No rockets. Just Tarzan.

 Adventures of Tarzan (1985) is a product of the golden age of Bollywood plagiarism, a time when you could pad out your Tarzan movie with songs lifted from The Sound of Music. At its best, it's the kind of movie I that I can use the sentence "Tarzan incapacitates the snipers with thrown guitars" when summarizing.  At it's worst . . . well, we'll get to that.

 

Tarzan (Hemant Birje) is a legendary figure, believed to live somewhere deep in the jungles of India.  When circus owner Krishnakant Verma (Narendranath Malhotra) sees a news report about a recent Tarzan sighting, he hires big game hunter D. K. (Dalip Tahil) to capture the wild man so he can force him to perform in the circus, because that's much easier than hiring an acrobat and having them dress up as Tarzan.

 D. K. teams up with shady archeologist Shetty (Om Shivpuri), who is leading an expedition to discover the lost civilization of Shakhabhumi.  Soon they're joined by Shetty's estranged daughter Ruby (Kimi Katkar), who traveled thousands of miles to tell her father she hates him, but reconciles with him almost immediately and is soon hanging around the expedition and occasionally wandering into the jungle.

 At night the expedition members can hear Tarzan's cry echoing through the jungle, and occasionally stragglers are carried off - not by Tarzan, by a problematic tribe of angry natives and their enormous Chief (Gorilla, and that is the actor's screen name; I'm not editorializing) but everyone assumes that Tarzan is responsible for everything bad.

After sneaking off to bathe in a river, Ruby is attacked by a rubber crocodile, and rescued by Tarzan.  She drives him away with her pistol.  On another day,  she's bitten by a venomous snake, and Tarzan saves her again.  At this point it's getting dark and she doesn't know how to get back to camp, so she embraces her narrative roll and falls in love with Tarzan instead.  

In the morning Tarzan takes her back to the camp, and D. K. and the others immediately shoot at him.  From here things proceed as you might expect, alternating between jungle peril and the developing romance.  Ruby sings a song as she tries to teach Tarzan the English alphabet for some reason, and in another scene she's abducted by natives.

One day, while Ruby is in the jungle making friends with all of the stock footage animals, the natives attack the expedition and wipe out nearly everybody, except for D. K. and his personal henchmen.  Tarzan fights the natives, but D. K. takes the opportunity to tranquilize Tarzan and capture him and Ruby.

 D. K. delivers Tarzan to the circus, and he plans to force Ruby to marry him, but it's soon clear that the only way they can get Tarzan to cooperate with the show is by directly threatening Ruby, so that's what they do.  D. K. and Verma add her to the show; she'll sing while Tarzan performs feats of acrobatics, then after the first night D. K. will forcibly marry her.  They plan to have snipers with rifles placed about the tent to keep Tarzan in line, but they don't have a backup plan in case Tarzan incapacitates the snipers with thrown guitars, and they really didn't count on a small army of jungle animals attacking the city to rescue their friend.

This in sot a good movie, but it's generally on the pulpy side of ridiculous. It's also structured like a King Kong movie rather than a Tarzan movie, with Tarzan treated as a figure of legend, the ruthless hunter, the kind woman who touches the ape-man's heart, and the greedy showman who refuses to cancel his exhibition despite being clearly warned about his impending doom.

 

I would probably like it a lot more if it wasn't so damned sleazy. It's not so much Ruby's skimpy costumes; that's in genre for both tarzan and Kong..  It's the fact that Ruby is repeatedly threatened with sexual assault, by D. K., by the natives, and even by two random sailors he meets while traveling to join her father in a scene which  doesn't connect the plot and seems to be there to establish that Ruby has a gun and isn't afraid to use it, though after shooting the sailors she goes on her way, and only uses the gun to scare Tarzan during their first meeting.  The movie opens with a flashback to a woman (presumably Tarzan's mother, but they never really spell out his origins)  dragged off screaming by the natives after watching her husband being murdered.  Sexual assault as a plot device was distressingly common in the Bollywood of the eighties, but this movie really leans into it.

In other words, tone is a serious problem here.  The movie wants to be light hearted pulpy and romantic fun,  but it's a bit too enthusiastic about putting its heroine in peril, and while Bollywood has never been good at portraying Adivasi communities, this movie is particularly bad about that as well.  There are some fun bits, but if you want Tarzan, you might be better off just reading the books.

 

 

The Man Who Wasn't There

 Mr. India is easily the most famous movie about an invisible hero, but it's far from the only one.  Elaan (1971) also features the hero given a high-tech invisibility ring by a friendly scientist, but while Mr.India is a superhero movie at heart, Elaan feels like a spy movie. Specifically an Italian Bond knockoff from the sixties.

Naresh (Vinod Mehra) isn't a superspy with an eye for the ladies, though. As the film opens,he's a freelance journalist with an eye for one particular lady: Mala (Rekha). They meet on the beach, and Malais offended at having her picture taken, so she rides off on a horse and in a huff. The horse promptly gallops out of control, giving Naresh a chance to ride to the rescue. That doesn't impress Mala, because she's unconscious, but it does impress her father, newspaper publisher Mehta (Brahm Bhardwaj), who offers him a job. After further humorous misunderstandings, Mala falls for Naresh as well, and they're soon a happy couple.

Mehta assigns Naresh and comic relief sidekick Shyam (Rajendra Nath) to investigate an apparently haunted island.  It turns out that the island is the base for an international syndicate of unspecified evil, and after a little torture to establish that Naresh and Shyam aren't police officers, the Boss (M. B. Shetty) sends Lily (Helen) to perform an item number and then recruit them into the organization. Shyam does have an eye for the ladies, so he distracts Lily and the other femmes fatale, while Naresh sneaks off and gets captured again.

 Naresh is thrown into a cell with violent criminal Ram Singh (Vinod Khanna) and an ailing scientist (Ratan Guarang).  Naresh is kind to the scientist, who gives him his hidden atomic ring, which can be used toi turn invisible when placed in the mouth, though only if the user is completely naked.  Ram Singh just gives Naresh punches. With the help of the ring, Naresh and Shyam flee the island.

The Boss sends Lily and Ram Singh to kill Naresh and retrieve the ring,  as well as to collaborate on a counterfeiting scheme with shady hotel owner Verma (Madan Puri doing his best Adopho Celi impression) and his hypnotist sidekick, the Professor (Jankidas.)  (Verma's gang is largely made up of beautiful women who may or may not have been hypnotized.)  

 Along the way, Mehta is murdered, and Naresh, Shyam and Mala all wind up under the protection of the Central Bureau of Investigation.  In the day or so since her father's death, Mala has become a trained and certified CBI agent ("People change," as she explains to Naresh) and she's sent undercover as "Mary" to infiltrate the counterfeiting scheme, while Naresh and Shyam are sort of deputized and given silly disguises and sent to verify that yes, that is Lily performing at Verma's nightclub.

In a proper Bond movie, or even a high end knockoff, the characters would be traveling the world at this point, bouncing from one beautiful city to the next; even Operation Kid Brother managed to include visits to Malaga, Morocco, and Munich.  Not here, though.  Mala hangs around Verma's place waiting to be shown the counterfeiting machine, Naresh alternates between acting as Mala's invisible guardian angel and bumming around Bombay in a series of silly disguises, and the Boss, Verma and Ram Singh all compete to see who can betray the others first.

This is Bond on the cheap, with an equally budget friendly sci-fi twist; the fact that the ring only works when the user is naked means that the producers don't have to spend any money on partial invisibility effects. It's all very slight and very silly, and nobody ever dresses up as Charlie Chaplin, but it's reasonably entertaining, there are multiple Helen dance numbers, and Young Rekha is adorable.

 

We could've been anything that we wanted to be.

Bugsy Malone (1976) doesn't sound like a real movie. The premise is ridiculous on its face; it's a G-rated gangster melodrama set in Prohibition-era New York, with a cast made up entirely of child actors. Oh, and it's a musical!  However, this is a movie that commits completely to the bit, and it has a couple of secret weapons hiding up  its sleeve.

The young cats present themselves as adults, and some of the boys are even sporting period appropriate mustaches, but everything is presented through a child-friendly lens; the vintage cars are pedal-powered, the liquor racket is replaced by the sarsaparilla racket, and most importantly, nobody gets shot, they get splurged.  Traditionally this takes the form of an old-fashioned pie to the face, but Dandy Dan (Martin Lev) has armed his gang with splurge guns, which are basically Tommy guns that use whipped cream instead of bullets.  However you're splurged, though, the effects are the same. You don't die, but you're washed up, out of the game, and out of the movie.

Dandy Dan's gang are the only ones with splurge guns,which means they're cutting a swathe through the businesses run by Dan's rival, Fat Sam (John Cassisi), who owns the speakeasy where much of the action takes place.  Sam controls a gang of mostly lovable incompetents, most notably Knuckles (Sheridan Earl Russell), who earned his name by constantly cracking his knuckles.  Sam is also dating the film's family friendly femme fatale, Tallulah (Jodie Foster), who is the speakeasy's star performer.

Tallulah is not the speakeasy's only performer, though, so singer and aspiring Hollywood actress Blousey Brown (Florrie Dugger) arrives to audition for a role in the chorus,only to be told that Sam is busy and she should "come back tomorrow."  At the speakeasy she also meets Bugsy Malone (Scott Baio), a struggling boxing promoter, and she finds him reasonably charming.  The pair strike up a low-key friendship.

Things are getting worse and worse for Sam. Dandy Dan is squeezing his business dry, and most of his men are lured into an ambush and splurged. Sam desperately tries to pretend that it's business as usual, and hires Looney, a hitman from out of town, to take down Dandy Dan.  He's going to need a driver, though, and Knuckles can't drive.

 Blousey is auditioning across town to replace diva Lena Morelli (Bonnie Langford), with Bugsy there to give moral support,but before she can sing a note Lena strolls in and takes her old job back.  Bugsy takes her back to Sam's place for another audition, and this time she gets her shot. She also spots Bugsy with Tallulah,and while there's really nothing going on there Tallulah still plants a chaste kiss on Bugsy's forehead.  (G-rating, remember?)  Blousey has had enough.

Bugsy needs to win Blousey back. He wants to take her to Hollywood, but to do that he'll need money. The good news is that Fat Sam is looking for a driver for a special job. And so begins Bugsy's G-rated spiral into a life of crime. The movie's only 93 minutes long, so there isn't much actual criming involved,and what little criming there is is directed at dandy Dan and his gang.

So, the movie is mostly a harmless ball of fluff with a bizarre premise. Why watch it today?  First, the songs, written and largely performed by Paul Williams, range from (in my highly scientific and impartial opinion) pretty good to great.

And then there's the acting. The assembled child actors are, for the most part, fine.  They're clearly having a good time, and that sense of fun counts for a lot, but they can't help but be overshadowed when they're standing next to Jodie Foster, who at this point had spent years honing her craft on TV and the Disney family film treadmill, as well as a few months of personal acting lessons with Robert De Niro on the set of Taxi Driver, which came out earlier in 1976.  Tallulah is a relatively small part, but it's a good part, and Foster's careful craft shines next to the talented amateurs around her. I've never seen an actor stand out from the rest of the cast that much before.

 

All the monsters are metaphorical.

 Dharam Veer (1977) is not a movie that fits into neat genre categories. It's a sprawling mess of a movie, really,but it's got it all - fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles, and a dubious grasp of historical accuracy.

I'll start at the beginning.  No,it's too much - let me sum up.  Princess Meenakshi (Indrani Mukherjee) lives in a small kingdom in a poorly defined historical period.  One day while out hunting she kills a tiger, only to be attacked by ruffians who are secretly employed by her evil brother Satpal (Jeevan); Satpal was warned by a prophecy that he will be killed by his oldest nephew, and figures that the easiest way to avoid it is to kill his sister before she can have any children.  However, she's saved by Jwala Singh (Pran), a humble woodsman who happens to be an expert fighter and "master of Samurai," according to the subtitles, who roams the land with his twin katanas and a well trained falcon named Sheroo (played by Sheroo the Wonder Bird, and sometimes a puppet.). Jwala takes the princess back to his cabin to recover, and she promises him anything to repay him for saving her life.  And that's when Jwala tells her the truth: he's loved her from afar for a long time,and the only thing he wants is her hand in marriage. She can marry him on the spot,or return to the palace knowing that she's broken her vow. 

She marries him on the spot. They spend the night together, but they are interrupted by a prowling tiger which Jwala announces is trying to avenge its mate.  He goes out tiger hunting, katana in hand, and discovers a man who had been tiger-killed,so he drapes his shirt over the man and drops his katana, only to be attacked by the tiger and falls with it into the river and an uncertain fate. Meenakshi discovers the body shrouded in her new husband's shirt, and because this is the Kingdom of People Who Jump to Conclusions, she stumbles home in a catatonic daze and is married to the only king who is willing to take her in this condition.  By the time she emerges from her fugue, she's married.  She explains that she was already married,and her new husband turns out to be really understanding; he promises to treat her as a queen in public and as a widow in private, and when he learns that she's pregnant he promises to raise her son as his heir.

He may be a little too understanding, though. Satpal was exiled because of the whole "plotting to murder his sister" thing, but when he turns up at her door apparently repentant, he's welcomed and charged with protecting his sister when her husband goes off to war. Meenakshi and Satpal's wife give birth on the same night, and Satpal sneaks off with his nephew and throws him from the wall of the castle, only to see Sheroo the falcon swoop down and carry the baby away.  When it turns out that Meenakshi had twins, Satpal switches his son with his younger nephew so that his son will be the heir, but when everyone is asleep his wife swaps the babies back without telling him.

Sheroo carries the baby to his master,who was in a coma for the last nine months and being tended to by a kindly blacksmith (Hercules) and his wife.  Jwala wakes up and discovers that Meenakshi left after the tiger attack,and because this is The Kingdom of People Who Jump to Conclusions, he wanders off to mope for the next twenty years.

The Blacksmith names the baby Dharam , and raises him until he grows up enough to be played by Dharmendra.  Dharam is a natural hero, strong and virtuous, and he's best friends with Prince Veer (Jeetendra), who is secretly Prince Veer.  Everyone dotes on him, especially his uncle Satpal. Veer and Dharam sing a song about how their friendship is one of the wonders of the world and can never be broken as they wander the land being generally heroic.

While wandering the land being generally heroic, Dharam and Veer stumble into a large arena where the evil Princess Pallavi (Zeenat Aman) hosts jousting competitions. naturally  Dharam decides to joust, and naturally he's brilliant at it, but it's really an excuse to get close to Pallavi. He wins and she promises him anything he wants.  He asks for her hand, and she orders her men to kill him. 

Dharam and Veer escape the assorted guards and gladiators trying to kill them, but Dharam goes back so that he can hit on Pallavi while she tortures him.  Meanwhile Veer takes refuge with a band of Banjara, and plots a rescue with the help of the dancer Roopa (Neetu Singh).  After the escape Dharam goes back again, this time kidnapping Pallavi and winning her heart through his inherent manliness. It's a sequence that has not aged at all well and drags on a bit too long, but eventually it ends and Pallavi loves Dharam, Roopa loves Veer, and Dharam is learning the art of Samurai from Jwala, who is still alive and has become an embittered hermit with two katanas and a trained falcon named Sheroo.  (Sheroo is remarkably spry for a bird of his age.)

Everybody is happy, but there is a closet full of shoes that are waiting to drop. When Satpal finds out that Veer isn't his son after all, he gathers an Injustice League made up of all the enemies Dharam and Veer have made in the movie so far: his actual son, Pallavi's brother, Pallavi's fiance, and Roopa's fiance, who was also the leader of the Banjara band until Dharam overthrew him. The first order of business is to drive a wedge between Dharam and Veer, and that turns out to be surprisingly easy when you live in the Kingdom of People Who Jump to Conclusions and you're not worried about massive collateral damage.

Dharam and Veer are manipulated into a duel, secrets are revealed, and all the characters get on ships because now it's a swashbuckling pirate movie.  It's exciting but confusing,which kind of sums up the movie as a whole. The good news is that Pallavi and Roopa get to join in on the swashbuckling fun.

She kills a lot more people than Munna Bhai does.

 James Bond (2015) is also known as Lady Gangster, and that's a much better title; the movie does feature a lady gangster, but has a notable lack of suave British superspies, or really any spies, super or not.

The lady gangster in question is Pooja (Sakshi Chaudhary), professionally known as "Bullet", and she is the reigning Don of Dubai. Bullet has a gang of loyal henchman,but she controls her empire of unspecified crime through her John Wooesque action skills, shooting and punching her rivals as well as throwing the occasional CGI shuriken.

Bullet has a sympathetic backstory told via  a brief animated flashback: her father was a gangster, and after her parents split over the whole mafia thing, he brought young Pooja to Dubai with him,raising her to be the instrument of his vengeance on the gangsters who crossed him.  Now she has reunited with her terminally ill mother (Prabha) and she's playing the part of the dutiful and not at all criminal daughter, determined to fulfill every one of her mother's wishes.  And because this is an Indian movie,that means getting married, so Bullet has a marriage broker look for an eligible man to play the part of her husband for as long as her mother lasts.

Meanwhile, Nani (Allari Naresh), or "Johnny" according to the subtitles, is an eligible young bachelor looking for love. The problem is that Nani is a coward, and when women find that out they don't really find him attractive.  One day at the temple Nani catches a glimpse of Pooja and immediately falls in love.  When a friend spots her picture in the marriage broker's office, Nani rushes down to express his interest, agreeing to all of her conditions without actually reading them.

Pooja accepts what she thinks is a fake marriage, and Nani accepts what he thinks is a real marriage.  They don't really talk about it beforehand, so Nani is very disappointed on the wedding night when she pushes him away, but he is a decent person so he's willing to give her space until she feels she's ready.

Standard romantic comedy rules apply here, so these two mismatched souls are bound to fall in love eventually, and sure enough Pooja starts warming to her new husband, especially since her mother is now so happy that she's on the road to recovery, and hints that what she really wants is a grandchild. However, one of Bullet's rivals from Dubai (Ashish Vidyarthi) has tracked her to Hyderabad, which means that between romantic comedy scenes she kills an awful lot of people. And Nani accidentally spots his wife during one of these scenes and realizes that his wife is in fact a lady gangster, so while Pooja is falling for him, he's plotting to escape.  Which is complicated when Nani's family shows up for an extended visit.

This is a very silly movie, but it's silly in predictable ways.  Of course Nani is going to learn that some things are worth fighting for and overcome his fears, and of course Pooja will learn that her awkward but kind husband is exactly what she needed all along.  It's decently entertaining along the way,  though; the action scenes were clearly filmed on a budget,but many of them are creative and fun,particularly the sequence where rival gangsters attack while the couple are shopping for clothes, and Pooja quietly deals with them while trying to hide the carnage from Nani.

 

When I first started watching Bollywood,Indian movies were not widely available on streaming services,meaning that I had to find DVDs, and sometimes that meant buying DVDs in bulk for less than a dollar each.  That was always risky; sometimes the movies weren't subtitled, sometimes they were sleazy revenge melodramas or incomprehensible slapstick comedies.  Sometimes they were great, and sometimes they were silly but reasonably entertaining low budget movies that I never would have discovered if I hadn't taken a risk. Lady Gangster is a dollar DVD movie.

All that's missing is a bag of diamonds.

Despite its release date, Love Ke Liye Kuch Bhi Karega (2001) is a pretty typical early Nineties Bollywood farce, with an overbearing father-in-law, alleged heroes engaged in a morally dubious scheme, a briefcase full of cash getting passed around, and a happy ending that solves nothing.  Well, mostly typical.

Prakash (Saif Ali Khan) is a charming and ambitious man who hopes to marry into money,and he's set his sights on Sapna (Sonali Bendre), an aspiring artist with a wealthy father and a short attention span. And it works!  The couple are quickly married, but Prakash discovers that while he's found a comfortable life, he doesn't have the respect of his father in law Rajiv (Dalip Tahil), who gives him a large office to sit in all day but refuses to let him have any responsibility,and berates him at every turn.  Prakash decides to start his own business, but he'll need money for that, and Rajiv isn't going to give him any.

Meanwhile, roommates Rahul (Fardeen Khan) and Harry (Aftab Shivdasani) have their own problems. Rahul is looking for a job without success, so  he hasn't  paid the rent in six months. This is especially awkward because he's in love with the landlord's daughter, Anjali (Twinkle Khanna).  Harry, meanwhile, just wants to have fun with as many ladies as possible, and he's borrowed money from the feared gangster Aslam Bhai (Johnny Lever)

Rahul finally has a chance to land a job, he'll have to pay a sizable bribe in order to seal the deal. Meanwhile, Anjali's father (Tanikella Bharani) has arranged a marriage for her in a month; he's willing to reconsider, but only if Rahul is employed, so they now have a deadline. And Harry has an idea - they can do some crimes to get money!  Not big crimes, just a little bit of mugging in the parking lot of a five star hotel.

Harry and Rahul attempt to mug, and Prakash is one of their first targets.  Despite dressing well, though, he doesn't really have much money. What he does have is an idea - the se skilled and totally trustworthy criminals can kidnap Sapna for a few hours, and demand a large ransom. Prakash will split the money with them, Rajiv is rich enough that he won't miss the money, and everybody will be happy!

And then wackiness ensues.  Sapna turns out to be surprisingly capable of defending herself, but Rahul and harry finally manage to kidnap her, only to realize that their tiny apartment is no place to keep a hostage, while Anjali is starting to suspect that something is up. It's a bit like "The Ransom of Red Chief" mixed with a dash of Fargo without the body count.  This is a silly movie.

Aslam Bhai has an extended subplot about being scammed by a fake movie producer named Aaj Kapoor (Snehal Dabi) who exploits his dreams of Bollywood stardom, and it is also silly, but silly in an unexpected way.  For a long time Johnny Lever was  Bollywood's reigning King of Comic Relief, a reputation he earned through incredibly broad acting and mugging for the camera, but he plays Aslam Bhai almost completely straight; it's arguably a more serious performance than the leads put in. 

Johnny Lever is interesting, Saif Ali Khan is reliably good, Sonali Bendre and Twinkle Khanna are charming but don't have much to do, and Fardeen Khan and Aftab Shivdasani are also in the movie.

Lanka is burning.

 Singham Again (2024) is the latest installment in Rohit Shetty's Cop Universe,and while it does feature all of the maverick supercops who play by their own rules and get results, as well as establishing some new result getting rule-breakers, it's still not The Avengers.  It does include even more avenging than previous installments, though, and significantly more avenging than any of the Avengers movies did.

At the end of Sooryavanshi, supercop Bajirao Singham (Ajay Devgn) swore to bring terrorist mastermind Omar Hafeez (Jackie Shroff) to justice. Then, apparently, he took a job in Kashmir and eventually lucked into an encounter with Hafeez, arresting him after a surprisingly mundane fight scene. (The laws of physics usually bend in the vicinity of Singham, but this was a scene that could really happen.)  After the failure of his previous schemes, Hafeez moved into drug smuggling, bringing drugs into India from Sri Lanka, and using the profits to finance terrorist activities.  Singham is appointed to lead Shiva Squad, a new organization drawn from police departments across India, to combat this threat.

Two years later, Singham's wife Avni (Kareena Kapoor) is producing and hosting a nine day production of Ramlila, interspersing the reenactment of the Ramayana with a tour of the places described in the epic. Singham is kept busy with Shiva Squad, and they've finally caught a break - a group of fishermen have been caught off the coast of Tamil Nadu carrying drugs. The prisoners refuse to talk until Singham arrives to threaten them personally, but they eventually give him a name: Danger Lanka (Arjun Kapoor).

Thanks to the tip, DCP Shakti Shetty (Deepika Padukone), also known as "Lady Singham", captures three of Lanka's men.  She's supposed to deliver them to Singham in the morning,but that night Lanka and his men rescue them, setting the police station on fire and killing everyone there in the process.  Shakti is devastated, but Singham convinces her to avenge her fallen colleagues.

Lanka is playing a different game, though.  With the help of Avni's assistant (Sara Arfeen Khan) she's lured into a trap and abducted.  Thanks to the timely intercession of ACP Satya Bali (Tiger Shroff) and the sacrifice of another police officer (Dayanand Shetty) Avni manages to escape, at least temporarily.  Bali takes her to the ashram run by his adopted mother, but Lanka and his men attack in force, and Avni is shot and then recaptured; Singham arrives, but he's too late to do anything but beat up a lot of people.

Lanka has a hidden agenda.  His real name is Zubair Hafeez, Omar's grandson, and he's avenging his uncles, who were summarily executed by the heroes at the end of Sooryavanshi.  He promises to release Avni,but only if Omar is turned over to him, along with Singham and his fellow maverick cops, Simmba (Ranveer Singh) and Sooryavanshi (Akshay Kumar).  Singham won't do anything unless he is sure that Avni is alright, so Lanka will allow Simmba to visit his lair and see for himself.

Lanka's  evil plan is based on the Ramayana, casting himself as Ravan.  And that might have been a surprise except that the movie hammers home the Ramayana connection at every opportunity, cutting back and forth between the contemporary action and the performance of the Ramlila, making it absolutely clear that this plot is just like the Ramayana and pointing out the Ramayana counterparts of all of the characters, while the Ramlila's narration spells out exactly what the intended moral is.  

The action scenes are every bit as over the top as you'd expect from a Singham movie, but everything else is completely po-faced, from Singham's many, many dramatic speeches about family and vengeance to Avni making condescending remarks about people like her son Shaurya (Viren Vazirani) who consider the Ramayana to be mythology rather than history.

Things brighten up considerably when Simmba is on screen; Ranveer Singh switches between action hero and comic relief at the drop of a hat, but he seems to be having a fantastic time, and he livens up the overly serious action/drama/patriotic epic proceedings.

But my real problem with Singham Again is the problem that I have with all of the Cop Universe movies. Singham and friends are presented as the incorruptible ideal police officers, but they are happy to step outside of the law   and summarily execute people when they feel it's right. We're supposed to trust them toact as judge, jury and executioner because the movies assure us that they're good cops, but it doesn't want us to consider the possibility that these cops could be wrong, or even less  than perfect. Absolutely nobody points out that the only reason Lanka started his campaign of bloody revenge is because Singham and company executed his relatives without a trial.  

Simmba is fun and the action scenes are visually impressive, but overall it's less realistic than the time that Young Singham turned into Aquaman and rescued a mermaid princess.

The rare Triple Reverse Scooby-Doo.

 As the title implies, Bhool Bhulaiyaa 3 (2024) is the latest installment in the Bhool Bhulaiyaa franchise.  While it shares much of the cast of Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2, and one key actor returns form the first movie, this is a spiritual sequel rather than a direct sequel; there's no shared universe, but character names are the same and plot points echo the previous films, up until the point when they do not.

The first real difference is in the choice of protagonist. In the first movie, Aditya (Akshay Kumar) is a psychiatrist, using the trappings of spiritualism to help a patient suffering from a spooky but ultimately natural problem. In the second movie, Ruhaan (Kartik Aaryan) is forced by circumstances to pretend to be Rooh Baba, and winds up dealing with a very real ghost. Here Ruhaan (Kartik Aaryan again) is already posing as Rooh Baba, cheerfully driving away fake ghosts and fleecing the wealthy and gullible with the help of his sidekick Tillu (Arun Kushwah.)

A potential client (Rajesh Sharma) turns the tables by faking a haunting by the ghost of his actually very much alive niece Meera (Triptii Dimri).  Even though they know he's a fake, Meera and her uncle need the help of Rooh Baba, and the video of him freaking out over an apparent ghost provides excellent blackmail material.

Meera's father (Vijay Raaz) is the Raja of Rakhtghat,but the entire family are living in squalor in the cowshed across form the palace. The place is supposed to be haunted by the ghost of Manjulika, a supremely talented princess of the family who murdered her brother Debendrenath two hundred years ago, was burned alive as punishment, returned as a ghost to kill her father, and was ultimately sealed up behind a scary door which must never be opened under any circumstances, which is surprisingly common in this sort of movie.  Ruhaan looks so much like the portrait of Prince Debendrenath that everyone assumes he is the prince's reincarnation, here to drive away Manjulika and restore the family to prosperity.  That is certainly the thesis of the family's spiritual advisor, a Rajpurohit (Manish Wadha), who tells Ruhaan that he must open the scary door, but only on the night of Durga Ashtami.

The family moves back into the palace and starts to live comfortably for the first time in ages - the villagers are sure that Manjulika is about to be exorcised, so they're willing to lend money to the Raja again, and once the palace is ghost free it can be sold for enough money to support them indefinitely, and pay Ruhaan a tidy commission.  And soon enough Mallika (Vidya Balan) and her team show up to handle the restoration; she's not the person Meera was expecting, but Mallika explains that he's suddenly left on a long vacation.

Spooky things begin to happen, because this is a haunted house movie. But Ruhaan quickly realizes the truth: the scary door is already open, and three grifters (Rajpal Yadav, Sanjay Mishra, and Ashwini Kalsekar) have been living in the forbidden room and faking the haunting to keep people away. Ruhaan knows a thing or two about faking hauntings, so he arranges a public ceremony to drive the ghost out,and asks Mallika to play the part of Manjulika.  Everyone buys it, and nobody seems to notice that Mallika really threw herself into the part.

The "ghost" is gone, and the palace is put up for sale, drawing a few interested buyers,but no one is willing to pay the Raja's asking price. Mallika's team accidentally break a wall, revealing yet another scary door, and the Rajpuroihit discovers that Manjulika had an older sister, Anjulika.  The Raja and Ruhaan open the new scary door but don't discover much, and soon after the glamorous Mandira (Madhuri Dixit) arrives to buy the palace, though she won't sign anything until Durga Ashtami.

And then rich jerk Vicky Khanna (Shataf Figar) arrives and announces he's willing to buy immediately. He can easily match Mandira's price, so the raja quickly agrees.  Khanna doesn't want to restore the palace, he wants to remodel it and turn it into a five star hotel, which is always a recipe for disaster in an Indian ghost movie.  It makes the ghosts angry, and it seems to infuriate both Mallika and Mandira. Khanna dies in an apparent car accident that night, and suddenly Mandira is the top bidder again. 

The haunting intensifies, the masked red burning phantom of Manjulika appears to multiple characters,and both Mallika and Manjira are acting very strange indeed.  The Rajpirohit prepares Ruhaan for a final supernatural confrontation, but what nobody realizes is that this isn't a house haunted by two sisters, it's haunted by three.  

"Bhoolm bhulaiyaa" translates roughly to maze or labyrinth, and this is easily the most labyrinthine plot in the series, with a haunting that is being faked by a different ghost.  While it's complicated, the plot mostly hangs together. It's never especially scary,but the smoldering masked ghost of Manjulika is an arresting image.  And it's a movie with its heart in the right place, though I am not really qualified to judge how well it handles the social issues it touches on.

All that aside, though, there are two real reasons to watch Bhool Bhulaiyaa 3: Madhuri Dixit and Vidya Balan. They're both veteran actresses at the top of their game here, mixing spooky scenery chewing, quiet menace, and surprisingly touching moments of genuine emotion.