Hiatus.

 I am going on vacation, so no new reviews until January.  See you then!

Vikram and Ajju's Excellent Adventure, Expanded Edition

 This is an old review, but I am older and wiser and have more Bollywood experience than the first time I watched Fun2ssh . . . Dudes In the 10th Century; at the very least, I am better at taking screenshots.  Let's see what Me From the Past had to say.

I'd like to be under the sea.

As I write this, Sooryavanshi, the latest installment of Rohit Shetty's "Police Universe", is breaking all sorts of box office records in India.  It's not available anywhere near me yet, so instead I'm going to take a look at an earlier installment of the "Police Universe."  Little Singham: Samundar Ka Sikandar (2021) recounts the time when Singham, the unstoppable supercop played by Ajay Devgn, traveled to an undersea kingdom, rescued a mermaid princess, and fought a giant squid.  It's weird that he never mentions this stuff in the movies.

Of course, this isn't exactly Singham as played by Devgn; it's Little Singham, because apparently when he was a child Singham was already a police officer who fought demons and mutant animal hybrids.  (Frankly, the gangsters and terrorists he deals with as an adult are a bit of a step down.)  Why is Little Singham already a cop?  He just is, okay?  Apparently he maintains a secret identity, though it doesn't come up in this movie at all.  We do get to meet young Singham's annoying sidekicks, though: Chikki, who is a monkey, and Lattu, who is not a monkey.

Singham and a good portion of his supporting cast are on a cruise ship near Hawaii when the ship strikes a rock and begins to sink.  Little Singham springs into action and saves all of the passengers and crew, but the ship sinks to the bottom of the ocean and bounces off of a mysterious domed undersea city.

Meanwhile, under the sea, the monstrous Jalgohra, nephew of King Sagadeer, and Haivaan, aquatic villain with a magic staff that can create undersea storms, decide to join forces and conquer both the undersea world and the world above.  The shipwreck gives them a chance to try and capture Princess Laharika, who is sometimes a mermaid and sometimes a whale.  The whales of the ocean send out a distress call which Singham can understand for some reason, so he and Chikki and Lattu put on their advanced wetsuits and dive to the rescue.

Our heroes save the princess and she takes them into the undersea city, where outsiders are strictly forbidden.  She casts a quick spell transforming them into hybrid sea creatures, but it only lasts about five minutes or so and then they are discovered, captured, and brought before the king.  And that's when Jalgohra and Haaiwan strike and reveal their evil plan: they're going to release the monstrous octopus Vikraal, which will devastate the underseas kingdom and allow the villains to conquer under and above the waves.  After a quick fight in which Singham nearly defeats them despite his hands being tied, the villains kidnap the king, and Singham and friends set out on an epic quest to find the magic pearl and trident they must use to save the day.  

Well, I say epic; the movie is less than an hour long, so there's only so much adventuring they can fit in.  The plot moves at an incredible pace, and there's no time for inconsequential things like "character development" or "explaining why these people are in Hawaii in the first place." 

To be fair, I am very far from the target audience for this movie, and the children it is intended for have probably seen some of the many, many episodes of the Little Singham TV show rather than relying on what they know from the Ajay Devgn movies.  And not always knowing what is going on doesn't prevent me from appreciating the sensational character find of 2021, "Guard Who Looks and Sounds Like Kermit."

Breaking the cycle.

The reincarnation melodrama is one of the subgenres of Indian cinema that keeps coming back, over and over again.  They tend to bring back the same tropes and plot beats over and over again as well, so it's always interesting when a movie like Raabta (2017) tries to do something different, looking to the present rather than continually focusing on the past.

Shiv Kakkar (Sushant Singh Rajput) is a young banker who has just taken a job in Budapest.  He may have a sensible and boring job, but Shiv is handsome and charming, and he knows it, so he makes quite the impression on the local ladies.  One night, Shiv and his date stumble into a chocolate shop run by driven, somber and intense Saira (Kriti Sanon) and he quickly forgets all about his date.  Shiv and Saira feel an immediate and mutual attraction, and after a minimal amount of will they-won't they, they do.

Saira lost her parents in a car accident when she was very young, and she suffers from a fear of water and recurring nightmares of blood and chains and someone drowning.  When Shiv starts appearing in these nightmares, she's moderately freaked out.  But the relationship is going so well!  Maybe too well, since the relationship seems to be moving awfully quickly.

As  a test of their relationship, Shiv and Saira attend a party and each try to pick up other people, to see if they feel the same powerful attraction to anyone else.  (this is a terrible idea, but nobody in this movie thinks anything through.)  Shiv is quickly surrounded by a half dozen ladies, while Saira strikes up a flirtation with liquor mogul Zak (Jim Sarbh.)  Zak is rich, handsome, mysterious, and charming, everything Saira used to think she wanted, but she still goes home with Shiv.

Soon after, Shiv has to leave town for a  week and the pair decide that a week's separation is another chance to test their relationship.  While Shiv is gone, Zak pops up again and strikes up a conversation with Saira.  They take a walk in the rain, they have a nice dinner, they talk about life and Saira's dreams and how she feels really ready to make a commitment to Shiv . . . and then Zak drugs her and takes her to his secluded island lair, where he explains that they were lovers in a previous life and he's been searching for her in this one, shows her his wall of creepy Saira portraits, and tells her that dinner is at eight and he's already picked out her dress.

When she's alone, Saira tries to escape.  She's caught by Zak and his men, but falls into the ocean and slips in to a flashback to eight hundred years ago, when she was the warrior princess Saiba and Zak was her deeply smitten childhood friend and bodyguard Kaabir.  Saiba's people lived on a secluded island plateau, but were threatened by the ferocious Muraakis, led by the ancient, wise, and possibly wizardly Muwaqqit (an unrecognizable Rajkumar Rao under heavy makeup) and the deadly warrior Jilaan, Shiv's previous life.  In a surprise attack, Jilaan severely wounds Kaabir and devastates Saiba's armies, so she travels to the enemy camp in disguise hoping to eliminate Jilaan personally.  Instead, they wind up falling in love, and he agrees to spare her land in exchange for her hand.

A recovered Kaabir attempts to rescue Saiba, but she refuses to leave.  Kaabir won't take no for an answer, so he murders Jilaan and throws the body in the ocean.  Saiba drowns herself, and Kaabir slits his own throat, while Muwaqqit predicts that this will all happen again.

In the present, Saira drags herself onto the beach.  She approaches Zak and tells him that she remembers everything and does not want it all to happen again, so she'll agree to marry him if he promises to spare Shiv.  Zak agrees, but he's lying because he's deranged and obsessed, making it all the more likely that it will all happen again.  Meanwhile, Shiv returns from his trip and discovers that Saira is gone and the newspapers are reporting Zak's engagement, so it's time to crash a party.  (Action banker!)

There are a lot of reincarnation movies in Indian cinema, and many of them are not very good.  part of the problem is that they spend a lot of effort on making the past lives exciting, while the characters' present incarnations are dull cardboard cutouts.  Raabta tries to get around this problem by committing to both its genres, diving wholeheartedly into romantic comedy tropes during the present scenes and embracing fantasy-historical epic tropes for the scenes set in the past.  It succeeds as well as it does largely through the strength of Rajput's two distinct performances; Jilaan is an interesting, quirky warlord with two swords and a heart of gold, but Shiv is an interesting and engaging protagonist in his own right.

Perhaps most importantly, Shiv doesn't think he's less interesting than Jilaan; he's determined to save the woman he loves, but it's specifically because he loves her now, not because his past life used to love her.

Not one word.

Vaayai Moodi Pesavum (2014) is by turns a sweet romantic comedy and an absurdist farce.  It's a movie about the importance of honest communication, of always speaking from the heart, and it uses a sudden outbreak of a disease that renders its victims literally speechless as its central metaphor.  It works. it works well, even, but watching it in the year 2021 makes for some surreal moments.

Aravind (Dulquer Salmaan) is a good-hearted door to door glue salesman in the hill city of Panimalai. He is an incredible talker, and he uses this talent not just to sell glue, but to make people's lives better.  As he tells a client, when he sees that something is broken, he can't help but try to fix it.  Still, there are some problems even his gift of gab can't fix; his best friend Satish (Arjunan) can't speak to women without jumbling his words and blurting out profanity, and the orphanage Aravind grew up in is threatened with closure by their surly landlord (Vinu Chakravarty).

Anjana (Nazriya Nazim) is a doctor, and she does not like to communicate.  She lives with her father (Abhishek Shankar) and her stepmother Vidhya (Madhoo), with whom she does not get along, and she's dating Vinodh (Abhinav), a controlling jerk who nags her into not wearing her glasses because he thinks she looks better without.

Meanwhile, "Nuclear Star" Bhoomesh (John Vijay) is filming a movie in the area, or at least he's trying to - the shooting is constantly being disrupted by protests from the Drunkard's Union, who want the movie banned because they feel it will portray alcoholism in a bad light.  (I did mention the absurdism, right?)  The Fan's Union also arrives to counter-protest, and nobody is willing to listen.

And then everything changes when Panimalai is stricken with "Dumb Flu," a mysterious illness which starts with a nasty cough and may rob the victim of the ability to speak.  This is bad for Aravind, because he's a door to door salesman and nobody wants to open their doors to a stranger during a pandemic.  But it's also good for Aravind because when he goes to the hospital to get tested (with a nasal swab) he meets Anjana, and they strike up a sweet, flirtatious friendship.  Aravind shares his philosophy, that every problem can be solved if people just speak form their hearts, and Anjana shares hers, which is no they can't.  They make a bet - if Aravind is able to resolve the dispute around Bhoomesh's movie, Anjana will tell Vinodh how she feels about his controlling ways, and try to have a heart to heart with Vidhya.  If he fails, he has to fetch Anjana a signed picture of Bhoomesh.  (She's a fan.)

The Dumb Flu gets worse, and Panimalai is put under s strict quarantine.  And when it's discovered that the disease spreads through people talking, the entire town is ordered to keep silent.  At this point the leader of the local opposition party declares that the Dumb Flu is a hoax, a conspiracy cooked up by the government in order to control people's lives, and he gives a fiery speech about how he will never comply with government silence mandates before keeling over and becoming the first person to die of Dumb Flu, which probably seemed really unrealistic back in 2014.

And at this point the film basically becomes a silent movie, with Aravind struggling to make peace between the dueling unions while robbed of his greatest asset, his voice.  Meanwhile, Vinodh silently proposes in front of Anjana's family, leaving her feeling pressured to accept and try to be happy about it, and Satish manages to strike up a relationship with a pretty nurse (Nakshathra Nagesh).  Wackiness ensues, but it does so silently, as everybody tries to resolve their various subplots while waiting for a vaccine.

Vaayai Moodi Pesavum is by turns silly and sweet; there's a bit of satire mixed in as well, but it's largely gentle satire, with the hardest hitting bits only becoming hard hitting in retrospect.  The silent parts of the film are particularly well done, with the cast conveying a great deal of emotion and meaning through gestures and facial expressions.  And any musical number featuring masked gangsters clashing with dapper mimes is worth bonus points in my book.

Chori Chori Chupke Chupke in reverse.

Mimi (2021) was always going to end in a bitter custody battle and tearful epiphanies and a moment of self sacrifice.  It's a movie about surrogacy, so the only real question is whose tears, whose epiphany, and who makes the sacrifice in the end.

John (Aidan Whytock) and Summer (Evelyn Edwards) are an American couple who have traveled to India in search of a surrogate mother for their eventual child.  They've tried working through a surrogacy agency, but Summer and John decided that those girls were too weak; they want a strong mother in order to bear their perfect, healthy child.  (Does it sound creepy when they put it that way?  Yes.  Yes it does.)

Their driver, Bhanu (Pankaj Tripathi) is sympathetic; he and his wife Rekha (Atmaja Pandey) have been trying for a baby for years, without success.  He's happy to help the Americans, especially when they offer him a large sum of money to help them find a surrogate.

And then, at a hotel in Rahahstan, they see Mimi (Kriti Sanon) dancing, and realize that she's the one; Mimi is tall, graceful, and well fit - she's exactly what they've been looking for.  Bhanu makes a clumsy attempt at explaining the situation to Mimi, and gets slapped for his trouble.  However, Mimi wants to go to Mumbai and become a Bollywood star, and to make the move she's going to need a great deal of money, so she reconsiders, and finally agrees.

The deal is that Mimi and Bhanu will be paid in healthy installments during the pregnancy, with the bulk of the payment coming after delivery.  The procedure is a success, so John and Summer pay for the first five months and then leave.  Rather than explain the situation to her parents (Supriya Pathak and Manoj Pahwa), Mimi tells them that she's been hired for a film shoot on a cruise ship, and she'll be back in nine months.  Then, disguised in a burka, she goes to stay with her friend Shama (Sai Tamhankar), posing as Shama's cousin while Bhanu plays the part of her husband.

Everything is pleasant domestic comedy, filled with humorous misunderstandings and the lighter side of pregnancy, until suddenly it isn't.  During one of their visits to India, the doctor takes John and Summer aside and tells them that tests indicate that their perfect baby may have Down Syndrome.  They can't handle the idea, so they tell Bhanu that they don't want the baby anymore and flee the country.

In the chaos that ensues, Mimi leaves the house without her burka, blowing her cover.  She returns to her family home, Bhanu and Shama in tow, and when her parents tearfully demand to know who the father is, she panics and mutely points at Bhanu, leading to a whole new set of wacky misunderstandings.  The baby is finally born healthy and very, very white, and Mimi falls in love with the boy.  The family settles into an uneasy equilibrium until Bhanu's wife comes looking for him, and the whole truth comes out.

And then everybody decides to act like grownups and they make the situation work.  Mimi names the baby Raj, and by the time he's four (and played by Jacob Smith) he's surrounded by a loving extended family.  Mimi has gone back to work as a dancer, and occasionally Raj joins her in her shows.  One clip makes it to Youtube, and Summer and John happen to see Mimi dancing and realize just who the perfect and very, very white child dancing with her must be, so it's off to India and the inevitable bitter custody battle and tearful epiphanies.

Mimi tries very hard to be a representative of conservative Indian family values, but at the same time, it's pitting a nuclear biological family against a found family of misfits consisting of a single mother, her parents, her Muslim friend, and a taxi driver and his wife, and the movie is very firmly on Team Misfit.  The intended moral, the explicitly stated moral, is that parents are vitally important but they don't have to be related to their children by blood (so consider adoption!) but the movie follows up on that premise by introducing a strong and loving family that is completely nontraditional while still superficially resembling a traditional extended family.  It's family that's important, and it doesn't matter what it looks like.

Bhooty Call: Dybbuk

 Dybbuk: The Curse is Real (2021) begins as Bollywood movies about possession tend to begin; a young couple moves to a big house in a new place, and the husband spends all of his time at work, leaving his wife home alone to face the slow drip of supernatural activity.  In this case, the young couple are Sam Isaac (Emraan Hashmi) and his wife Mahi (Nikita Dutta).  Sam is a nuclear waste management specialist, and he's just taken a job at a storage facility in Mauritius.  Mahi feels alone and isolated, so she comforts herself by buying items for the new house, including an ornate wine box covered in Jewish iconography that she found at Vendredi Antiquesa local antique shop.

What Mahi doesn't know is that an employee of the antique store died violently after trying to open the box, which is the sort of information that really ought to be disclosed to a potential buyer.  Mahi takes the box home, opens it, and gets a nose full of dybbuk.  Suddenly Mahi is behaving very strangely, staring blankly and caressing the box.  And then she starts seeing a ghostly girl who follows her around and calls out for "Ezra."  Like all husbands in Bollywood possession movies, Sam assumes she's just being hysterical until he starts hearing footsteps in the attic at night, then he suddenly starts taking things seriously.

Sam talks about the haunting with his childhood priest, Father Gabriel (Denzil Smith).  Father Gabriel suspects that the ghost is a dybbuk, and sends Sam to Rabbi Benyamin (Anil George).  Benyamin listens to Sam's story and tells him that it can't be a dybbuk because a dybbuk can only possess someone whose body and soul are not quite in alignment.  Everyone is relieved until Sam learns that Mahi is pregnant, and Benyamin explains that it takes a while for a baby's body and soul to line up properly.

(The movie takes some pains to explain that the word "dybbuk" actually refers to the box, and the possessing spirit is a shedim.  Then everybody forgets that and keeps calling the spirit a dybbuk, which is just as well because the idea of a dybbuk box does not come from Jewish folklore, it comes from a fairly recent urban legend.)

Shortly after delivering the necessary exposition, Bemyamin dies, and it's hunky Rabbi Markus (Manuv Kaul) who must confront the ghost.  He doesn't go right away, though; he spends some weeks researching ways to get rid of the dybbuk without anybody dying.  Sam and Mahi manage to return to a sort of normalcy in the meantime, but when an obviously possessed Mahi goes on a late night barefoot walk through the city, Markus arrives just in time.

Markus does more research and discovers that the dybbuk was once Abraham Ezra (Imaad Shah), a nice Jewish boy who fell in love with Norah (Darshana Banik) before religious prejudice destroyed their lives.  He learns that Ezra the dybbuk is a weapon, shaped by his Kabbalist father (Yuri Suri) to find a host capable of destroying Mauritius.  And he just might have found the perfect candidate.

Despite the trappings of Judaism, the ghost in dybbuk works just like a common Bollywood bhoot, and it's dealt with in a similar way, only with menorahs instead of trishuls and Kabbalah rather than Tantric sorcery.   Ezra's history is the most effective use of the cultural background, tying in to the real-world history of Jews in Mauritius, and providing a parallel to Sam and Mahi's interfaith marriage.

While Dybbuk is a much more traditional ghost story than it would like you to think, it is a very well-crafted ghost story.  There are twists, but the twists are set up in advance and they make sense based on what has come before.  It's a movie that plays fair.

Bhooty Call: Raju Gari Gadhi 2

Raju Gari Gadhi 2 (2017) has basically nothing to do with Raju Gari Gadhi or Raju Gari Gadhi 3, apart from ghosts and the presence of actor Ashwin Babu.  Ashwin usually plays the hero, but here he's one of the three comic idiots, and nearly disappears when the movie shifts genres.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Ashwin (Ashwin Babu), Kishore (Vennela Kishore), and Praveen (Praveen) are three idiots and lifelong friends who have pooled their money to open up a resort hotel.  The three are varying degrees of horrible; Praveen likes to ogle the female guests, especially Suhanisa (Seerat Kapoor), Kishore is actively scheming to trick them into bed despite being married, while Ashwin saves his ogling for his online girlfriend (and the occasional Sunny Leone video.)  

Kishore convinces Suhanisa to come to his room and look at his etchingsastrology book, and while there he tries to take a picture, only to notice that she does not show up on camera.  he freaks out, and runs to tell the others that  Suhanisa is a ghost.  They mock him for it, but spooky stuff keeps happening, and after Ashwin's scantily clad Skype session with his girlfriend is interrupted by ghostly static and watery footprints moving across the ceiling, the trio call in the local Catholic priest (Avinash) to perform an exorcism. 

The priest is useless, so he suggests they contact Rudra (Nagarjuna).  Rudra bills himself as a mentalist, but he's basically every cop show gimmick from the past few decades wrapped up in a single person - he he profiles, he uses cold reading and interprets microexpressions, mixed with a bit of hypnotism and a smidgen of genuine psychic ability.  Once Rudra shows up, the movie changes genres and becomes a police procedural, with Rudra solving an unrelated murder in order to establish his bonafides.  

Once the murder is solved, Rudra arrives at the resort, where he quickly establishes that yes, the place is haunted, and no, Suhanisa isn't the ghost, you dorks.  He manages to cajole the actual ghost into making contact, and learns that her name is Amrutha (Samantha Ruth Prabhu), and that she was a brilliant law student before meeting her tragic end.  In life, Amrutha believed that any case could be solved by answering three questions: Who?  Why?  What did they gain?  And he is determined to those three questions on her behalf.

While Raju Gari Gadhi 2 shifts wildly from genre to genre, it's never particularly scary; it's hard to be frightening when the ghost is consistently the most likable and sympathetic character in the cast.  Still, it turns into a decent drama once it stops being an idiotic sex comedy.  On the other hand, the shifts in genre do create some cognitive dissonance.  One of the themes of the movie is that women should be treated as people rather than as attractive objects, but the early part of the movie still objectifies the hell out of Suhanisa, and the three idiots engage in some terrible behavior which is brushed off as just boys being boys.  It doesn't quite manage to live up to its own themes.

Bhooty Call: Bhoot Police

The "Scooby Doo" franchise is weird.  It's not just the talking dog, or the occasional continuity where the monsters are real, or the celebrity cameos, or Fred thinking that that ascot makes him look good.  The central premise of "Scooby Doo" is that the world is full of petty criminals and greedy real estate developers who use smoke and mirrors to pretend to be ghosts, and that there are enough fake ghosts to keep the meddling kids and their dog traveling around the country debunking, and yet the public never stops being fooled.  Bhoot Police (2021) may as well take place in the Scoobyverse, since there are enough fake ghosts scattered around India to support two fake exorcists.

Chiraunji (Arjun Kapoor) doesn't want to be a fake exorcist.  He's the son of the famous Ullat Baba, and he's spent years trying to decode the mysterious book his father left him  Older brother Vibhooti (Saif Ali Khan) is happy to be a fraud, though, and the pair travel around the country in a battered bhootmobile, exorcising fake ghosts, earning money and occasionally making peoples' lives better.  Chiraunji is always hoping the next ghost will be real.

At a Tantric fair, the brothers meet Maya (Yami Gautam), who is looking for someone to exorcise a Kichkandi (a kind of Nepali ghost) from her tea plantation.  Ullat Babu bound the Kichkandi twenty seven years ago, so Chirauni feels a sense of responsibility, while Vibhooti just wants to get away from police inspector Chedilal (Javed Jaffrey), who has been Captain Ahabing after them for a while now, for reasons that will eventually be made clear.

At the plantation, the brothers meet Kanika (Jacqueline Fernandez), aspiring social media star and Maya's older sister.  Kanika wants to sell the plantation and open a bar in London, but Maya wants to protect their father's legacy.  Vibhooti also befriends a mute little girl named Titli (Youngykar Dolma), who will be important later.

Two things quickly become clear.  First, the current haunting is another fake.  Second, something very bad happened here decades ago.  Unravelling these two truths is enough to strain the brothers' relationship to the breaking point, and that's when Chedilal finally shows up.

Bhoot Police is a horror comedy.  The comedy is very successful, thanks to strong performances by both the leads (Saif Ali is by turns despicable and delightful, but consistently amusing) and the supporting cast, particularly Jamie Lever and Rajpal Yadav.  It's also . . . reasonably scary.  There are some creepy bits, but the horror definitely takes a backseat to humor and character.

My one complaint is that I would have liked to see more of the Tantric fair.  It's a fascinating setting that could support a whole movie of its own, but here it's mostly used to facilitate a pretty good Indiana Jones joke.

Bhooty Call: Angulika

Angulika (2020) is just obscure enough that while there's an IMDB entry for the movie, it only lists about five actors and doesn't say which characters they play.  I have looked, but haven't found a cast list that's in a language I can read.  There are actors, they're great, but I can't tell you much more than that.  

Six hundred and twenty years ago, hedonistic king Kalindra is living in a cave, hiding from the sun.  he was cursed by someone named Angulika after doing something extremely bad; this part of the movie is heavy on dodgy CGI and light on exposition.  It is clear that Angulika is related to the sun god, and that's why the sun burns Kalindra whenever it touches him. Kalindra's loyal ministers arrive with a group of mystics in tow, and the mystics have a suggestion.  The way for Kalindra to escape his curse is to die, hang out in a grave for a few centuries, and then, on the eve of the next Angulika Eclipse, wait for Angulika's reincarnation to pass close to his grave, allowing him to return from the dead, kill her again, and gain power over the entire world.  (Is Angulika named after the eclipse, or is the eclipse named after Angulika?  That's the kind of detail that would be included in exposition.) Everyone agrees that this is a sensible plan, and so they carry it out.

Centuries pass, and Pravalikka is on her way to visit her family's ancestral palace, accompanied by her husband Balu and their young son Rahul.  Pravalikka is Angulika's reincarnation, and so Kalindra's spirit is awakened.  His ghostly voice lures little Rahul into the woods.  Rahul knocks a small hole in  Kalindra's tomb, unleashing the ghost, and spooky things begin to happen.

And then, suddenly, it's ten days later.  Pravalikka and her family are missing, and because her father is the Home Minister, it's a political matter.  The case is assigned to Priya and Gautham, two "young, dynamic officers with tech knowledge," as the subtitles put it.  Priya in particular is affected by the case.  (It turns out that she and Pravalikka have been friends for years, but nobody mentions this until quite late in the movie, because the filmmakers are adamantly opposed to providing helpful exposition.)  

Priya and Gautham travel to the palace.  They meet an angry holy man, Gautham fights some thugs, and then they run into the film's excruciating comic relief, three filmmakers who are scouting for locations for a horror movie, and then for some reason cops and comic relief all decide to camp out in the woods together.  (the camping trip provides the excuse for a musical number, so I am not complaining, but it's still a weird choice.)

Priya and Gautham are clearly on the right track, because they're pulled form the case after two days.  Priya insists on continuing, and in the process, she manages to attract the attention of the evil ghost, and Gautham takes her to a psychologist.  And then, finally, over an hour into the movie, we get a bit of exposition when the psychologist arranges a telepathic link between Priya and Pravalikka's maid Shantha, because that is totally a thing that psychologists can do.  Thanks to the telepathy, they learn what happened during the missing ten days, and realize that they're actually working two cases, one a mundane murder, and the other a supernatural struggle for the fate of the world.

The main plot, with an angry ghost seeking revenge on the reincarnation of the woman who thwarted him, is lifted shamelessly from 2009's Arundhati, to the point that ghost-kalindra is doing an impression of Arundhati's villain.  The investigators, one a believer and one a skeptic, are Mulder and Scully by way of Anjaan: Special Crimes Unit's Vikrant and Aditi.  The powerful mystical ring pulled out of the water nods strongly in the direction of Tolkien.  And horror filmmakers being menaced by genuine horrors is such a cliche that I just reviewed a spoof of that very plot point last week.

Despite the plethora of influences and the scriptwriter's dogged insistence on never explaining anything until the very last moment, Angulika does eventually make a bit of sense, at which point the movie switches genres and becomes a devotional movie instead.  Sometimes you just have to go where the movie takes you.

Bhooty Call: Shaitaan Haveli

At this point "a film crew working on a horror movie stumbles across an actual, supernatural horror" is not a new or original premise, and Shaitaan Haveli (2018) doesn't pretend otherwise.  There is a twist, though: the movie within the TV series is a schlocky, exploitative gorefest inspired by the eighties output of the famous Ramsay brothers, and so is the actual horror they uncover.

B-movie director Hariman Singh (Singh Bhupesh) and his trusty cameraman Gangu (Kanchan Pagare) are in trouble.  Hariman's last film, an attempt at a legitimate family drama (but sexy!), was a massive flop, and he owes money to violent and short-tempered gangster Ponty (Adi Irani), and the only way to pay himm back is to make a horror movie on an incredibly low budget and pray for a hit.  Unfortunately, part of the deal is that the hero will be played by Ponty's musclebound and muscle-headed son Monty (Hemant Koumar).  

Hariman also casts Monty's English girlfriend Julia (Pippa Hughes), but an Indian audience expects an Indian leading lady, so he recruits troubled TV actress Prarthana (Neha Chauhan) as the main love interest.  Struggling actor Rahul (series creator Varun Thakur) is cast as the hero's friend.  And faded actor Mukesh (Zahid Ali), who played the lead in Hariman's early hits, is cast as Dracula.  And Hariman has found a great deal on a ruined haveli to use as a filming location; it's cheap because it's supposed to be haunted.

The shoot is an absolute disaster.  Monty is not just arrogant, lazy, and easily distracted, he's also a terrible actor.  Prarthana, meanwhile, is a terrible human being, and she immediately latches on to Monty as the apparent Most Important Person in the area, practically shoving Julia out of the way as she does so.  Rahul is a great actor, but Monty insists on stealing all his lines and speeches.

And then there's Mukesh.  Mukesh is increasingly frustrated because Hariman refuses to give him any lines, only letting him growl and laugh evilly.  Mukesh is just starting to realize that he's never going to be the leading man again, and that's when the haveli's housekeeper Mahua (Shweta Singh) reveals that she is secretly an evil witch, and she offers to restore Mukesh's youth if he will help to secure five sacrifices in order to bring back her master, evil Tantric Chandaal (Surender Thakur).  Mukesh eagerly agrees, but he's not very good at it, so it takes a while before the supporting actors start dying.

Shaitaan Haveli is a love letter to eighties Bollywood horror in all its tawdry glory, but it's also a very silly show.  Chandaal and Mahua try, bless their monstrous hearts, but they're every bit as neurotic as the film crew, and it's hard to recline in dark satanic majesty when you're also squabbling about centuries-old relationship issues.

There is one exception to Shaitaan Haveli's devotion to the tropes of Ramsay horror.  This series has an awful lot of zombies in it, and while they were called out of their graves through the power of Chandaal's magical gemstone, they're obviously Hollywood zombies, complete with a bite that causes rapid zombification.  That particular species of walking dead just wasn't a thing in the Indian horrorsphere of the eighties, but if it had been a trend, the Ramsays would have happily exploited it.