Bhooty Call - Sardaar Ji

Normally, I like to end my annual Bhooty Call with something really scary, but this year the real world has been entirely scary enough for my tastes, so I'm going with something different.  After all, ghosts are exciting, but sometimes, they need to be busted.  That's when you call Sardaar Ji (2015.)

Bilal (Ali Kazmi) and Ruksana (Anita Kailey) live in London, or possibly Birmingham or Leicester - the geography isn't always clear.  They are rich and happy and blissfully in love, so their wedding is going to be a big event; the Queen is expected to attend, and they've booked a "castle" for the ceremony.

The problem is, the place is haunted.  However, the invitations have already been sent out, and the Queen has already accepted, so the wedding absolutely must happen at the appointed place and time in order to preserve the royal honour.  They try a team of American ghost hunters and an exorcist from Africa, but they fail.  It's clear that they need someone absolutely fearless, who won't ever quit once they've accepted the mission.  Obviously, they need a Sardar.

The Sardar in question, is Jaggi (Diljith Dosanjh), a highly efficient exorcist.  He can rid a building of a ghost in just a few minutes, forcing it into a bottle and carrying it home.  He actually keeps the bottled ghosts around and talks to them sometimes, often flirting with the ghost ladies, but he hasn't yet found that one special lady ghost that he can . . . keep in a bottle on the shelf and occasionally talk to.  Yeah.  Moving on.

(I think the intention here is to showcase that despite his bravado, Jaggi isn't confident around actual women.  Flirting with ghost girls is safer, because it can't lead to anything serious, while courting a living woman means making yourself emotionally vulnerable.  It's a bit clumsy, but I'll allow it for now.)

Despite his successful ghost busting business, Jaggi is happy to drop everything and fly to England in exchange for a large sum of money.  Jaggi enters the house,m but instead of the exotic English blonde ghost he was expecting, he meets and is immediately captivated by the beautiful and very Punjabi Pinky (Neeru Bajwa.)

 

Wait, wrong picture.

Pinky tries to drive him away, but Jaggi is experienced and persistent.  He tracks down Pinky's mother (Sunita Dhir) to learn all he can about her, then returns to try again to convince her to leave.  They settle into an uneasy truce, and Pinky agrees to leave if Jaggi will bring her a dancer named Jasmine Gill (Mandy Takhar.)

Jaggi finds Jasmine, and utterly fails to make a good first impression.  However, she teaches a salsa class, so he tries to sign up for her class.  She doesn't want to accept him as a student, both because the class has already started and because she thinks he's kind of a creep, but reluctantly agrees to let him join the class if he can demonstrate basic salsa proficiency.  Since he doesn't know salsa at all, that means it's back to Pinky for remedial salsa lessons.

 

When it comes time for the actual test, though, Jaggi chokes.  Salsa dancing involves touching an actual, living human girl, and he just can't do it. At the last minute he manages to save the situation with his bhangra skills, because there's no problem that can't be solved with judicious application of bhangra.  

 

Jaggi spins a story about learning salsa to impress his fiance, Lucy Spanish (you wouldn't know her.  She goes to a different school) and the lessons begin.  As Jaggi and Jasmine grow closer, he realizes that he has feelings for this actual, living human girl, and he feels terrible for lying to her.  Of course, Jasmine has been keeping secrets as well, especially about what happened to Pinky.

 

The supernatural elements take a back seat to relationship drama here.  The romantic triangle is a bit clumsy at times, and the "collecting ghost women like Pokemon", but the movie does do a good job of showing just how terrifying it can be to open yourself up and make a connection with a real person..

Bhooty Call - 1920 London

 1920 London (2016) is not exactly a sequel to 1920.  The movies in the 1920 franchise are unrelated stories, the only real connection being the basic premise of people being possessed by ghosts in a historical setting.  In this case, the historical setting is London in 1920, or at least London in a vague year which is supposed to be 1920 but includes costume and design elements drawn from the late Victorian era all the way to the early 1960s.  However, I don't think historical accuracy was a real priority.

 Newlyweds Shivangi (Meera Chopra) and Veer (Vishal Karwal), an honest to goodness Rajastani princess and prince, are happily settled in London.  Veer is just finishing up his law degree, and everything is wonderful. . . until a package from home arrives, containing a mysterious amulet.  Suddenly there are whispers in the night and shadows on the stairs, and everything takes a turn for the spooky.

 Now, I've seen a lot of these "possessed by a ghost movies: the original 1920, Bhoot, Raaz, Machli Jal Ki Rani Hai,  and those are just the ones that I can think of off the top of my head.  Most of them start in the same way; a young couple experience some sort of life change which results in the wife being left at home, at first everyone thinks she's going a bit Yellow Wallpaper, but it turns out that she's possessed, so her husband must team up with an unconventional spiritual advisor to drive out the angry spirit. It is a surprisingly gendered subgenre.

But that is not what happens here.  Veer hears strange noises at night and discovers an empty rocking chair, and Veer suddenly starts behaving strangely, eventually leaving him nearly comatose and wracked with extreme muscle spasms.  Shivangi rushes him to the hospital, and the doctors diagnose tetanus, but Shivangi's servant Kesar Maa (Sushmita Mukherjee) notices that all the portraits of Veer in the house have developed spooky blacked-out eyes, so she diagnoses ghost, and suspects that Veer's stepmother is responsible.

Shivangi returns to Rajastan to consult with her family, and the family hires a Tantric (Gajendra Chauhan), who attempts an intercontinental exorcism involving the secret shadow world that lies behind the mirror.  (Not a particular mirror, all mirrors.)  He fails, and tells the family to seek out a more powerful Tantric, Mewar Baba (Sharman Joshi.)  This is a problem, because back when Mewar Baba was plain old humble shepherd Jai Singh Gujjar, he was Shivangi's star crossed lover.  (This movie puts the "ex" into exorcist!)

Since the breakup involved Shivangi's testimony sending him to prison for a crime he did not commit, Jai is reluctant to help.  Shivangi eventually wins him over by reminding him that he would agree to help literally anybody else, and the pair are off to London.  In order for the exorcism to work, Shivangi must complete a series of dangerous rituals, but there's something Jai is not telling her, and she's not being entirely honest with him either.

I can't really say that the choice of which spouse gets possessed utterly transforms 1920 London; it definitely impacts the film, but in the end , the plot is fairly typical for a bhoot movie.  (Apart from the other big twist.)  Still, there are some decent scares here, including a very tense scene involving a lemon, and it is interesting to see which genre elements are played with, and which ones are played straight.

Bhooty Call - Saboot

The Ramsay family made their name in Bollywood with a string of low budget supernatural thrillers like Purana Mandir and Purani Haveli, movies which feature broad comedy, cheap props and costumes, and reasonably attractive young people trapped in a secluded location with an unconvincing supernatural monster.  Saboot (1980) is not one of those movies, despite the murderous ghost.

Newlyweds Asha (Vidya Sinha) and Vikas (Vinod Mehra) are enjoying a bit of morning canoodling when Vikas gets a call from his old friend Anand (Navin Nischol).  Anand is leaving the country, but invites Vikas to fly out and meet him before he goes.  Vikas agrees, but his plane crashes and there are no survivors.

After his death, the factory he owned and managed reverts back to his father in law, Dharamdas (Trilok Kapoor).  Shady businessman Dhanraj (Prem Chopra) wants to buy the factory, but at the last minute Dharamdas cancels the sale, deciding to keep the factory in the family as a monument to his son in law.

Dhanraj is not the type to take no for an answer, though.  When Dharamdas is on a business trip, Dhanraj boards the train, accompanied by four of Dharamdas's employees, Manmohan (Roopesh Kumar), Ashok (Narendra Nath), and Rita (Padma Khanna).  They force him to sign over the factory, then stab him and bury him in a shallow grave in the jungle.  Rita notices that he's not quite dead yet, and warns the others that when someone is buried alive, their spirit will return to take revenge.  They don't listen.

Years pass.  Asha's younger sister Kaajal (Kaajal Kiran) is returning home when someone steals her purse.  Anand arrives, beats up a whole gang of goons in order to retrieve the purse, and introduces himself as Inspector Anand.  She is quickly won over by his doughy middle-aged charm, and soon they are engaged.

Meanwhile, Dhanraj is having a hard time sharing.  The other conspirators demand their share of the ill-gotten gains, and he reluctantly agrees to pay them off one at a time, starting with Manmohan.  Manmohan dies that night under mysterious circumstances, and Anand is called in to investigate.  All signs point to "Angry Ghost," but Anand instead suspects Ajit Roy (Om Shivpuri), long time employee and friend of the Dharamdas family.  Which does make things a little awkward.

 Despite the ghostly trappings, Saboot isn't really a horror story, it's a mystery.  It's not a very hard mystery, but it does rely on people making decisions that make no sense at all.  There's just as much cheese as in the Ramsays' more famous films, but it's cheese in the service of a different genre.

Bhooty Call - Go Goa Gone

 Go Goa Gone (2013) has a refrain of sorts; at various points in the film, our hapless slacker heroes stop and ask themselves "What do we know?  And what have we learned?"  Here's what I know: Go Goa Gone is a zombie movie with the soul of a stoner comedy, or possibly a stoner comedy with zombie trappings, or maybe it's a butterfly dreaming it's a man.  It is not a movie that feels obligated to respect genre boundaries, in any case.

Roommates Luv (Vir Das) and Hardik (Kunal Khemu) are having a bad week.  Luv has cleaned up his act, resolving to give up booze and drugs, focus on his job, and finally propose to his girlfriend Priyanka (Meenal Thakur), only to discover that she's been cheating on him the whole time.  Hardik, meanwhile, has embraced his hard partying lifestyle, only to be fired when the boss catches him smoking and (attempted) canoodling in the office.  They both need a break, and when they learn that responsible roommate Bunny (Anand Tiwari) is going to Goa on business, they invite themselves along.

In Goa, Luv meets Luna (Puja Gupta) and is immediately smitten.  And while Luna is not especially smitten in return, she does invite the boys to join her at a secret party being held on a nearby secluded island.  The party is hosted by Russian mobster Boris (Saif Ali Khan), who is using the party to launch  a new, experimental drug.  Most of the party-goers take the new drug, but Luv, Hardik, Bunny and Luna don't have the chance.  Which is just as well, because by morning all the people who took the drug have turned into zombies.

Our heroes are not really prepared for zombie fighting, though they do manage some small but hapless heroics before they are rescued by Boris, who cheerfully explains that "I keel dead people."  And if you've seen a zombie movie before, you've got as fair idea of what happens next.  They squabble.  They run from zombies.  Boris shoots a lot of zombies.  Luv nearly gets himself killed with a stupid plan he lifted from Shaun of the Dead.  Still, they have a goal: the gang reached the island by boat, so if they can reach the boat, everything will be fine.  Right?

Now, what have I learned?  Zombie movies have a reputation for nihilism.  The end of the world brings out the worst in people, strangers can't be trusted, you have to do whatever it takes to survive, and even then, some idiot is going to be zombiebit and not bother to tell anyone.  On the other hand, Go Goa Gone has all the gore and violence you'd expect from a zombie movie, but it somehow ends up much more optimistic than usual; yes, the hapless protagonists spend a lot of time bickering, but they still pull together, take risks to protect each other, and actually manage to grow and become better people in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.  It's not the sort of emotional arc you expect to see in this kind of film, but I will take it.

Bhooty Call - Petromax

 Petromax (2019) is a movie about a house.  It's quite a nice house, really; comfortable, well lit, and obviously well-loved.  Meera (Tamannaah) lives there with her father (K.S.G. Venkatesh), her little sister Nivetha (Monekha Siva), and household sort-of-servant Santosh (the IMDB has failed me again.)  They are a wonderful loving family, and blissfully happy, until they realize that the house is haunted, and soon after discover that actually, they are the ghosts.

Saravanam (Prem Kumar), who owns the house, wants to sell, but he can't get a good price because word of the apparent haunting has spread.  He's forced to rely on a quartet of unlikely ghostbusters: kindly bartender Senthil (Munishkanth), mild-mannered family man Thangam (Kaali Venkat), aspiring actor Kaali (TSK), and partially deaf security guard Nandha (Sathyan).  While the quartet are not especially brave or clever or competent, they each have a particular flaw that makes them hard to haunt:  Senthil has a heart condition and on the advice of his doctor he reverses his emotional reactions, laughing when scared and crying when happy; Thangam is a boozy Popeye, transforming into a fearless and not very smart macho man when drinking; Kaali responds to stress with movie dialogue and filmi bravado; and Nandha is not only hard of hearing, he has literal night blindness, so he can't see or hear anything the ghosts are doing.

The plot sounds simple, but that is because I am avoiding spoiling any of the big twists.  I will say that while the movie will quite gleefully use misdirection to conceal important plot points, everything makes sense in the end.  

Despite the twisty plot, though, Petromax is not a terribly deep or innovative film.  It's not really trying to be; it's just a horror comedy, light on the horror, heavy on the comedy.  Still, it's a good horror comedy, drawing much of its humor from an engaging cast of quirky human and ghostly characters, which gives even the sillier scenes a bit of emotional heft.

Bhooty Call 2020

 As if this year hasn't been terrifying enough, it's time for our annual Bhooty Call, a month long celebration of the ghosts of Bollywood (and other cinema of the subcontinent.)  Time to sweep out the haunted haweli, because we're having company.