Bhooty Call: Kaal

Because Kaal (2005) was produced by Karan Johar, it opens with a dance number starring Johar's most famous friend, Bollywood megastar Shah Rukh Freaking Khan.  Khan is there to draw in a crowd, but when the dance number is over, he's gone and the crowd is left to deal with the rest of the movie.  This is almost certainly a metaphor for something.

Krishna Thapar (John Abraham) is a wildlife expert employed by National Geographic, though he's currently between assignments and spending his time engaging in shirtless snake wrestling and canoodling with his wildlife photographer wife, Riya (Esha Deol.)  That changes when visitors start dying in Orbit National Park, presumably victims of a man-eating tiger, and Krishna and Riya are dispatched to investigate.

Meanwhile, a group of quirky, hip young pals are on their way to a nearby farmhouse.  The group all have their own individual quirks: Sajid (Kushal Punjabi) is obsessed with his handgun and wants to use it for hunting, Dev (Vivek Oberoi) tends to introduce himself as "God" and whenever anyone annoys him he threatens to kill them under his breath, Ishika (Lara Dutta) is a woman, and Vishal (Vishal Malhotra) is also there.  

The trip to the farmhouse is derailed when they have serious car trouble, but Dev manages to convince creepy stranger Bagga (Vineet Sharma) to give them a ride.  Bagga notices Sajid's gun and offers to take the group camping in the national park, with maybe a little light poaching on the side?  And given that they have just met Bagga, don't like Bagga, certainly don't trust Bagga, and have all been warned repeatedly to stay out of the park because it is very dangerous, what with the man-eating tiger that has been killing (and eating!) people in the area, they agree.  It will be "an adventure."

Along the way the gang literally run into Krishna and Riya, in one of the movie's many, many car accidents, and since they are all going in the same direction, the decide to travel together.  And at this point, the movie falls into a sort of pattern.  Authority figures and local experts warn the travelers about dangers in the jungle.  The group ignores the warnings.  People die.  

At first it's other people doing the dying, including Krishna's driver and a friendly and easily bribed park ranger.  But then Sajid loses his head, goes off alone to hunt for rabbits, and, well, loses his head.  While searching for him, the car stalls, and the group are menaced by three tigers before being rescued by the mysterious Kaali (Ajay Devgn), a local guide who only speaks in dire warnings.  He promises the group that if they survive, he'll meet them again, and leaves.

After discovering what's left of Sajid, the group decide that heeding warnings might be a good idea after all, and decide to leave the park.  Unfortunately, the monsoon season has just started, and the main roads are blocked.  Fortunately, Kaali returns, and offers to guide them to their final destination.

At this point, Krishna is beginning to suspect that it's not a tiger killing people.  He asks Kaali about it, and Kaali carefully tries to explain that this is a ghost movie rather than a killer tiger movie.  he begins telling a spooky campfire story about a local guide who began leading tourists to be killed by wild animals before the villagers killed him in turn, and the name of that guide was . . .. but nobody lets him finish the story.

And at long last, spooky things start to happen.  It starts with bad dreams, but soon the group are threatened by wildly improbable accidents, and people start to die.  The film nobly tries to maintain a sense of mystery about what supernatural force is behind the deaths.  Could it be the mysterious stranger who is dressed in black, constantly predicts that people will die, is played by the biggest name in the cast, has nearly the same name as the movie, and told the story of the original haunting but was interrupted before he could add "And that ghost was me!"?  This is a hard one.

The makers of Kaal deserve some credit for trying to break away from old horror movie formulas and create something new; this is a ghost story that takes place almost entirely in bright daylight, after all.  But that credit can only stretch so far, because the film fumbles the execution.  The early jump scares completely fail to land, and that sets a tone.  The characters range from smug and unpleasant (Dev) to inoffensive and bland (Ishika), but they all speak and behave like they've been written by a bad AI that watched a thousand hours of soap operas.  It's hard to get attached when the ghost is the only character with clear motivations.

Don't let the opening dance number lure you in; the hidden dangers of a dodgy script lurk in the cinematic underbrush.  I knew it was a metaphor!

Bhooty Call - Nishi Trishna

 Nishi Trishna (1989) doesn't actually use the word "vampire" when describing its undead monster; the subtitles refer to bloodthirsty spirits instead.  But it's a fanged creature that sleeps in a coffin, hunts for blood by night, hypnotizes victims with its terrible gaze, and rips off several plot points from Dracula, so I feel confident in saying that this is a vampire movie.

The film opens with photographer Tony snapping some pictures of his lovely model (and possibly wife?  The subtitles aren't clear) Milli.  (Nishi Trishna is obscure enough that the IMDB doesn't list the characters the actors played, for the most part.)  There's a carriage parked across the road, and after some mildly comic business with two policemen bantering with the mute carriage driver and discovering a coffin in the back, we cut to Milli, dead, with fang marks on her neck.

At Milli's funeral, the priest notices her hand sticking out of the coffin.  He investigates, and discovers that the corpse is surprisingly lifelike and yes, has prominent fangs.  So he orders the coffin closed and continues the funeral as normal.  As he and Tony walk away from the grave, a sudden burst of wind knocks over the cross.  The priest warns Tony that the death was unnatural, then walks away without doing anything.  This decision does not come back to bite him, but it does come back to bite Tony.

Cut to a group of attractive young people planning a road trip.  Anjan is a doctor, and is dating Sanjana; her mother, Doctor Banarjee, is the hospital administrator.  Paul works for an antiques dealer, and the group are going to stop off along the way at Gorchampa Palace to examine some items his boss is interested in buying.  Along the way their car breaks down, and the villagers are not willing to go anywhere near the palace after dark, but they manage to get a ride from local dancer Shimli (Moon Moon Sen), who insists on going along for reasons of their own.

It is well after dark when the little party arrive and are greeted by Mister John, the creepy owner of the creepy palace.  John invites them to stay the night, and spooky things begin to happen.  Shimli finds her missing identical twin Kamli chained up in another room, delirious and ranting about someone drinking her blood.  Paul follows the sound of a mysterious voice, and discovers a mysterious woman with ghungroos singing a song about the thirsty night.  Paul and Shimli fall in love, which, granted, isn't actually that spooky.  But nobody shares any information with each other, because the real monster is poor communication skills.

No, wait, the real monster is vampires!  The group's pal Tapas picks up the car and is bringing it to the palace when he is attacked and killed by Vampire Milli, still wearing they skimpy nightie she died in.  (Did they bury her in it?)  And Sanjana is attacked by a terrifying living corpse with hypnotic eyes, which proceeds to drink some of her blood before she is saved by Shimli.  It takes some convincing, but the boys finally agree that there's something terribly wrong with the palace, and the group briefly hold Mister John at gunpoint, sneak past the vampire as he lies down in his coffin, and go home.

The whole episode is kind of like if Johnathon Harker brought friends while visiting Dracula's castle, and none of them were terribly observant.  Like Dracula, the vampire then follows the group back to the city, but there's no need for a boat, so his servants load the coffin into the back of a truck and drive it to town.  

More women around town are attacked, and Anjan has just about realized that there's something supernatural going on when the Van Helsing of the picture reveals herself - it's Doctor Banarjee!  She tells the men the story of her college boyfriend, who wanted to know the secrets of life and death, so he turned to the occult, procured a corpse, and summoned a bloodsucking spirit to inhabit it, only to wind up as the resulting vampire's servant.

And with that, there's nothing left to do but to get the gang together, drive back to the palace, and kill the vampire.  Which they do.  Yeah, it's pretty abrupt, and the not-terribly-shocking reveal of Mister John's true identity doesn't get more than a minute of screen time.  Roll credits.

The characters in Nishi Trishna don't really communicate with each other, but I don't think the scriptwriters were communicating, either.  In theory the scenes of the movie connect together, but nothing has any real impact from one scene to the next.  Shimli's twin sister meets a tragic fate, but now we're worried about Sanjana.  Paul held Mister John at gunpoint to escape his creepy palace, but his boss is still doing business with the man.  The group crept past a vampire returning to its crypt, a vampire which has already attacked two of the group and demonstrated supernatural powers?  That's interesting, but they're still skeptics until Doctor Banarjee explains things.  They are a shockingly oblivious bunch for horror movie characters, and that is saying something.

The movie does have its good points.  It's very atmospheric, and the mood is enhanced by the back and white footage.  The fearless vampire hunter being somebody's mom was a nice twist, though they didn't give her much to do.  Shimli was an intelligent and competent protagonist, though she really needs to learn about sharing information.  And the film's real hero, Mister John's mute manservant, had a few brief shining moments in the sun.

The end result is still pretty disjointed, though, and comes across as the world's most cursory adaptation of Dracula by someone who only skimmed the first few chapters.

Bhooty Call: Golmaal Again

Golmaal Again (2017) is not a straight horror movie.  It's not even a horror comedy, really.  This is an installment in the long-running Golmaal comedy franchise, and while there are ghosts in it, the movie is about as scary as the average episode of The Ghost Whisperer.  

The Golmaal movies don't have any real continuity from one film to the next; actors recur, and they may have the same character names or perform the same running gags as in previous films, but every movie is a world in itself, with its own overly complicated plot there to serve as an excuse for farcical shenanigans. In this case, Gopal (Ajay Devgn), Laxman (Shreyas Talpade), Madhav (Arshad Warsi), Lucky (Tusshar Kapoor), and the other Laxman (Kunal Khemu) grew up in the same orphanage, overseen by Jamnadas (Uday Tikekar).  The five orphans discovered a baby girl whom they named Khushi, but after a few happy years childhood rivalries caused the boys to leave the orphanage in two groups.  Gopal and the first Laxman grew up to be enforcers for Babli (Sanjay Mishra) while Madhav, Lucky, and the other Laxman went to work for Vasooli (Mukesh Tiwari.)

Naturally everybody has their own comic quirk.  Gopal is an amazing fighter, but is terrified of ghosts.  Laxman 1 is a loyal friend with a lisp that's supposed to be funny.  Madhav - well, Madhav doesn't really have a quirk per se, he's just a jerk who likes to play practical jokes.  Lucky speaks in complete gibberish, which again is supposed to be funny, and Laxman 2 is maybe three inches shorter than the others..

When Jamnadas suddenly dies, all all five of the gang agree to put aside their differences and return to the orphanage for the funeral.  There, they are reunited with the orphanage's librarian, Anna (Tabu), who happens to be able to see ghosts.  This will be important later.  They also meet real estate tycoon Vasu Reddy (Prakash Raj), who announces that he will be demolishing the orphanage and rebuilding it in Bangalore.

After returning home, Gopal is haunted by an actual ghost; he and Laxman 1 flee to Anna for help, and she suggests that they stay with her in the house of the blind Colonel Chauhan (Sachin Khedekar); her ghost knowledge is a strong motivation, but Gopal is also intrigued by what he thinks is the Colonel's pretty young maid (Parineeti Chopra).  Meanwhile, Madhav and his crew are hired by Vasu Reddy to chase Gopal away.

And then wackiness ensues for a while.  Fake ghost shenanigans.  Real ghost shenanigans.  Johnny Lever appears as a fellow grownup orphanage alumnus who occasionally transforms into Johnny Lever doing a bit.  It's like if Hamlet spent the first three acts of the play playing pranks on Laertes before finally finding out what happened to his father.  But eventually the real plot arrives.

The maid isn't the maid, she's the Colonel's adopted daughter.  The ghost of the Colonel's adopted daughter, actually, and these five knuckleheads can see her because she's actually the ghost of the Colonel's adopted daughter Khushi, and they took care of her when she was a baby.  (To the film's credit, at this point the various characters all point out how completely inappropriate a relationship between Gopal and Khushi would be, and the romance angle is dropped entirely.)  Khushi and Jamnadas were both murdered by Nikhil (Neil Nitin Mukesh), who was her fiance and Jamnadas's wayward nephew, all as a part of a scheme with Vasu Reddy to gain ownership of the orphanage so that they can tear it down and build an amusement park.  Anna has deliberately brought the gang together so that they can avenge Khushi and save the orphanage.

Usually, a premise like this would lead to a basketball playing dog saving the day, but this time they decide to try a reverse Scooby Doo; Nikhil is busy being evil in Dubai, so the gang decide to sue their skills, a fake Babu, and their actual supernatural ghost who has amazing powers of telekinesis and can possess anybody in order to fake a haunting and scare Vasu Reddy into confessing his crime to actual medium Anna, pretending to be a fake medium, so that they can record the confession and give it to the police.  

(The plan seems a little overcomplicated, since they have a ghost with actual supernatural powers who has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to possess people, including Vasu Reddy specifically, and make them say whatever she wants.  It seems to me that they can just have the eagles fly them to Mordorskip a few steps.  Perhaps it's better for Khushi's spiritual development if they do things the hard way.)

This is a very silly movie, and it's also largely inoffensive in its silliness.  It's certainly less obsessed with sex than most of the other big budget multi-star comedy franchises.  The complicated plot serves as a delivery vehicle for jokes, and the jokes are largely . . . okay.  (Apart from having two characters with speech impediments played for laughs.  That was not okay.)

Ultimately, the movie comes down to its performances.  Ajay Devgn is clearly having fun playing a  a parody of his usual tough guy image, combining Singham style violence with comedic vulnerability.  Johnny Lever is clearly at home here, recycling several of his most practiced comic tics.  Parineeti Chopra isn't given much to do apart from stand around and look beautiful and/or ominous.

And Tabu is largely wasted; she's an actor of tremendous depth and talent (this film was made three years after her ferocious and heartbreaking performance as Ghazala in Haider, and a full fourteen years after her chilling "Lady MacBeth" in Maqbool) and here she just narrates, speaks kindly to ghosts, and acts as stern but supportive den mother to our rowdy heroes.  Her performance is fine, she just doesn't have much to work with.

Bhooty Call: Cinderella

 Cinderella (2021) is structured as a mystery, with mysterious events being explained by flashbacks as the film progresses.  However, it's not a very difficult mystery, so I am going to start with the flashbacks.  This is your chance to turn back, for here be spoilers.

Thulasi (Raai Laxmi) is a poor but pure-hearted orphan who works as a maid for the wealthy Sandra (Uhhayinee Roy) and her spoiled daughter Ramya (Sakshi Agarwal).  Mother and daughter are both horrible, constantly berating, abusing, and humiliating whenever they need to take out their frustrations on someone helpless.

And they do have frustrations - their secret illegal poisonous snake smuggling business is complicated and stressful, and Ramya has fallen in love with Robin, a foreign (Australian, maybe?) millionaire who goes to the same dance class as she does.  Robin appears to be blissfully oblivious to Ramya's charms, but he's friendly, and she is confident that if she persists he'll come to his senses and fall in love at some point.

One day Thulasi catches sight of a Cinderella dress outside a shop, and she basically falls in love, walking past the shop to gaze at the dress at every opportunity.  She doesn't have a Fairy Godmother handy, though, so she decides to make her own dream come true, working extra hours and odd jobs, with a little busking on the side, in order to earn the money for the dress.

It isn't enough.  She hires local creepy tailor Guru (Robo Shankar) to make her a dress, but what he comes up with is a Sexy Cinderella Halloween costume rather than a gown.  She visits a church to ask Jesus to help her buy the dress, and that's where she overhears a woman praying for a miracle to save her dying son.  Thulasi happens to have the rare blood type the son needs, and she anonymously donates blood to save his life.  The mother tries to pay her, Thulasi refuses, but eventually relents and accepts just enough money to buy the dress.  Hooray!

Soon, Thulasi is at work, helping her employers prepare for a party which Robin will be attending.  Sandra notices a rip in Thulasi's clothing, and orders her to change into something nice, not realizing that Thulasi has a ballgown in the closet.  She puts it on and helps serve the guests, and Robin is instantly captivated, not paying attention when Sandra proposes an engagement to Ramya.  She makes her announcement, but Robin is nowhere to be seen - he is too busy pledging his love to Thulasi.

However, this is a ghost movie, so there are no happy endings here.  Sandra and Ramya brutally murder Thulasi and hide the body.  

Cut to the present day.  Akira (Raai Laxmi again) is a sound designer who has come to this remote area in order to record the song of a rare bird.  She spots a Cinderella dress in an antique shop and decides she absolutely must have it . . . so she buys it with some of her money, because she's not a poor maid. Soon after, she's arrested for a murder she did not commit (the victim was actually killed by an entirely different angry ghost) but after Ramya is killed under similar circumstances, she's released..

Spooky things begin to happen, and Akira may or may not be possessed by the spirit in the dress.  Either way, the ghost has killed Ramya, and a terrified Sandra seeks protection from Saint Gonzalez, who is your basic cinematic evil Tantric sorcerer, but with pseudo-Catholic aesthetics lifted from a heavy metal album cover.

They're making a lot of horror comedies in India these days, which wink at genre tropes even as they make use of them.  Cinderella isn't a horror comedy; almost the entire movie is played completely straight, apart from Robo Shankar's off-putting turn as the creepy tailor.  Cinderella doesn't wink at genre tropes, it embraces them.  

Tropes can be fun, but it does mean that the main plot is kind of thin, and it doesn't help that the movie pads out its runtime with shots of cars driving to their spoooky destinations.  It's interesting enough, and sort of scary, but it really could have been an episode of Anjaan: Special Crimes Unit without losing any key plot points.  

However, the climax does one thing that surprised me.  When Saint Gonzalez's magic proves to be a match for Thulasi's ghostly powers, she reveals that she's brought a friend.  The unrelated ghost form the beginning of the movie turns out to be not so unrelated after all, and they two angry spirits manage to wreak their revenge.  It's a clever twist in an otherwise very predictable film.