When I'm feeling blue, I like to think about the time that the London News Review accused me of being Andy Kaufman.  It's a weird claim to internet fame, but I'll take it.

Bhooty Call - Pari

Two movies called "Pari" were released last year, one in India and one in Pakistan, and after the first five minutes of Pari (2018) I realized that I was watching the wrong movie.  This wasn't the blockbuster horror film starring Anushka Sharma as a mysterious woman who may be a supernatural being, it was the other one.

Pari begins like a lot of ghost movies begin - a young family, in this case Shehram (Junaid Akhtar), his wife Mehwish (Azekah Daniel), and their young daughter Pari (Khushi Maheen), move into a new house deep in the woods.  Shehram works, leaving Mehwish and Pari alone in the big creepy house all day, and spooky things begin to happen . . . eventually.  the first half of the movie is much more concerned with Shehram and Mehwish having solemn conversations about the move and carefully avoiding the topic of their struggling marriage. 

Things do finally start to get spooky, though.  Dead birds litter the ground around a nearby tree.  The rocking chair moves by itself.  Somet unseen force snaps the foosball table in half.  There's a ghostly blue boy that only Pari can see who sits in the top bunk of her bed  and drinks her milk.  And a homeless man (Saleem Mairaj) sits outside the property, stares at the family, and proclaims that Pari is the devil and needs to be thrown out of the house.

Spoiler: homeless guy is right.  Pari terrifies an elderly professor (Qavi Khan) who visits the family in time for her (deeply depressing) birthday party, and the professor conveniently drops dead right after asking Mehwish who Pari's real father is.  Mehwish does not answer, which means that while the supernatural spookiness is escalating, we also get a lot more solemn conversations in which husband and wife studiously avoid actually saying anything.

What I am saying is, this movie is slow and very, very serious.  It's like the Pakistani remake of  the Omen, directed by Ingmar Bergman.  The actors do their best, but with all the padding they really don't have much to work with.  I will say that the movie was shot in Ayubia national park, and the occasional glimpses we see of the forest are impressive.  Most of the time, though, you can't see the forest for the plodding.

Bhooty Call - Arundhati

Arundhati (2009) features one of those large and happy extended families that were so common in the Indian movies of the Nineties.  They're rich, but it hasn't spoiled them, and even the servants are considered part of the family.  Everybody loves each other, everybody's happy, everybody's kind, and everybody's bound and determined to care for and protect Arundhati (Anushka Shetty), a literal princess and the only girl born into the family for generations.  Unfortunately, all these noble virtues get many of them killed.

On the eve of her engagement to Rahul (Arjan Bajwa), Arundhati returns to her ancestral home in Gadwal, only to find that her warm and wonderful loving family are keeping one of the servants chained up in the back yard.  Apparently while delivering wedding invitations his car was forced off the road, forcing him to seek shelter in the family's ruined castle, and something happened to drive him mad.  The plan is to bring him to Anwar (Sayaji Shinde), the local fakir, to drive out any evil spirits, but Arundhati is a modern skeptical girl, and is not impressed by Anwar's rather brutal exorcism technique, so they drag the poor fellow home again.

That night, Arundhati gets a call from rahul, asking her to meet him at the creepy ruined fort.  She doesn't know she's in a horror movie yet, and so she accepts.  And, well, she finds out that she's in a horror movie.  In the ruined dance studio stands a makeshift mausoleum, with a creepy voice demanding that she let him out.  Arundhati responds like an angry queen, loudly proclaiming that she will never let  him out, and it looks like she's about to pick a fight right then and there when Anwar arrives, drags her away, and demonstrates that yes, ghosts absolutely do exist.

And it is obviously time for some backstory.  Eighty years ago, Arundhati's great grandmother Arundhati (Divya Nagesh) was a child princess, already renowned for her martial skills, courage, and wisdom.  her older sister (I cannot find the actor's name - not cool, IMDB!) is married to Pasupathi (Sonu Sood), who is the kind of decadent aristocrat that would make Lord Byron blush.

Pasupathi has absolutely no self control.  He's such a monster that he rapes and murders Arundhati's blind dance teacher (Leena Sidhu) in the palace, but when Arundhati goes to her father and demansd that Pasupathi be exiled, she is refused.  her father explains that as long as her sister alive and married to the blackguard, he's safe.  The sister overhears and takes matters into her own hands, killing herself.  At which point Arundhati orders that Pasupathi be beaten to death and then dragged out of town by his own horse.

Unfortunately, Pasupathi isn't quite dead.  He's saved by a band of Aghori who teach him dark magic, and seven years later he returns for revenge.  By this time, Arundhati has grown into Aushka Shetty, and she manages to defeat the unstoppable sorcerer using only a pair of scarves and the techniques she learned from her blind dance teacher, and also a pair of swords and a chandelier. Because of Pasupathis's magic, though, it's too dangerous to just kill him; instead, they build a mausoleum around him, entombing him alive without even a drop of Amontillado. 

Meanwhile, the mad servant escapes and frees the ghost.  And Pasupathi - well, he doesn't so much haunt the modern Arundhati as stalk her.  Fortunately, the previous Arundhati has planned for this, sacrificing her life to create a weapon (made of her own spine!) that can kill the ghost once and for all.  Unfortunately, the ghost knows about the weapon, and it's willing to kill everybody Arundhati loves in order to keep her from it.

In a lot of ways this movie is a throwback to the old Ramsay Brothers horror flicks; there's a lot of blood, and when Pasupathi's a round the camera gets a bit male gazey.  It's the Arundhatis that keep things fresh.  The Twenties version is an awesome, indomitable warrior queen with awesome fighting skills, while the modern version does not have awesome skills, but is still willing to walk through Hell in order to protect the people she loves.  Once again Shetty puts in two distinct and memorable performances. 

And I will confess, it's nice, every now and then, to see a ghost who can be defeated with a spinesword and a Glasgow kiss, rather than having to complete his unfulfilled desires.  (Especially since the unfulfilled desires are so horrible.)

Bhooty Call - Bhaagamathie

Bhaagamathie (2018) seems like two movies in one.  The first movie is a political thriller.  In order to frame honest politician Eshwar Prasad (Jayaram), a cabal of crooked politicians arrange for his former assistant Chanchala (Anushka Shetty), now in jail for murdering her fiance Shakti (Unni Mukundan), to be transferred to a ruined castle where she can be interrogated by CBI officer Vaishnavi Natarajan (Asha Sarath) and local police officer Sampath (Murli Sharma), who also happens to be Shakti's brother and really shouldn't be involved in the case at all.  When she's not being interrogated, Chanchala is free to roam the creepy castle totally alone; the police seem to be hoping to Yellow Wallpaper a confession out of her.

At night, though, the movie changes.  The castle isn't entirely empty . . . Chanchala and a small group of comic-relief policemen are terrorized by an escalating series of supernatural events.  Strange sounds, mysterious books, a crazy old man who somehow managed to wander through security long enough to make sinister predictions, and then Chanchala is attacked by an invisible assailant.  Before too long, she's speaking in an unknown language and calling herself Bhaagmathie, Queen and rightful ruler of the palace, and swearing vengeance on her long-dead general Chandrasenan.  This complicates the ongoing interrogation.

Between the Baahubali movies, Arundhati, and Rudhramadevi, Anushka Shetty has developed quite a talent for playing angry queens.  But while the character of Bhaagamathie is spooky bombastic fun, and I will never get tired of Shetty promising to rain horrible vengeance on her enemies, her performance as Chanchala is far more interesting.  At different times, she's brave, terrified, loyal desperate, and ultimately not what she seems.  Almost nobody in the movie is quite what they seem.  The movie itself isn't quite what it seems, either.  Despite the presence of the angry ghost, it's as much film noir as it is horror, and the real monsters are very human.

Too much toon, and not enough loony.

Toonpur Ka Superhero tells the story of a Bollywood actor who is suddenly pulled into a world of living cartoons. From the premise, it sounds like it’s going to be Who Framed Rajiv Rabbit, and it is, sort of, if you replace Bob Hoskins with Ajay Devgan and swap out Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse for a bunch of characters that nobody has ever heard of.

You might think that Bollywood superstar Aditya Kumar (Ajay Devgan) has it all, but look closer and . . . well, you’d probably still be right. He has fame, fortune, a loving and only slightly crazy wife named Priya (Kajol), and two beautiful children. The only cloud on the Kumar horizon is Aditya’s relationship with his son Kabir (Ameya Pandya); Kabir is so upset about his father missing the school’s track and field day again that he stomps off the track in the middle of his race, and later accuses his father of being a “fake hero” who lets his stuntmen do all the work.

Now, if this were an American movie, then the dad (probably played by Tim Allen) would have forgotten all about his son’s sporting event until the very last minute, leading to a desperate race across town only to arrive a second too late. Not here, though; Aditya does everything he can, short of throwing a diva tantrum and storming off the set, to see his son run, he just doesn’t quite make it. That’s one of the nice things about this movie; the adults consistently behave like adults.

Meanwhile, the cartoon inhabitants of Toonpur have a problem. Ever since the good king Tooneshwar was overthrown by his treacherous general Jagaaro, the good hearted Devtoons have been oppressed by the mischievous Toonasurs. The Devtoons need a hero, and one of their number, a young Bollywood fan named Bolly, suggests his favorite action hero, Aditya Kumar.

The Devtoons send a couple of their number into the real world to kidnap Aditya. They do, and once he realizes that he’s in Toonapur . . . well, you could probably write it yourself. There are a few crazy cartoon hijinks, and Aditya comes to care for his new cartoon friends, leading them to battle and finally facing Jagaaro in a video game which has all the excitement of watching your little sister play Tomb Raider.

The inhabitants of Toonapur are all original characters, created for this movie. The Devtoons are all based on Bollywood stereotypes – there’s the aforementioned starstruck Punjabi boy, the overbearing filmi ma, the lazy policeman, the meek South Indian accountant, the perpetually lovestruck damsel, and so on. The Toonasurs are a bit more varied – they’re mostly stock Bollywood thugs, but they do have a Sumo wrestler, a caveman, and a shameless Jessica Rabbit ripoff.

The problem with the Devtoons isn’t that they’re new characters, it’s that none of them are particularly interesting. It’s like watching a movie about the supporting cast of a Bugs Bunny short. They don’t act like cartoons, they act like . . . well, like a random assortment of Bollywood stereotypes. In the fight scenes, it’s Aditya who takes advantage of cartoon physics.

The sole exception, the one cartoon character who actually behaves like a cartoon character, is Rubdoot, cartoon god of death (the name’s a pretty good pun) and Aditya’s biggest fan. (Sorry, Bolly.) Rubdoot is genuinely loony, and his big scene is a high point, but he doesn’t get much screen time at all.

It’s a shame that the cartoon world is so bland, because the scenes set in the real world are actually pretty good. Aditya is written as a grown up who’s trying to do his best, rather than as an arrested adolescent who needs to recapture the wonder of something or other, and he displays a great chemistry with his film family. Ajay Devgan is one of nature’s great straight men, but he needs someone else to deliver the punchlines, and that doesn’t happen here.

You can tell they're twins because they have the same mustache.

Twin movies are fairly common in Bollywood, and they tend to follow the same basic formula. Identical twins are separated at birth. One twin grows up poor and feisty, raised by humble working folk. The other twin grows up wealthy and meek, terrorized by evil rich relatives who are after their money, though the rich twin usually also has a good-hearted but vulnerable relative that they need to protect. Just when it seems all hope is lost, the twins accidentally trade places, with the poor twin overcoming the villains, the rich twin developing a spine, and everybody gaining a love interest. Kishen Kanhaiya (1990) follows this formula as well, but with some surprising tweaks.

The film begins just as you might expect; tragic birth, dead mother, one twin spirited away to be raised by the midwife, while the other is left with his wealthy and now widowed father, Sunderdas (Shreeram Lagoo). While Sunderdas is a devoted parent, he’s overwhelmed, and decides to marry Kamini (Bindu), the sister of his employee Gendamal (Amrish Puri). Gendamal and Kamini are, of course, evil, and soon Gendamal arranges for Sunderdas to take a convenient fall, leaving him mute and paralyzed. Thanks to a complicated will, though, Gendamal needs to keep Sunderdas and baby Kishen alive until Kishen’s 24th birthday, then force the young man to sign over the property. And in order to make this possible, Gendamal and Kamini raise the boy through terror and abuse. By the time he grows into an adult (and is played by Anil Kapoor), Kishen is basically a servant, completely cowed by his uncle, stepmother, and her illegitimate son Mahesh (Dalip Tahil).

Kanhaiya (Anil Kapooor), on the other hand, was raised by the midwife (Subha Khote), and has grown up fearless, lazy, and a bit shady, but basically good hearted. Kanhaiya is obsessed with movies, and spends his days at the movie theater, dressed in fancy clothes borrowed from his best friend Lobo (Johnny Lever). After inadvertently picking a fight with a much larger man, his filmi fisticuffs catch the eye of fellow cinemaniac Anju (Madhuri Dixit), daughter of wealthy and cranky businessman Vidya Charan (Saeed Jaffrey), who happens to be a close friend of Gendamal.

And at this point, with the characters clearly established, that you’d expect the twins to switch places. But no, not yet. Both brothers have fully developed romantic subplots under their own identities, rather than meeting their love interests while switched. Kishen falls for milkmaid Radha (Shilpa Shirodkar), and surprisingly, Gendamal is all for the match, figuring that a wife would help keep Kishen docile, and an educated woman would be harder to control.

Kanhaiya, meanwhile, grows closer to Anju, who assumes that he’s also the child of a rich family. While pursuing this relationship. Kanhaiya casually and repeatedly humiliates Anju’s “uncle” Sridhar (Ranjeet), a business associate of her father’s. Sridhar has an unhealthy interest in Anju, and is nasty enough to expose Kanhaiya’s poverty, have the young man brutally beaten, kill his adopted mother, and then shoot him in the head.

Kishen, meanwhile, suddenly grows a spine and refuses to mark the papers transferring control of the family fortune, because Radha doesn’t want him to. Gendamal does not take this refusal well, and orders Mahesh to kill Kishen and dump his body in the sea. And then, with Kishen presumed dead and Kanhaiya’s life in ruines, Kanhaiya’s adoptive father explains the switch, and Kanhaiya deliberately assumes Kishen’s identity in order to root out the villains and perhaps discover what happened to his twin.

Kishen is not really dead, of course. Anju discovers him wandering the city street and thinks he’s Kanhaiya; he cannot contradict her, because he has amnesia. Anju tries to help him recover his memories by dressing up as Raj Kapoor, but surprisingly it doesn’t work.

Kishen Kanhaiya hits many of the same story beats as, say, Seeta Aur Geeta, but it steers clear of some of the twin movie cliches. (Kanhaiya lets all the nice people know who he is as soon as possible, for instance, so there’s no tearful rejection by the family he’s trying to save.) It’s an old story, but different enough to be interesting, and the cast is full of people I like, so I thoroughly enjoyed this movie.

Here’s to you, Mrs. . . does she even have a last name?

I love Bollywood DVD clearance sales. I can get stacks of movies for as little as 49 cents apiece, and because they’re often movies starring nobody I’ve ever heard of, and I have no information on the film other than an often inaccurate cover blurb, watching them is always an adventure. Sometimes I discover an amazing jewel in the rough, and sometimes I discover Kya Aisa Hota Hai Pyar (2004).
Karan (Hussein Sheikh) and Aditya (Sumeet Chawla) are college students and the best of friends. Karan is athletic, popular, dating the lovely Poorvi (Parita Vora), and secretly craves the approval of his distant workaholic father (Rajvansh Malhotra). Aditya is not particularly interested in girls, but that doesn’t stop him from toying with the emotions of Gia (Namita Shrivastav), Poorvi’s friend and roommate.

After a particularly dismal evening out with Gia (which she paid for, because Aditya is a selfish jerk) Aditya’s motorbike gets a flat tire, and older woman Aanchal (Samrita Singh) stops to offer him a ride. (Samrita Singh can’t be much older than me, but the lighting and makeup people are doing her no favors in this movie.)

Aditya may not be all that interested in girls, but Aanchal makes it very clear that she is interested in him. He’s a lttle intrigued, and agrees to meet her later, but when he arrives at her house she’s performing a sleazy dance number with some random guy who never appears again. Suddenly, Aditya is very intrigued, and soon he’s coming over to canoodle every day after school.

It’s an odd dynamic; Aanchal tries to communicate her philosophy of living for the present, and Aditya pretty much behaves like a lovestruck puppy. He’s in love for the very first time, and unfortunately, the person he chooses to share the happy news with is Gia, whom he knows is in love with him.

Karan invites a small group of friends, including both the lovesick Aditya and the heartbroken Gia, to his family estate for a few days because there’s no way that could be awkward. The kids are not alone, though. Karan’s father is there for a brief visit, and leaves the gang in the care of Karan’s beloved Auntie Aanchal. Yes, that Aanchal.

I’m trying to come up with some nice things to say about Kya Aisa Hota Hai Pyar, and it’s not easy. Samrita Singh managed to give a poorly written and cliched character some small degree of depth before what little character development Aanchal had was undone by the final scene, in which she picks up and hits on yet another young college kid. Bhaskar, the comic relief with the incredibly stupid beard made me really appreciate the acting talent and subtle comedic timing of Johnny Lever. And I’m sure the whole thing was well intentioned; it reminds me of an afterschool special about the horrible dangers of dating older women, complete with a narrator who pops up onscreen occasionally to spout gibberish about love.

Well intentioned or not, though, the final product is kind of skeezy. Aanchal is oversexed and sort of predatory, and even nice girl Gia has a scene where she writhes on the bed and displays her cleavage to the camera for no apparent reason. Comic relief guy spends his time making unwanted sexual comments to a woman who is clearly not interested, and everyone else thinks this is hilarious. And in this movie, women appear to be interchangeable; after a brief conversation with comic relief guy, Aditya goes from pining for Aanchal to pining for Gia, without even pausing for breath.

In short, this movie is not very good. Save your 49 cents.

Bhooty Call - Om Shanti Om

Unlike most of this month's movies, Om Shanti Om (2007) is not a horror movie in any way, shape or form.  It's a masala flick, a heady mix of comedy, romance, reincarnation revenge melodrama, and enthusiastic celebration of all things Bollywood.  It makes the cut because it also features the rare Reverse Scooby Doo, in which our scrappy heroes fake a haunting in order to scare Old Man Mehra into confessing to a murder.

Om Prakash Makhija (Shahrukh Khan) is a "junior artist", an extra who makes his living through bavkground parts in the glsmourous world of 1970's Bollywood.  He has a loyal best friend, Pappu (Shreyas Talpade), a loving and overdramatic mother (Khiron Kher), and a dream.  One day he will be a big star, live in a big house, and get to meet Shanti (Deepika Padukone), the famous actress that he worships from afar. 

 Om gets the chance to meet Shanti sooner than he expected, when there's a fire on set and he leaps through the flames to rescue her.  She's grateful, and agrees to spend one evening with him.  With Pappu's help, he pulls out all the stops, and arranges a magical evening on an empty set.  Shanti is delighted, and they part as friends.

But Shanti has a secret; she's secretly married to producer Mukesh Mehra (Arjun Rampal).  When Om finds out, he's heartbroken, but lets her go and, after a sad song, throws himself into his acting.

Unfortunately, Mukesh also has a secret: he's engaged to another producer's daughter, and can't have Shanti around to spoil things.  She pleads with him to reconsider, but it goes badly.  Really badly.

Mukesh burns the set down with Shanti inside, then as he leaves sends some goons to make sure she doesn't escape.  Om turns up at just the right time, tries to save her, is beaten by the goons, burned, blown up, and then hit by a car.  he dies.

And thirty years later, Om Kapoor is a big star living in a big house.  Life is great, apart from his severe pyrophobia and the crazy old lady who keeps showing up at his film shoots claiming to be his mother. 

And then Om goes to a film shoot at an abandoned studio that burned down thirty years ago, and meets his father's old friend Mukesh, and the memories of his last life all come flooding back.  He tracks down his previous mother and Pappu, and they come up with a plan.  Om will recruit Mukesh to produce the film he abandoned thirty years ago, then they will use a duplicate Shanti to convince him he's being haunted, driving him to confess to her murder.  And soon enough they find their duplicate Shanti when clumsy, start struck Sandy (also Deepika Padukone) auditions for the lead.

Writer-director Farah Khan clearly loves Bollywood, and this movie is stuffed with all the things she loves about it.  In all my years of watching Bollywood, this is the Bollywoodest bit of Bollywood that I have ever witnessed.  And it is well made.  Khan made her name as a choreographer, and the dance numbers are frequent and lively and shot with a choreographer's eye; the last number recaps the entire plot so far in a splashy Broadway style number which doubles as an exemplar of "I know what you did and I'm gonna get ya" because she's Farah Khan, and she can do that. 

And then there's Shahrukh Khan.  Khan is a gifted actor, but he rarely has a chance to demonstrate that fact; people want to see his carefully crafted persona, and so that is what he delivers.  Fortunately, he's really, really good at delivering his carefully crafted persona, and Om Shanti Om was written to play to his strengths.  SRK deserves some special credit for the celebrity cameo-filled song "Deewangi Deewangi", which requires him to establish distinct relationships with thirty one different celebrities, all in the space of a few seconds each, while dancing.  He manages to communicate a lot through small gestures.

Om Shanti Om is packed with the things I love about late Nineties/early Oughts Bollywood, and manages to cram in most of my favorite actors in the bargain.  It's one Johny Lever cameo short of the full experience.

Bhooty Call - Tumbbad

Tumbbad (2018) begins by explaining the story's cosmology.  When the world was new, the Goddess of Plenty (who possessed infinite gold and infinite food) gave birth to sixteen million gods, but her favorite child was her firstborn, Hastar.  Hastar was greedy, and claimed all the gold for himself, but when he tried to take the food as well, the sixteen million other gods fought back.  They would have destroyed him, but the Goddess hid him away in her womb, on the condition that his name doesn't appear in any of the ancient histories and no one worships him, ever.  It's a very evocative myth, and it is wrong in one important detail.

Of course, you can't keep a god secret forever, and in the cursed village of Tumbbad, Hastar has attracted a cult of worshippers,  Not much of a cult, really.  There's a bedridden Sarkaar (madhave hari Joshi), his long-suffering servant/mistress (Jyothi Malshe), their two sons Vinayak (Dhundiraj Prabhakar Jogalekar) and Sadashiv (Rudra Soni), and the Sarkaar's great grandmother (Piyush Kaushik), who has become a withered, eternally hungry monster that they keep chained up, well fed, and asleep.  (She is basically Gollum, only slightly more monstrous.) 

And everything is . . . well, not fine.  Pretty damned bleak, in fact.  The Sarkaar has wasted his life looking for the family's fabled treasure, with only a single gold coin to show for it.  he uses the coin to string Vinayak's mother along, because somebody has to keep Granny from waking up and eating everybody. And then the Sarkaar dies, and things go from bleak to actively terrible.  Sadashiv falls from the mansion wall, and his mother rushes him to a doctor, leaving Vinayak to feed Granny.  But Granny wakes up.  Vinayak barely survives, but Sadashiv doesn't.  His mother takes him away to Pune, and makes him swear never to return to Tumbbad.

Years later, Vinayak (now played by Sohum Shah) returns to Tumbbad.  Granny has been reduced to a withered husk, with a tree growing out of her body, and she is still alive and lucid enough to reveal the secret of the family treasure.  He returns to Pune with a handful of gold coins, and then another, and then another, enabling him to build a new life with his wife (Anita Date), but also making his pawnbroker (Deepak Damle) suspicious.

Despite the cursed mansion and the horrible undead grandmother, this is not a ghost story.  It's cosmic horror - the forgotten god is even named Hastar!  It presents a bleak, uncaring universe in which humans are destroyed by a combination of forbidden knowledge and their own avarice, like a combination of "The King in Yellow" and Erich von Stroheim's "Greed."  It's also top of the line cosmic horror: well written, wonderfully acted, with beautiful cinematography.  And it is so, so bleak.

Bhooty Call - Stree

Over the course of my many Octobers, I have learned one thing about ghost stories: the good ones are never just about the ghost.  That's certainly the case with Stree (2018). 

The men of the small town of Chanderi have a problem.  A ghost (and possibly a witch; the lines are blurry in Indian cinema) called Stree (Flora Saini) abducts men she catches out alone at night.  Naturally, the men are terrified. They want to run.  They want to hide.  It's scary when you live where the Stree has no name.

(And the stree literally has no name; near as I can tell, the word just translates to "woman" or "female."  Naturally, this will be important later.)

One man who isn't particularly worried is Vicky (Rajkumar Rao), a brilliant tailor who believes that he's destined for greater things.  he hopes that one of the greater things he's destined for is a mysterious woman (Shraddha Kapoor) who asked him to sew a dress for her.  And the woman seems to like Vicky as well!  She asks to meet up later, and it's only slightly odd that she asks for a few ordinary household items like brandy and a lizard's tail and the hair of a white cat.  Vicky's friends Bittu (Aparshakti Khurana) and Janna (Abhishek Banerjee) are a little more suspicious, since the woman doesn't have a phone and never actually enters the temple grounds and nobody but Vicky has ever seen her and even he still doesn't know her name, but every relationship has it's issues, right?

It's no coincidence that both of the female leads are unnamed.  (Actually, looking back, I don't think any women are named onscreen.)   This looks an awful lot like one of the stories men have been telling each other for generations that asks "What would happen if women treated us the way we treat them?"  Within the story, many of the men think that's exactly what's going on, resorting to women's clothing as a way to escape Stree's wrathful gaze, and the (fairly stupid) plan our heroes come up with to deal with Stree and get their friends back certainly plays to those tropes.  But it is explicitly a stupid plan; the real solution, as Vicky eventually realizes, is to treat Stree with respect, as a person.

So, is it scary?  Not really.  There are some intense moments, but the ghost story develops slowly, and the movie is much more interested in its cast of small town goofballs.  But then, it's not really about the ghost.  It's about respect.

Bhooty Call - Mohini

I've seen a lot of Bollywood ghost stories over the years.  Sometimes they're horror stories.  Sometimes they're revenge melodramas. Sometimes they're goofy slapstick comedies.  And sometimes you get a movie like Mohini (2018), which tries to be all of them at once.

Vaishnavi (Trisha)  is a popular chef and You-tuber who agrees to travel to London for stupid and contrived reasons and pretend to be the assistant to incompetent chef Cotton (Yogi Babu.)  Vaishu is staying in a house full of comic relief (including Swaminathan, Ganeshkar, and Jangiri Madhumitha) and, well, wackiness ensues.

Vaishu is also sort of haunted - even when she's still in India, the ghost is able to reach out and swat away an obsessed fan who breaks into her house, and once she reaches London the ghost emerges long enough to scare the comic relief, at one point yelling at them for doing stupid comedy bits when she's trying to haunt them. 

Vaishu's life is not all ghosts and slapstick though; she also meets a man!  Rohit (Jackky Bhagani) is rich and charming and frankly a little too happy to make major life decisions without consulting her.  The ghost is also occasionally possessing Vaishu at this point in order to avenge her murders, but still leaves time for the young lovers to get engaged.  They're happy, right up until the point when Vaishu meets Rohit's father, KVR (Mukesh Tiwari.)  The ghost definitely recognizes him, and we get some exposition via flashback.

Mohini (also Trisha) was an architect working for KVR's construction firm.  She accidentally stumbled upon the secret child sacrifice ring KVR has been using to "bless" his building projects (apparently child sacrifice for construction purposes that there's an entire shadow industry devoted to it, including a warehouse full of children.  In London.)  KVR was arrested and promptly released, and he and his goons murdered Mohini for her inflexible attitudes about child sacrifice.

So Mohini is back, she's ticked, and she's wiping out her killers one by one.  So far I am firmly on Team Ghost.  The problem is that she's decided that even though Rohit had nothing to do with his father's crimes, he really needs to die too, and she's not that keen on giving Vaishu her body back . . .

Let me be absolutely clear: this is a very silly movie.  The special effects are endearingly cheap, and the whole movie takes place in the weird parallel universe London you see in Indian movies sometimes; there is apparently only one church in the city, and it is right by a huge waterfall that runs through the nearby forest.  The action scenes, when Mohini hunt down her killers, are fun, but there aren't enough of them, and instead the film is padded with too many comic characters.  And the plot just doesn't make a lot of sense.  The film is occasionally entertaining, but it's the kind of movie which would be greatly improved by commentary from sarcastic robots.

State of the blog.

The Gorilla's Lament has been back in business for exactly two weeks, and we already have more than two hundred reviews posted!  Obviously, the rate of new posts is going to slow down a bit, especially since I've run out of posts from the old blog to bring over.  I still don't have everything from the prior incarnation of the Gorilla's Lament, but at this point I'm just happy to have saved anything.

I'm hard at work putting together a review index, and I also need to get the tags organized so that they're a useful addition to the site.  And of course, Bhooty Call 2019 continues.

So, still plenty to do, and more content still to come!