With Purani Haveli (1989), the Ramsay brothers attempted to recreate the success of Purana Mandir by making essentially the same movie, only with two
monsters, even more potential victims, and a stronger focus on the
star-crossed lovers than on actually explaining anything. The results
are . . . let’s say mixed.
Wealthy heiress Anita (Amita Nangia) lives with her uncle Kumar (Vijay Arora), his wife Seema (Neelam Mehra), and Seema’s sleazy brother Vikram (Tej Sapru). They are, naturally, slowly but surely embezzling her money, and are scheming to marry Anita to Vikram so that they can just take the money directly. Unfortunately for them, Anita has noticed that Vikram is a nasty little creep, and has given her heart to poor and allegedly hunky photographer Sunil (Deepak Parashar).
Kumar decides to buy a creepy old mansion for reasons which are never explained. While inspecting the place, the seller is crushed by a creepy animated metal statue, while Kumar wanders outside and through an exploding graveyard, only to be killed by the Beast, a monster which looks like it’s half Wolfman, half demonic golliwog.
Meanwhile, Seema and Vikram hire a gang of thugs to chase away Sunil. It doesn’t work, naturally, so Seema resorts to Plan B, and forces Anita to tell Sunil that she’s never loved him and is going to marry Vikram after all. Sunil believes her, because he has apparently never seen a movie before. Fortunately, his assistant Mangu (Satish Shah) and platonic gal-pal Shobha (Shubha) have seen movies before, and when Seema sends Anita, Vikram, and a small group of her friends and his henchman on a trip to the creepy old mansion, they convince Sunil to follow them.
The group settle in for a long stay. Vikram quickly shows his true colors and tries to attack Anita, but Sunil shows up at the last minute and beats him up. Then everybody goes back to the house, and the attempted rape is never mentioned again. That night, Vikram’s buddy Michael gets drunk and wanders the halls alone, only to be thrown out the window by the walking statue. The gang dig a shallow grave in the back yard, drop the body in, and go back to what they’re doing, rather than, say, calling the police or leaving the house.
After Michael’s death, things get kind of creepy. Someone (and I still have no idea who) keeps digging up Michael’s and Kumar’s bodies and leaving them around the house for the women to find. The Beast uses his Freddy Krueger powers to cause bad dreams and disturbing hallucinations. The men laugh off any concerns as silly women being silly, and they all decide to stay in the house for a few more days, despite the fact that somebody died.
At this point in the movie, horror doesn’t really seem to be much of a priority. Instead, Seema drives down to the mansion in order to scheme against Sunil and Anita, while Mangu gets his own lengthy subplot about his long lost identical twin brother, a bandit chief named Gangu. It isn’t until late in the film, after much plotting, romance, and identical bandit hijinks, that Vikram accidentally releases the Beast and scary stuff resumes in earnest.
Sometimes, I’ll watch a movie and spend the rest of the week wondering what happened. That’s not the case here; I know exactly what happened, I just can’t quite figure out why, or how. I’m geeky enough that when I watch this kind of movie, I want to be able to figure out what the rules are, and that’s just not possible here, because there’s not enough exposition. We do find out that the Beast is a Beast because of the curse on the house, but we never find out how the house became cursed in the first place, or where the murderous statue came from. And that’s just one of the nagging questions still bothering me. If the Beast is sealed beneath a crypt behind the house, how did it kill Kumar and the teenagers at the beginning of the movie? Who was moving the bodies around? Why did Kumar want the house in the first place, and why did Seema send Anita there? It makes my head hurt.
However, there are some things I liked about the movie. The big slow lumbering statue was treated as a big slow lumbering statue, able to kill people who are unsuspecting, drunk, or both, but not much of a threat if you’re able to run, and it had kind of a neat design. The romance plotline was predictable but not awful, and led to more songs than the average horror movie. And the comic relief was occasionally sort of funky; Satish Shah certainly seemed to enjoy chewing the scenery as the bandit king with a heart of gold.
If you like Ramsay style horror movies, this isn’t a bad choice. Just don’t expect it to make sense.
Wealthy heiress Anita (Amita Nangia) lives with her uncle Kumar (Vijay Arora), his wife Seema (Neelam Mehra), and Seema’s sleazy brother Vikram (Tej Sapru). They are, naturally, slowly but surely embezzling her money, and are scheming to marry Anita to Vikram so that they can just take the money directly. Unfortunately for them, Anita has noticed that Vikram is a nasty little creep, and has given her heart to poor and allegedly hunky photographer Sunil (Deepak Parashar).
Kumar decides to buy a creepy old mansion for reasons which are never explained. While inspecting the place, the seller is crushed by a creepy animated metal statue, while Kumar wanders outside and through an exploding graveyard, only to be killed by the Beast, a monster which looks like it’s half Wolfman, half demonic golliwog.
Meanwhile, Seema and Vikram hire a gang of thugs to chase away Sunil. It doesn’t work, naturally, so Seema resorts to Plan B, and forces Anita to tell Sunil that she’s never loved him and is going to marry Vikram after all. Sunil believes her, because he has apparently never seen a movie before. Fortunately, his assistant Mangu (Satish Shah) and platonic gal-pal Shobha (Shubha) have seen movies before, and when Seema sends Anita, Vikram, and a small group of her friends and his henchman on a trip to the creepy old mansion, they convince Sunil to follow them.
The group settle in for a long stay. Vikram quickly shows his true colors and tries to attack Anita, but Sunil shows up at the last minute and beats him up. Then everybody goes back to the house, and the attempted rape is never mentioned again. That night, Vikram’s buddy Michael gets drunk and wanders the halls alone, only to be thrown out the window by the walking statue. The gang dig a shallow grave in the back yard, drop the body in, and go back to what they’re doing, rather than, say, calling the police or leaving the house.
After Michael’s death, things get kind of creepy. Someone (and I still have no idea who) keeps digging up Michael’s and Kumar’s bodies and leaving them around the house for the women to find. The Beast uses his Freddy Krueger powers to cause bad dreams and disturbing hallucinations. The men laugh off any concerns as silly women being silly, and they all decide to stay in the house for a few more days, despite the fact that somebody died.
At this point in the movie, horror doesn’t really seem to be much of a priority. Instead, Seema drives down to the mansion in order to scheme against Sunil and Anita, while Mangu gets his own lengthy subplot about his long lost identical twin brother, a bandit chief named Gangu. It isn’t until late in the film, after much plotting, romance, and identical bandit hijinks, that Vikram accidentally releases the Beast and scary stuff resumes in earnest.
Sometimes, I’ll watch a movie and spend the rest of the week wondering what happened. That’s not the case here; I know exactly what happened, I just can’t quite figure out why, or how. I’m geeky enough that when I watch this kind of movie, I want to be able to figure out what the rules are, and that’s just not possible here, because there’s not enough exposition. We do find out that the Beast is a Beast because of the curse on the house, but we never find out how the house became cursed in the first place, or where the murderous statue came from. And that’s just one of the nagging questions still bothering me. If the Beast is sealed beneath a crypt behind the house, how did it kill Kumar and the teenagers at the beginning of the movie? Who was moving the bodies around? Why did Kumar want the house in the first place, and why did Seema send Anita there? It makes my head hurt.
However, there are some things I liked about the movie. The big slow lumbering statue was treated as a big slow lumbering statue, able to kill people who are unsuspecting, drunk, or both, but not much of a threat if you’re able to run, and it had kind of a neat design. The romance plotline was predictable but not awful, and led to more songs than the average horror movie. And the comic relief was occasionally sort of funky; Satish Shah certainly seemed to enjoy chewing the scenery as the bandit king with a heart of gold.
If you like Ramsay style horror movies, this isn’t a bad choice. Just don’t expect it to make sense.
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