with two different endings, borrowing the central gimmick from Clue.  The mystery doesn't get in the way of the broad comedy, though.

Billionaire Rajneet Dobriyal (Rajneet Bedi) is hosting a birthday party on his private cruise ship as it sails from Newcastle to Scotland.  (The film doesn't specify where in Scotland.)  Before the cruise can get underway, though, Rajneet is discovered dead.  This isn't a big surprise, since the party is for Rajneet's 100th birthday, but son Dev (Fardeen Khan) and assorted members of the company and ship's crew decide to keep the death a secret until control of the company can be formally passed on to Dev, to protect the stock price.  However, Rajneet's lawyer Lucy (Soundarya Sharma) reveals that Rajneet left a will, which leaves everything to his other son Jolly.  None of them have met Jolly, but he will be joining them on the cruise, and he will be bringing his foreign-born wife.

 Sure enough, Jolly (Riteish Deshmukh) shows up on time, along with his wife Zara (Sonam Bajwa); she's from Afghanistan.  Then Jolly (Abhishek Bachchan) appears with his wife Shashikala (Jacqueline Fernandes) from Sri Lanka.  And then Jolly (Akshay Kumar) arrives, with his wife Kaanchi (Nargis Fakhri), from Nepal.  Dev asks the ship's doctor to perform blood tests, then the three Jollys are allowed to enjoy the ship while they wait for the results.

That night the ship's cook Pasta (Chunkey Pandey) slips something into everybody's drink, and the three Jollys wake up with the wrong people and no memory of what happened the night before.  But somebody has killed the ship's doctor, and the three Jollys are the natural suspects.

 The ship's head of security, Batuk Patel (Johnny Lever) locks the Jollys up, and they compare notes.  naturally, none of them are real, and none of them are married, so the six team up to solve the mystery before the ship reaches Scotland.  Meanwhile, Maya (Chitrangda Singh), the company's CFO, has called for help from her ex husband Baba (Jackie Shroff) and his partner Bhiddu (Sanjay Dutt), two maverick cops who play by their own rules.  It's a race to solve the mystery as the bodies pile up, with an extended Weekend at Bernies riff as the Jollys attempt to dispose of Ranjeet's body for reasons.  

 This is obviously a very silly movie; the Housefull franchise is nothing but very silly movies.  Some of the jokes hit better than others; Dutt and Shroff are a perfect parody of Indian movie cops in general and their own respective careers in particular, and Akshay-Jolly's blood feud with the ship's parrot is played perfectly straight.  (His rumble with two monkeys is less effective.)  Johnny Lever continues to be the King of this sort of broad comedy, mugging for the camera with style and skill.

However there's also a lot of focus on ogling the female cast members.  The treatment of lawyer Lucy is particularly egregious, as well as the scene where the Mrs. Jollys assure the audience and one another that the only possible way to sneak into the ship's medical center is by shimmying on their backs through the air ducts.  The Housefull series has always dabbled in sexual humor, but at times this comes across as a bit from The Benny Hill Show or Carry On Stabbing.  It's very much a Curate's Egg of a movie - good in parts, but I cannot vouch for the whole.