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.