No grannies were shoved in the making of this movie.

 Triple Seat (2019) opens with renowned lawyer Jehangir Irani (Rakesh Bedi) being interviewed on stage.  The interviewer asks him about which cases he won but wishes that he had lost, and Irani immediately becomes wistful and spins a tale of the time when three men broke into his house late at night to ask for legal advice.  Krushna (Ankush Chaudhari) starts telling his story, which means that after only a few minutes we're already two flashbacks in.

Krushna is a good guy who works hard to support his family.  He drives a van that operates as a sort of bus service for the neighborhood, and business is good. Krushna can be a bit naive, but once he gives his word on something he absolutely will not back down, so when he receives a desperate phone call from a young woman who claims to have been kidnapped asking that he buy some minutes for her cell phone so that she can call her family, he's happy to help.  

Krushna doesn't just pay for minutes, though. He goes straight to the police station and reports the kidnapping. Inspector Bahurao (Pravin Tarde) is suspicious, and he's proven right almost immediately when the girl, calling herself Meera (Shivani Surve), calls to thank Krushna; it turns out the kidnapping was all just a college prank.

Against all odds, Krushna and Meera become "missed call friends," basically pen pals but with phone calls instead of letters. They agree to never meet, but tell each other about their lives. Meera talks about her abusive and controlling father (Vaibhav Mangale), while Krushna shares his struggles with his own widowed and alcoholic father (Vidyadhar Joshi.)

Eventually there is good news!  Krushna's family have found a match for his younger sister (Shilpa Thakre), and the families got along so well that everyone agreed to a double wedding, with Krushna marrying the groom's beautiful sister Vrunda (Pallavi Patil).  Krushna invites Meera to the wedding ceremony, but Meera reminds him that they were never supposed to meet, and jokes that if she comes Krushna will end up marrying her instead. Unfortunately her father overhears that part of the conversation, hits her, breaks her phone, and threatens to marry her off in two days.

Krushna's engagement ceremony starts well, but then Inspector Bahurao shows up to arrest him for kidnapping a girl named  Tanvi; Krushna is the last person to have called her, he's been calling her for ages, and it quickly becomes clear that "Meera" has been Tanvi all along.  Her parents beg him to release their daughter, but when she arrives at the police station, there's a whole lot of shouting.

Bahurao solves the problem as best he can: he's adopting Tanvi, effective immediately, her father isn't allowed to hit anyone, and because he assumes that Tanvi and Krushna are in love, he insists that they get married right away and won't listen to any arguments otherwise.

So Krushna is married to the wrong woman, his sister's marriage is off, and his entire family blames Tanvi.  The new couple take different paths to figure out what to do. Krushna and his friends break into the home of respected lawyer Jehangir Irani, closing one of the flashbacks, and Irani suggests a mutually agreed no fault divorce.  They'll have to wait six months, they can't tell anyone until the divorce goes through, and he needs to marry Vrunda immediately afterwards.

Tanvi talks to her mother, who tells her that marriages are made in heaven and she needs to make this marriage work, adding that the only way to do that is with the power of unconditional love. Tanvi is in a classic Bollywood romance situation,living in her beloved's house under false pretenses,and tasked with winning his family over, though with the added difficulty that she needs to win her beloved over as well.  So she Shah Rukhs the heck out of things, making everybody's  lives better even if that means giving Krushna his divorce. Krushna starts to waver, but he took a vow, and he will fulfill  it and marry Vrunda and get his sister married as well, even though both matches were arranged and nobody else is that hung up on it.

This is romance as puzzle, an "unsolved case,"as Irani puts it.  They may try to build a little suspense, but there's no question of what the end will be, so you watch to find out how they get there.  And on those terms, it's a pleasant little mystery.

Bhooty Call: Machchli Jal Ki Rani Hai

 

 (No screenshots this week due to technical difficulties.)

 Machchli Jal Ki Rani Hai (2014) has all the trappings of a traditional Bollywood haunted house movie, but like Bhoothnath, the genre swerves away form horror and in some unexpected directions.  Unlike Bhoothnath, though, I'm not sure that the genre mixing is on purpose.

The movie doesn't open with the haunted house, it opens with Action Exorcist Ugra (Deepraj Rana) attempting to drive a spirit out of the body of a young girl. The attempt involves more wire-fu than you usually see in exorcisms, as well as a chase through the countryside.In the end, though, Ugra fails.  The girl dies,and the ghost retaliates by brutally killing Ugra's entire family. He's promptly arrested, but on the advice of psychiatrist Bhatnagar, he's declared insane and sent to a very nice asylum.

Years later, Bhatnagar needs Ugra's help, so he visits the asylum and Ugra is released into his company.  As they drive away, Bhatnagar fills the audience and the exorcist in on the important backstory with a long flashback.

Bhatnagar's daughter Ayesha (Swara Bhaskar) is married to Uday (Bhanu Uday), and they have a young son named Sunny (Yug Mahnot).  A few months ago Ayesha was driving recklessly and caused an accident which killed a woman. Soon after, Uday was transferred to Jabalpur in order to reopen a factory; Uday is from Jabalpur so he's delighted to be reunited with his old friends, while Ayesha could really use a change. The family move into a company guesthouse,and at first everything is going well.

Sunny quickly makes friends with Guddi (Roshni Walia).  Ayesha meets Guddi's parents; mother Urmi (Reema Debnath) is nice, but father Manohar (Murli Sharma) is surly and angrily insists that his wife and child need to stay in the house and Ayesha needs to stay away.  

And then . . . well, it's a haunted house movie, and they tend to be fairly predictable.  Ayesha starts hearing noises and seeing things around the house, and Uday refuses to believe her, or even really listen, even when people start dying.  There's a fatal accident at Uday's work, then Mangla (Sakha Kalyani) the maid dies in a freak antler accident, followed by the exorcist Mangla brought Ayesha to see.  Sunny is acting strangely. Ayesha is acting really strangely.  Bhatnagar visits and also refuses to listen to Ayesha, telling her it's all in her head even though the beginning of the movie clearly established that he believes in ghosts.

Before long, Sunny is missing and Ayesha is possessed and on a rampage.  At this point Bhatnagar remembers that he believes in ghosts, and also that he knows an Action Exorcist, so the flashback ends and the movie loops back to the beginning. Ugra confronts the possessed Ayesha, leading to the dramatic climax.

This is standard Bollywood haunted house stuff, and works in all of the familiar beats, including the scene when a passerby catches Ayesha eating something weird.  (The family's pet goldfish, just to loop back to the nursery rhyme that gives the movie its title.)  There are two twists, though.

The first twist is minor but clever; ghosts in this movie are more mobile than usual, so Ayesha and Uday's house isn't actually haunted - it's the place next door!  It doesn't have a huge impact on the plot, but it does add an extra sense of danger, with no real safe places.

That sense of danger is immediately undercut by the other twist: this isn't really shot like a horror movie, it's shot like an action movie, with bright lighting and surprisingly kinetic exorcism scenes.  At times it's practically a superhero movie; Ugra refers to his origin story at the beginning of the movie, and he is walking around with Doctor Strange's cape.  (Or its Indian equivalent.)

I'm honestly not sure if they were shooting for action horror or just stumbled into it.  It means the movie is never quite as scary as it wants to be, but the genre mix is at least interesting.

Bhooty Call: Bhoothnath

 Bhoothnath (2008) is a movie of two parts.  The film opens with the classic Bollywood haunted house scenario.  Aditya (Shah Rukh Khan) and Anjali (Juhi Chawla) are an attractive and modern young couple who have just moved in to a house on the outskirts of Goa with their young son Banku (Aman Siddiqui).  It's only when they move in that they realize that the house is supposed to be haunted, though the audience has already glimpsed the ghost driving people away.

As is typical in these films, Aditya has a job that takes him out of town; he's the chief engineer on a cruise ship, and he promptly sails away, leaving Anjali to deal with Banku, an oversized house with a very dangerous staircase, and Anthony (Rajpal Yadav), the alcoholic homeless man who used to squat there. She's already overwhelmed just getting the place cleaned when nobody is willing to work there, and that's before she realizes that Banku has a new invisible friend.

But this isn't a horror movie, it's a children's movie about a boy and his magical friend, so the ghost isn't a threat.  Banku manages to out-prank Bhoothnath, the spirit of Kailash Nath (Amitabh Bachchan) in short order, and after the requisite fall down the stairs the two become fast friends.  Which is good, because someone has to help Anjali with the house, as well as Banku's mean principal (Satish Shah) and classroom frenemy Jojo (Devandra).

It's all very by the numbers, though during the school sports day Bhoothnath refuses to use his ghostly powers to help Banku beat Jojo, instead encouraging the boy to work harder for what he wants.  Bhoothnath is full of good advice, actually, much of it revolving around forgiveness.  He helps the boy make peace with Jojo, then reconcile with Anjali after the mother and son have a nasty argument.

And that's when Vijay Nath (Priyanshu Chatterjee) returns to Goa.  Vijay is Kailash's son, and he's here to sell the family home; he's not a monster, and is quite happy to find Aditya and Anjali another place to live, but Banku doesn't want to go, and Bhoothnath absolutely refuses to lose his new family.

Normally this kind of problem is resolved through magical pranks, but the movie has already gone to great lengths to set up the importance of forgiveness and reconciliation.  Aditya returns, because it's time for the movie to enter its second part, as the senior actors all earn their keep with an emotional story about death and moving on.  The second part is pretty solid; it's a very filmi and melodramatic story, and well within the respective skill sets of Bachchan, Chawla and Khan, but it's a heck of a tonal shift, and Banku and the more comic actors like Satish Shah and Rajpal Yadav either fade into the background or vanish entirely.

Whether the movie is a children's fantasy or an emotional melodrama, though, one thing remains consistent: it is not scary at any point.  Some of the trappings of horror appear, but it's a story about family dynamics in a large but surprisingly cozy house.  They really need to do something about those stairs, though.

Bhooty Call: Stree 2

 Stree 2: Sarkate Ka Aatank (2024) is a direct sequel to 2018's Stree, and it starts with one of the better recaps of the previous movie I've seen.  The town of Chanderi is celebrating an annual religious festival, and Rudra (Pankaj Tripathi) sings a song about Stree (Flora Saini in the last film, this time played by Bhoomi Rajgor), a terrifying ghost that once haunted the streets of Chanderi, abducting men and leaving behind nothing but a pile of clothes, until the town's champion Vicky (Rajkummar Rao) manages to cut off Stree's braid and then . . . treats her with love and respect, which is what she wanted all along.  It's a fun number, and a band of kids act out the events as Rudra describes them, but it does leave out some key details.

Vicky hasn't forgotten anything, though.  He's gone back to work as a ladies tailor, but he's still pining for the beautiful, mysterious, and so far nameless woman (Shraddha Kapoor) who helped him every step of the way, even though his family and friends keep telling him that she is never, ever coming back after she took Stree's severed braid and vanished.  Sidekick Bittu (Aparshakti Khurana) has definitely moved on, and is now sort of dating the hip and modern Chitti (Anya Singh).

Rudra receives a mysterious letter which contains extra pages of the Chanderi Puran, a mysterious history of Chanderi which proved useful in the last movie.  The pages provide more detail about Stree's death, and include a warning that "He is coming back."  Who is coming back?  They find out when a terrifying headless ghost kidnaps Chitti.  It turns out that the young women of the town haven't been going off to the big city after all, they've been spirited away by the new ghost.  And the Chanderi Puran holds the answer - the ghost is the spirit of Chandrabhan (no actor listed because he's a great big CGI thing that shouts and screams rather than speaking.)  Chandrabhan was once the village headman in Chanderi, and was an abusive and womanizing drunk who brutally murdered Stree and her love as their young daughter watched; after rising from the dead Stree returned the favor by decapitating her tormentor.

Chandrabhan is specifically targeting "modern" women, and he has a very broad definition of modern; having a job or a Facebook account is enough to be added to his collection.  The women in town do their best to avoid notice, but a group of them approach Vicky and tell him to do something about the situation; he is the town's destined protector, and Chandrabhan only returned because Vicky convinced Stree to move on, so it's his fault.

(As a sidenote, the women in Chandrabhan's collection have their heads shaved, are dressed in modest saris, and are essentially placed in supernatural cold storage.  Chandrabhan draws a lot of inspiration from the monsters found in old Ramsay Brothers horror films, and particularly the headless demon sorcerer from Purana Mandir, but the movie completely avoids the exploitative tendencies of that era of Bollywood horror.)

There's some good news: Vicky keeps seeing the Woman, and the others eventually see her too.  The group decides that they need to bring back Stree to deal with the new ghost, and to find Stree they need Jana (Abhishek Banerjee), who was possessed by Stree in the last movie.  Jana is currently living happily in Delhi with his cousin Bhaskar (Varun Dhawan), who is a werewolf from a different movie.  They bring Jana back and set him loose in the ruins outside of town, which proves to be an utter disaster.

The Woman has another plan - she gives Vicky a magic dagger and tells him to look Chandrabhan in the eyes and stab him in the heart.  To lure him out they turn to Shama (Tamannah Bhatia), a famous dancer and Rudra's old friend, to perform a spectacular dance number in the heart of the town.  And it's also an utter disaster, ending with Shama kidnapped and most of the men in town possessed by Chandrabhan's rigid rules about gender roles.  Vicky's only real superpower is listening to women, which doesn't seem like it will be that helpful.

Stree 2 isn't just a sequel to the original, it's a part of the Maddock Supernatural Universe, which also includes werewolf movie Bhediya and Munjya, which features a different sort of ghost.  This is not a cinematic universe that requires a lot of homework, though.  It;s an effective monster mash in its own right, like House of Frankenstein but focused on archetypes form Indian horror cinema, with the Ramsay-like Chandrabhan matched against the more modern J-horror inspired Stree, and there's enough context provided to explain the Wolfman who shows up at the end to help.

And it's also an effective monster mash with something to say, since the real villain here is a narrow and oppressive view of society that winds up hurting everyone, including the men it's supposed to be empowering.

Or possibly the real villain is Dracula, since Bhaskar drops some pretty broad hints at the end.

Bhooty Call: Papi Gudia

 Papi Gudia (1996) opens with a near riot at the police station; Mumbai has been hit by a wave of child kidnappings, and the people want answers now.  Inspector Yadav (Tinnu Anand) has just been assigned to the case, but he already has a plan.  And that plan is apparently to wait for a lucky break; a fearless beggar woman (the IMDB doesn't list the actress, which is a shame since she is the film's true hero) happens to interrupt the kidnapper, and gives chase.  She's on foot and he's in a car, so she doesn't catch him, but she is able to provide a decent description to the police.

The kidnapper is Charan Raj (Shakti Kapoor), also known as Channi.  Channi is a skilled necromancer, and he just has to sacrifice one more child in order to gain ultimate power and rule the world.  he kidnaps another child, and Yadav has another incredibly lucky break - they literally bump into each other on the street.  Yadav recognizes the man form the police sketch, and they have a long chase/gunfight which ends in a toy store, when a seriously wounded Channi uses a long ritual to transfer his soul into a nearby doll, just before the store blows up.

The kidnapped child is Raju (Master Amar.)  He;s fine, but the police have some trouble contacting his family.  His only relative is his sister Karishma (Karisma Kapoor), and she's a popular singer, currently blowing most of the film' special effects budget in a big dance number.  They finally manage to contact her, she picks her brother up, and the police go on their way after urging Karishma to hire a babysitter next time, for heaven's sake.

Karishma has a show the very next night, and her friend Mona (Shraddha Verma) agrees to watch Raju.  Raju doesn't want to stay with Mona, so Karishma takes him out for a fun afternoon to cheer him up after the whole "attempted kidnapping by an evil necromancer" thing.  She buys him a talking doll called Channi, and Raju immediately becomes very attached, but the good news is he's now fine with Mona watching him for the night, so Karishma goes off to her next show.

And then the murders begin.

Mona first; she annoyed Raju by turning off the TV when Channi wanted to watch the news.  When Karishma returns, the house is full of policemen, led by Inspector Vijay Saxena (Avinash Wadhavan), the handsome rich kid who broke her heart years ago.  Vijay explains the situation: Mona fell, or was thrown, out the window after being hit in the head with a very small hammer.  Vijay suspects foul play, and all signs point to Raju, but Karishma flatly refuses to let the police interview him.

Inspector Yadav dies next, then the heroic but unnamed beggar woman.  Every time Raju is seen in the area, doll in tow.  The audience has seen the murders happen.  We know that Channi is the killer, but Vijay is convinced that Raju is involved, while Karishma is convinced that Vijay is pursuing some sort of vendetta against her.

But the thing is, Vijay is right.  Raju is absolutely involved.  When Karishma asks him about Mona, he explains that she had to die because Channi didn't like her and she wouldn't let him watch the news.  Raju skips school to take Channi to Yadav's house.  Raju steals Karishma's car while she's onstage so that Channi can use it to run over the old woman.  At best Raju is an accessory to multiple murders.  he certainly needs psychological help, and he never gets it; nobody even tries to take away the doll that he's clearly obsessed with.

The special effects are an obvious issue here; the movie doesn't use computer graphics or stop motion to bring Channi to life, they just manipulate the doll for the camera, using lighting and camera angles to make him look sinister.  This can be very effective in theory, but here it's not.  It's also not very practical during any sort of fight scene, so they turn down the lights and put a small actor (possibly a child) in a costume, before giving up entirely and turning Channi back into Shakti Kapoor.  The effects are silly, but that's fine; audiences will happily suspend their disbelief for the right story.

The problem is, it's not the right story.  The writing is a mess.  Everything runs on coincidence, things happen just because it's time for a new plot point, and the heroes and villains are both wildly incompetent.  Before the climax Vijay visits Channi's magical mentor (Mohan Joshi) and learns his secret weakness, which he does not use. Instead, the ending relies on coincidence (again) and blatantly rips off some of the lesser Hammer Dracula's.

 It's not all bad news.  The music is generally good or at least catchy, and nobody sells a dance number like Karisma Kapoor.  But this is a very silly movie.

Bhooty Call 2024

 It's that time again.  The nights are getting longer, the air is getting colder, and shadows start to gather in the corners of the room.  It's the spooky season.  Time for a bhooty call.

Four funerals, no wedding.

 Dil Bechara (2020) is the official Bollywood adaptation of the Hollywood movie The Fault in Our Stars, based on the novel by bestselling author, philanthropist, internet educator, and original Nerdfighter John Green, and like a lot of Green's work it is by turns absurd, heartfelt, angry, and grappling with mortality.

"Absurd, heartfelt, angry, and grappling with mortality" is also a good description of Kizie Basu (Sanjana Sanghi), a young college student with thyroid cancer.  Kizie lives a constrained life, watched over by her overprotective mother Sunila (Swastika Mukherjee) and laid back father Abhiraj (Saswata Chatterjee, playing a good guy for obce), along with her constant companion, the oxygen tank she calls Pushpinder.  Kizie wants a normal life, but she's tied to a neverending routine of medication and hospital visits.  She wants answers, but she knows she's not going to get them, so instead she crashes random funerals, hoping to form a connection with the bereaved so she can avoid thinking of the people she'll leave behind.

And then Kizie meets Manny, properly Immanuel Rajkumar Junior (Suishant Singh Rajput), filming an amateur movie on the street with his friend JP (Sahil Vaid.)  Manny is cocky and almost deliberately annoying, and Kizie takes an instant dislike to him, but they just keep meeting.  He turns out to be a student at her college, returning after a long absence, and he takes over the school talent show in order to perform the title song.  he and JP also show up at Kizie's cancer support group, and for good reason: JP has already lost one eye to cancer and is going to lose the other one soon, while Manny lost a leg to osteosarcoma and is now in remission.  

Cancer is not the only thing that connects them, though.  Manny is an enormous fan of Superstar Rajnikanth, and the movie he and JP are making is a Rajnikanth pastiche.  Kizie isn't really into movies, but she loves music, especially the work of the reclusive songwriter Abhimanyu Veer.  Manny wants Kizie to play the female lead in the movie, while Kizie wants to share the music she loves.  They make a deal.

It's the music that they really bond over, especially Abhimanyu's final song, which was unfinished and ends abruptly.  Kizie in particular becomes fixated on meeting Abhimanyu and asking him why the song was never finished, so that at least she'll have an answer about something.  But Abhimanyu has vanished completely.  Meanwhile, she and Manny drift into a sweet and awkward romance, and adopt the Tamil word "Seri," meaning "Okay," as their private way of telling each other "Don't forget to be awesome."

And then things happen.  Manny discovers that Abhimanyu is living in Paris, and even manages to email him, but the composer won't answer any questions unless they ask in person.  They plan to go to Paris, and then Kizie's health suddenly declines.  After some drama, they go to Paris anyway, and meet Abhimanyu (Saif Ali Khan), who turns out to be a nasty, nihilistic jerk who doesn't mind taunting a young cancer patient about the inevitability of death to  her face.  Kizie and Manny are left to find their own meaning in the world, but there is more bad news to come, because this is a story that was only ever going to end one way.

Sushant Singh Rajput died on June 14, 2020, and Dil Bechara was released on the streaming service Disney+ Hotstar on July 24, just over a month later.  The movie never made it to theaters because of COVID restrictions.  Rajput's death has kind of overshadowed the film; it's better known as his last movie than for its own merits.  And if it was a different movie it would be more of a problem, but this is a movie about death and legacy and what we leave behind, a movie that asks questions even though it knows there won't be any answers.  It's absurd and heartfelt and angry, and it grapples with mortality because we all grapple with mortality.

So I'm not going to worry about whether this is a good movie or not; I enjoyed it, and I am happy to leave it at that.  However, Dil Bechara also features a good example of the double standard you often see in Bollywood casting.  Sushant Singh Rajput and Swastika Mukherjee had worked together before, in 2015's Detective Byomkesh Bakshi.  Rajput played the titular detective, while Mukherjee played the sultry femme fatale Anguri Devi.  The actors are close to the same age, but men can keep playing the young hero for decades while women are quickly shunted into roles as mothers and then grandmothers.