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.
No comments:
Post a Comment