Count the snakes.

 Monica, O My Darling (2022) begins as it means to go on, with murder.  Factory worker Dev (Shiv Chauhan) barely has time to announce his engagement to Shalu (Zayn Marie Khan) when he's attacked and killed by an industrial robot.

Six months later, Shalu's brother, brilliant engineer Jayant (Rajkummar Rao) is attending the company gala for Unicorn Robotics.  Things are going well for Jayant; he's just been appointed to the board of directors, and he's engaged to Nikki (Akansha Ranjan Kapoor), daughter of Unicorn's CEO Satyanarayan (Vijay Kenkare.)  He's also kind of a terrible person; he's openly dismissive of former childhood friend Gaurav (Sukant Goel) and he's having an affair with Monica (Huma Qureshi), the company secretary who is also performing a big dance number at the gala for reasons that are never explained.

After the gala, Jayant and Monica are enjoying some "alone time" when she announces that he's pregnant.  She make sit clear that she's keeping the baby and that she will take care of it herself and not tell anyone who the father is, as long as she's provided with large sums of money at regular intervals.

The next day, Jayant receives an anonymous letter with incriminating photos of him and Monica, asking him to meet the sender at a sleazy hotel.  Jayant assumes that it's Monica attempting to formally blackmail him, but it turns out to be Nikki's brother Nishikant, who reveals that Monica has also been blackmailing him, along with the hapless and very married accountant Arvind (Bagavatyhi Perimal).  Nishikant insists that there's only one solution to all of their problems; they need to kill Monica.  He pressures the other men to agree, then they draw lots to decide who will do the killing, who will transport the body, and who will dispose of it.  Then Nishikant makes them sign a contract detailing the arrangement; since he's the assigned killer, he doesn't want to take the fall alone.

 The plan is overly complex, involving luring Monica from Pune to Mumbai, with Jayant driving for miles in a borrowed van before taking the train back home, hopefully before Nikki has time to wake up.  It's hectic, but everything seems to work until Jayant delivers the body to Arvind, who is supposed to bury it in the woods.  Arvind is far too hapless to handle the job on his own so Jayant reluctantly stays to help bury Monica in the woods, but the men are chased away by a leopard.

The next day, the body is found in the woods, still wrapped in a yellow tarp, but it's not Monica's body, it's Nishikant's.  Monica is apparently fine, and still cheerfully insists on being paid.  But it's clear that there's something else going on; Arvind is killed by a snake someone sent in the mail, and Jayant barely escapes his own snake.  People are dying, and quirky detective Naidu (Radhika Apte) is closing in on Jayant.

Jayant makes for an unusual protagonist, because he really is a terrible person.   On the other hand, the audience isn't really expected to root for him, just watch in bemused fascination as he struggles to avoid his fate.  Much of the time he's passively terrible, selfish and hypocritical but not actively malevolent, but he's willing to do awful things in order to protect his comfortable life.  Monica is also terrible, but is more honest about what she wants and displays more agency in general, which makes her a more sympathetic character.  

Monica, O My Darling is a black comedy rather than a proper film noir, but the twisty plot hangs together, and the killers (there are multiple murderers) have understandable motives.  The film is deeply cynical, often funny, and surprisingly fun.

Fool me once . . .

 Avatara Purusha 2 (2024) begins as the previous movie ended, with a magical battle re-imagined as a martial arts duel lifted straight from a wuxia film.  It's an intriguing sequence, probably the highlight of both films, and promises a supernatural adventure that the movies never really deliver on.

That's followed by vital exposition.  Siri (Ashika Ranganath) wanted to reunite her broken family by presenting her aunt Susheela (Bhavya) and uncle Rama (P. Sai Kumar) with the son that Yahsoda (Sudharani), Rama's sister and Siri's mother, lost at the fair years ago.  Finding the actual missing Karna is hard, though, so instead she hired an extra known as Overacting Anil (Sharan) to play the part.  Rama remained suspicious, but Anil quickly formed a close and loving bond with Susheela.  And then the real Karna, calling himself Kumara (Srinigara Kitty), arrived, and Anil went back to life as an extra.

That's not an unusual plot for an Indian movie, except that Kumara is a master of black magic, sent by his evil mentor Darka (Ashutosh Rana) to find the key to enter the mostly empty heaven known as Trishanku, and Anil is not just a glorified extra with dreams of stardom, he's also a trained magician on a mission to save the family from the forces of evil.

Susheela's health is declining, and Kumara doesn't really show much interest in his mother, so Rama and Siri decide to bring back Anil.  They do, and he tries to find his place in the family dynamic while wooing Siri and trying to everyone from the horror movie curses sent by Kumara and Darka.  

 That status quo holds for most of the movie - subtle sympathetic magic in the background of the family drama.  Not much is happening with the plot, so the running time is padded with slapstick and sideplots that don't really go anywhere.  Anil thwarts a band of crooks who are robbing the studio where he works.  His old friend and fellow runaway from the hidden village of evil magic-users is haunted by a ghost and needs help with the right ritual to put it to rest, but wackiness ensues. Meanwhile, the main plot goes nowhere.

And then the main plot goes somewhere.  One of the family members is killed by a curse.  Susheela's soul is taken to the edge of Trishanku, and Anil must follow in order to save her, leading to a final battle, an anticlimax, and the revelation that once again nothing is as it seems, leading once again to a cliffhanger setting up the inevitable part 3.

There's enough material for one solid horror comedy here, but there's just so much padding.  The plot inches forward at a glacial pace, then suddenly accelerates when it's clear that there's no time to wrap everything up in a satisfying fashion, all to set up the next sequel.  The premise is great, but this movie could have been an email.

Passing the torch.

 Deewana (1992) isn't a romantic comedy, it's a romantic drama, a grand sweeping tale of love and tragedy starring veteran actor and known sweater enthusiast Rishi Kapoor.  It's also the cinematic debut of a plucky young stage and TV actor named Shah Rukh Khan.  Still, Bollywood's a rough business, and it's very hard for someone without any family connections to make it, so we probably won't be seeing him again.

Kapoor plays Ravi, a wealthy and handsome eligible bachelor.  Ravi is pursuing a music career, so he leaves running the family business to his mother Laxmi (Sushma Seth) and his transparently evil uncle Dhirendra (Amrish Puri).  Dhirendra is all smiles and compliments when people are looking, but he is Laxmi's stepbrother, and he's been nursing a grudge about that for decades.

Ravi shares a little banter with his mother about the importance of getting married and providing the family an heir, then he leaves for a show in a mountain town.  While preparing for the show Ravi stays with aspiring poet and musician Devdas Sabrangi (Deven Verma), and that's where he meets Devdas's niece Kajal (Divya Bharti).  

Kajal is . . . well, she's young and carefree and nothing is ever going to change her.  She's spunky, prone to pouting and telling people "I'll kill you" when thwarted, which is a lot more charming than it sounds.  And she's a huge fan of Ravi, with posters covering her walls.  Ravi and Kajal spend more and more time together, and he keeps extending his trip, but eventually he has to go home.  At first Kajal is heartbroken, but Ravi decides to marry her immediately and take her home with him.

So, Ravi is happy, Kajal is happy, Laxmi is thrilled, and Dhirendra is not happy at all.  He's charming when meeting his new niece-in-law, but the moment he's alone with his son Narendra (Mohnish Bahl) they start scheming.  The first plan involves Narendra assaulting Kajal, but Ravi returns home just in time and Narendra is thrown out of the house, with Dhirenra joining in the rebuke in order to preserve his position.

The second plan is much simpler.  When Ravi and Kajal go away to spend some alone time in the family's farmhouse, Narendra and a small army of goons arrive to kill them both.  There's a fight and Ravi is shot, but he manages to kill Narendra with a sword before falling off a cliff to his apparent death; there's no way that anyone could have survived a fall from that height, so that must be the end of him.

Kajal returns to the family home and tells Laxmi what happened, then Dhirendra arrives and reveals his true colors.  He's furious about the death of his son, and practically destroys the house while pursuing the women, but they escape and, with the help of family lawyer Sharma (Alok Nath) they find a new home in the city.

Life in the city is hard for a pair of widowed women, even if they have money.  Kajal has resigned herself to a life of quiet misery when brash and rebellious rich kid Raja (Shah Rukh Khan) literally runs into them, almost knocking Laxmi over.  Kajal immediately berates him, and he watches her in stunned silence as the police arrive to take him away.  

Raja is smitten, and begins stalking Kajal in earnest, buying her flowers, carving her name into his own arm, following her home on Holi to . . . honestly I'm not sure what he was trying to achieve in that scene, but Kajal was having none of it.  He also tells his stern and materialistic father Ramakant (Dalip Tahil) about the woman he wants to marry.  Ramakant is furious; marrying a widow would be a stain on the family's honor, so he sends thugs to Kajal's home, intending toi drive them away.  Raja arrives just in time and beats the goons up, and while that doesn't impress Kajal, it does impress Laxmi; she urges Kajal to marry the young man in order to secure a protector, and after some heavy guilt tripping Kajal agrees.

After the wedding Raja turns out to be a better man than expected.  He tells Kajal that he knows she still loves her late husband, and promises not to touch her until and unless she feels something for him.  Then he gives her space, focusing instead on providing a comfortable life for his new family, opening a garage with the help of his layabout friends.

After Raja is hurt in a car accident, Kajal realizes that she feels something for him after all, and once again everyone is happy.  And that's when Dhirendra returns to ask Sharma to help him access the family's money.  After Sharma refuses, Dhirendra suspects that the women are alive and well and somewhere in the city, so he sends more goons to find them.  meanwhile, Raja saves a mysterious man from muggers, takes him to the hospital, and checks in on him frequently.  The men quickly become close, but Raja doesn't realize that this mysterious bearded and sweaterless man is actually Ravi.

This is pretty standard late eighties/early nineties Bollywood melodrama, with quick courtships and sudden twists of fate and characters turning out to not be dead after all and noble self sacrifices, though directly confronting the taboos around widows remarrying is a bit unusual.  Ultimately, though, the movie is going to succeed or fail based on the performances.

Rishi Kapoor is always solid, and he's clearly in his element here.  Amrish Puri is also doing what he does best, alternating between chewing the scenery and gently nibbling the doorframes; Dhirendra is a Shakespearean villain as written, so that's how he plays him.  And Divya Bharti is beautiful and charming and stuck in a role which is largely just reacting to one tragedy after another.  All too often, the role of a woman in early nineties Bollywood is to suffer nobly, and Bharti sadly died the next year, just as the industry was starting to open up and let women be fun from time to time.

And then there's Shah Rukh Khan.  He's very stagey in this, playing to the people in the back of the theater, but he also gives Raja some of the same menacing intensity that he would later bring to the villainous roles that would make him a star; Raja even has the same giggle as Rahul does in Darr.  After the wedding he settles down a bit into pleasant leading man, and during the final scenes he throws focus to Bharti and Kapoor, since they have the heavier dramatic beats.  The real difference between this and Khan's later roles is that Raja outright wins every fight he's in, rather than making use of Khan's signature "get beaten to a bloody pulp" move.

Deewana is very much a product of its time, but it's a fascinating time, with Khan at the beginning of his film career while Kapoor was about to transition away from romantic roles, and Bharti's promising career would be cut short by tragedy within a year.  It's a snowglobe of Bollywood history, a singular moment in time.  And a decently entertaining melodrama.

One ring to rule them all.

 Despite the title, Jab Harry Met Sejal (2017) has nothing to do with When Harry Met Sally.  If anything, it owes a debt to It Happened One Night, because this is a Bollywood road trip movie.  It's a popular formula; two people are forced by strange circumstances to travel together, usually across India or Europe as represented by one ton in Switzerland.  At first they don't get along, then they do get along, then they're in love and it's time to return home and face whatever obstacles are keeping them apart, whether that means a violent fiance with gang connections or an angry father played by Amrish Puri.  But what if nobody was standing between them?

Harinder Singh Nehra (Shah Rukh Khan) was once a farmer in a small village in Punjab, but now he's Harry, a tour guide making a circuit of the stately capitals of Europe.  It is immediately clear from the opening montage that beneath his practiced patter and massive reserves of personal charm, Harry is absolutely miserable, but he carries on, spending his time between trips with his only friend Mayank (Aru Krishansh Verma), as well as a rotating cast of short term girlfriends.

After sending the latest tour group on their way home, Harry is stopped by Sejal (Anushka Sharma), one of the group members.  She explains that she became engaged to her boyfriend Rupen (Kavi Shastri) on the trip, and she has lost the ring.  It's a treasured heirloom in Rupen's family, they've already fought, and she has to find it soon.

Harry does not want to help; he's supposed to be enjoying some time off, and he's been fired before for romancing the clients so he doesn't want to risk anything.  Sejal is really bossy though, and her parents pulled some strings with the tour company, so Harry is on ringfinding duty for the time being.

So Harry and Sejal retrace the tour, starting in Amsterdam and moving on to Prague and beyond.  And they argue a lot, but they've both got excellent "antagonistic banter which grows progressively more flirtatious as time goes on " skills, and after a run-in with some gangsters in Prague they start to open up to one another.

Sejal can tell that Harry is lonely, and invites him to consider her his girlfriend while they're looking for the ring together.  Harry knows that's a terrible idea, and tells her so, but Sejal assures him that she's not the kind of girl who would leave her fiance for a tourist guide.  Then she dares him to turn on the charm while reenacting the moment she thinks she lost the ring, not reckoning with the fact that Harry is played by Shah Rukh Freaking Khan, with all the prodigious charm reserves that implies.  

The adventures continue.  At this point Harry is in love with Sejal but determined to control his emotions, and Sejal is starting to realize that she loves Harry as well.  They have a run in with a different set of gangsters, led by Gas (Chandan Roy Sanyal), during which Sejal finds the ring.  And decides not to tell Harry about it, instead dragging him to Frankfurt so they can represent the groom's side at Mayank's wedding.  Mayank and his new German wife Irina (Evelyn Sharma) notice the obvious chemistry between the two, but Harry and Sejal explain that they're both happier than they've ever been, but it's not real and every vacation ends.

And that seems to be that.  After one last fight, Sejal reveals the ring, Harry books her a flight, and she goes home to get married, while Harry goes back to work.  Will they see each other again?  Will they get a chance to declare their feelings?  This is a Bollywood romance, so the answer is obviously yes, but probably not in the way you're expecting.

Amrish Puri isn't in this movie.  There's no angry father with a small army of thugs, and no physically imposing boyfriend to stand in the way.  (Rupen is kind of a jerk, but in an ordinary way, and he barely gets any screentime.)  Harry and Sejal can't be together because Harry and Sejal don't want to admit their feelings, because they're afraid. Once again this is a problem that can be solved by five minutes of conversation, so the solution is to have that five minutes of conversation.  Then kiss.  And then an awkward thumbs up.

The plotline here is classic Bollywood, but the presentation isn't.  This is a romance and a moody character piece, and Shah Rukh gives an unusually nuanced and restrained performance.  Harry and Sejal aren't looking for love, they're just looking for a way home.  And eventually they find it.

Evil Vampire Jumanji

The board game Ludo is a "cross and circle" game, one of the many variants of the ancient Indian game of Pachisi; probably the most common variant in the US is Parcheesi, published by Hasbro.  Versions of the game appear in the Mahabharata and the video for ABBA's song "The Name of the Game", as well as the 2015 Bengali horror movie Ludo, directed by auteur Qaushiq Mukherjee.  (Also the 2020 ensemble black comedy Ludo, but that's a movie for another time.)  

The basic plot of Ludo is incredibly straightforward.  College students Ria (Subholina Sen), Pele (Soumendra Bhattacharya), Payal (Ananya Biswas), and Babai (Ranodeep Bose) all want to have sex.  They each live at home with their respective families, so they try to get a hotel, but it isn't easy.  They're stopped by police, who demand a hefty bribe and steal Ria's food, then they're refused by several hotels in a row because they can't produce a marriage certificate to show that any of them are married.  

The last hotel they try doesn't turn them away, but the man at the desk is oddly unresponsive, and when the power cuts out they go upstairs only to discover that the hotel is full of kinky vampires.  The students flee, go to a club and freak out for a while, but then it's back to the matter at hand, finding a place to have sex.

Finally, one of them has an idea.  They sneak into a nearby shopping mall and hide out until closing.  When everyone has gone they spend some time racing around the mall, drinking, smoking, bullying one another, and generally acting like doomed teens in a slasher movie.  When one of the couples finally decides to get down to business, they're interrupted by a pair of elderly vagrants (Rituparna Sen and Joyraj Bhattacharya).  

After some initial hostility everyone calms down.  The old man wanders off, Ria goes to look for a bathroom, and the old woman takes out an ancient cloth gameboard which seems to hypnotize the others.  They play for a while, and then the old woman suddenly and messily eats Babai, literally tearing the young man apart.  Everyone (including Ria, who returned just in time) freaks out.

This is not a bad setup for a horror movie; Ludo is a game in which players make their way around an enclosed board, trying to reach a safe space and avoid getting taken out by the other players, and the characters are now trapped in an enclosed space with plenty of room to run (as demonstrated by the earlier race scene), pursued by relentless supernatural cannibals.  That's not what happens, though.

Ria, Payal and Pele all pile into an elevator, which seems to go haywire.  Pele becomes convinced that his friend dies because of the sinful women, and tries to attack them, but the door opens and the ladies escape, leaving him to be picked off easily by the old man.  Ria and Payal reach the basement, they're menaced by the old woman, who is not considerably younger and covered in blood, and then they fall into another hypnotic trance and sit down beside her as she narrates her backstory in her best Gollum voice.

That backstory takes up the entire last half of the movie, and it could have been handled with a five minute scene.  Two siblings discover the cursed game board their family has kept contained for generations, they have sex, their father curses them, and now they are cursed immortal cannibals who can never die.  Sometimes they are starving and lamenting their fate, sometimes they are playing board games with random people, an evil shaman (Tillotame Shone) shows up to try and steal the board and then vanishes abruptly, and then it's more lamenting and more board games.  

There are elements of a good movie here.  The characters are unpleasant, but the actors are good, and there are two separate interesting premises which are dropped almost immediately.  But the pacing kills it.  the first half of the movie is incredibly compressed, so we don't really get to know anything about these people apart from he fact that they really want to have sex, and once the killing starts everyone immediately shuffles into the basement for exposition.  There's no time to build tension.

The last half of the movie is just tedious.  I am not inclined to feel sorry for the cannibal couple, who went from stealing a game to eating people in almost no time, and there are few things as dull as watching other people play board games to the death.  It's an excellent example of how sometimes telling actually is better than showing - they played the game for centuries.  I get that.  I don't need to spend centuries watching them do it.

There are nice touches throughout Ludo; the reveal mid-exposition that Ria and Payal have started playing the game again without realizing it is very well done, for instance.  But then the movie makes me angry again with a sequel-hunting mid credits scene about the evil shaman plotting to unleash the evil board game upon the world by commercially releasing a game that has already been available in stores for generations.

It's frustrating.  Technically well-made, but I think the ABBA video has a better narrative.