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.