Bhooty Call: Chandramukhi 2

 Horror comedy reigns supreme in Indian cinema at the moment, so it was probably inevitable that 2005's Chandramukhi was going to get a sequel.  And that is exactly what happened; Chandramukhi 2 (2023) shares a number of plot elements with the earlier film, including an ancestral curse, a broken family, a clever outsider charged with solving everyone's problems, and of course the Room Which Must Never Be Opened.  In this case, though, it's the same Room Which Must never be Opened, because Chandramukhi 2 is a direct sequel to the earlier movie.

Wealthy matriarch Ranganayaki (Radhika Sarathkumar) and her family have faced a series of disasters in recent years, including the family factory burning down and a car accident which put younger daughter Divya (Lakshmi Menon) in a wheelchair.  The family's Guru (Rao Ramesh) suggests that the family have neglected their ancestral deity, and the solution is for the family to gather in Vettaiyapuram and perform prayer sin the ancestral temple.  This will require the entire family, including the two orphaned children of the daughter who ran away to marry a man "from a different religion," as the subtitles delicately put it.  The daughter and her husband died in a plane crash years ago, and the family have made no effort to contact the children (Manasvi Kottachi and Sanjiv V) but now they are needed.

The children are introduced on a school bus which has been taken hostage by a band of violent and well-armed thugs.  Fortunately, the kids have a protector, their guardian Pandian (Raghava Lawrence), who arrives and defeats the bad guys in spectacular fashion, because while Superstar Rajnikanth doesn't return for the sequel, this is still very much a Rajnikanth movie.

Ranganayaki rents a castle near the temple from  Murugesan (Vadivelu), who was comic relief in the first movie and continues to be comic relief here, and the family movies in, bringing the children and Pandian along with them.  And then the movie focuses on family drama for a while, as Ranganayaki learns to stop being a jerk and accept the kids, while Pandian makes a connection with Lakshmi (mahima Nambiar), beautiful daughter of the groundskeeper.  

Lakshmi has always wanted to explore the palace, and late at night Pandian helps her sneak in.  They explore the forbidden south wing, and Lakshmi discovers The Door That Must Never Be Opened, though she does not open it at this time.  Still, the genre shifts at this point.  The family temple is overgrown and needs to be cleaned before the rituals can be performed, though the temple's priest (Y. G. Mahendran) warns them that that will release a dangerous spirit.  They hire workers from outside the area, but after a pair of tragic deaths the workers leave, and so Pandian clears the temple himself, starting a fire in the process.  He's met by a mysterious sage (so mysterious that I don't know who played him) and learns that the angry ghost of Chandramukhi (Kangana Renaut) has possessed one of the women in the household.

The possession in the previous movie was ambiguous, but probably psychological rather than supernatural.  This time it is definitely the ghost of slain dancer Chandramukhi, who is definitely here to take her revenge on Vettaiyan (Raghava Lawrence), who murdered the man she loved and then ordered her burned alive, though the backstory from the first movie is needlessly expanded and we learn that  Vettaiyan is actually a general named Sengottaiyan, who murdered the actual king (Shatru) and Dread Pirate Robertsed himself onto the throne in an effort to possess Chandramukhi.  

 Despite that twist and the added supernatural elements, though, this is basically the same plot as in the first movie, and plays out in much the same way; the giant snake from the first movie appears and does nothing again, and they even use the same trick to convince Chandramukhi to leave.  Everything is bigger, though - the special effects are flashier, the scenes set in Chandramukhi's time feature fight choreography lifted from Bahubali, Chandramukhi gets a dramatic sword fight after her big dance scene, and there are actually two ghosts, both of which are real.

Well, almost everything is bigger.  There is nothing in this movie to match Jyothika's magnetic performance in the original, and while Raghava Lawrence is doing a very good Rajnikanth impression, he's still not Rajnikanth.  The scale is bigger, but the ambiguity that made the first movie work is completely gone, leaving us with a very by-the-numbers haunted house movie and broad comedy scenes that just keep going and going.  This is skippable - you're better off watching the Bhool Bhulaiyaa sequels, which at least mix up the plot a bit.

Bhooty Call: Maa

 Maa (2025) takes place in the same universe as 2024's Shaitaan, a movie which I have not seen.  I don't think I need another cinematic universe in my life, but Maa is mostly standalone and features both Kajol and Kali, making it hard for me to resist.

 The movie starts forty years ago in the village of Chandrapur, in West Bengal.  the people of the village are performing a Kali Puja as the wife of the local landowner, gives birth to a son.  And then a daughter, and in accordance with the village's tradition and a prophecy from Kali (as interpreted by the men of the village) the newborn girl is taken into the woods and sacrificed.

 The newborn boy is not harmed in any way, and grows up to be Shubankar (Indraneil Sengupta), a family man living in Kolkata with his wife Ambika (Kajol) and twelve year old daughter Shweta (Kherin Sharma).  Shubankar has broken with decades of horror movie tradition by telling his wife all about the curse on his family and the dark traditions of home, though they have not yet explained things to Shweta, who is curious about the ancestral village that her parents refuse to talk about.

Before any further exposition can be delivered, Shubankar receives a call from Joydev (Ronit Roy), informing him that his father has died.  Subankar returns to Chandrapur for the first time in years, and makes arrangements to finally sell the family mansion, but on the way back home he's killed by a demonic tree. 

A few weeks later Joydev calls Ambika, asking her to come to the village and finalize the sale of the mansion.  Ambika agrees, but Shweta insists on coming along, and the locals are oddly hostile to the girl, though she does manage to befriend Deepika (Roopkatha Chakraborty), daughter of the mansion's caretakers.  The real estate broker says that finding a buyer will be more difficult than expected, because of the curse, so Ambika and Shweta stay a little longer than anticipated.

Meanwhile, things go horribly wrong.  Shweta convinces Deepika to take her to see the cursed tree in the nearby forest, and that night Deepika vanishes.  Ambika asks the locals, with the help of stolid policeman Sarfaraz (Jitin Gulati), and learns that in the past few months all of the young girls who started menstruating have vanished, and then returned a few days later; Joydev blames a mysterious old woman who lives in the woods (Vibha Rani), but there's no evidence that the woman did anything wrong. 

 And then Deepika's grandfather, who had been catatonic before Shweta arrived, hands Ambika a scroll, revealing the actual circumstances of the curse, involving a demon created by a single drop of blood from the demon Raktibaija, when Kali and the other incarnations of the Goddess destroyed him.  The new demon, Amsaja, seeks to use a mortal maiden of the landowner's family to reproduce, and they have been sacrificing their daughters for generations.  The girls of the village have become Amsaja's minions, and they abduct Shweta.  

Ambika wants her daughter back, but she's going to need help - divine help.  She performs the Kali Puja with the women of the village, and then enters the forest with  the blessing of Kali.

 Maa has a plot that hearkens back to classic Bollywood horror - in a lot of ways this plays out like a Ramsay Brothers film with CGI special effects and (thankfully, given the subject matter) a lot less exploitation.  It also works as parental horror; Ambika is the viewpoint character, and she's struggling with bringing up a preteen daughter in a world that is sometimes predatory, but her ordinary struggles are amplified by the supernatural elements.

But it's not just a horror movie, this is a sort of Gothic Devotional, mixing sincere religious elements with some tremendous spooky style.  (I've seen my share of Hindu devotional movies over the years, and they usually don't have so many bats.)  

In short, there's a lot going on here, and I'm not quite sure the plot actually holds together; everything runs on coincidence and a series of terrible decisions.  On the other hand, Kajol is compelling, attacking the sometimes shaky script with her trademark sincerity.  I'm not sold on the so-called "Devil's Universe," but Maa is a good reminder of just how talented she is.

Bhooty Call: Munjiya

I have a theory about ghost stories: it's never just about the ghost.  The best stories, and the best movies, use the ghost as a lens to examine something else.  And the movies of the Maddock Horror Comedy Universe certainly support my theory; Stree is about learning to see women as people, Bhediya (werewolf not ghost, but stick with me) is about preserving the environment and tearing down regional prejudice, Stree 2 is about how societal oppression hurts everybody, and Munjya (2024) - well, I'll get to that.

 The movie opens in 1954, with a boy named Gotya (Ayush Ulagadde) who is obsessed with his neighbor Munni, who is seven years older than he is.  When Munni's marriage is arranged, Gotya lashes out, going so far as to attempt to poison her fiance. The boy is punished, but he only spirals further out of control, finally dragging his sister Gita (Khushi Hajare) into the woods as a human sacrifice so that he can perform a dark magical ritual to win Munni.  Gita escapes, and Gotya accidentally sacrifices himself.  His remains are buried under a tree in order to bind his spirit, because he has become a Munjya.

 Years pass.  In the present day, Gita (now played by Suhas Joshi) lives in Pune with her widowed daughter-in-law Pammi (Mona Singh) and grandson Bittu (Abhay Verma).  Bittu is awkward and shy, but he has dreams.  He wants to study Cosmetology and is also secretly in love with his slightly older childhood friend Bela (Sjarvani), who has just returned from America with her annoying boyfriend Kuba (Richard Lovatt) in order to open a Zumba studio.  

Bittu has literal dreams as well, and they're not as nice; he's haunted by flashes of a phantom with a voice that sounds an awful lot like Gollum and keeps talking about marrying someone named Munni.  

 Bittu's cousin Rukku (Bhagyashree Limaye) is getting married, so the family travels to their ancestral village for the engagement ceremony.  Pammi clashes with her sexist and brutish brother-in-law Balu (Ajay Purkar), who blurts out the secret of Bittu's father's death: he was attempting to burn down a tree in the nearby cursed forest that the family owns.  Bittu visits the tree and is attacked by the Munjya.  he's saved by Gita (who is awesome) but Munjya manages to kill his sister and mark Bittu with a handprint.

 Bittu returns to Pune, but Munjya comes with him.  Only a blood relative can see the wicked spirit, and Munjya threatens to kill Pammi unless Bittu finds Munni for him.  With no clues, Bittu is forced to wander the streets late at night, while Munjya plays wicked pranks on everyone.  Bittu turns to his friend Spielberg Singh (Taranjot Singh) for help, and eventually figures out that Munni is Bela's grandmother Akka (Padmini Sardesai), which causes Munjya to transfer his obsession to Bela instead.

Bittu needs more help, and it is a well established fact in Indian horror movies that Christian clergymen  have magical powers, so Spielberg takes him to see revival preacher Elvis Karim Prabhakar (Sathyaraj), who seems to be and in fact is a bit of a huckster.  He does have actual knowledge of evil spirits, though, and he's dealt with munjyas before.  Elvis has a plan.  It's not a great plan, and because this is a horror comedy it's bound to go cattywampus in amusing ways, but it is a plan, so Bittu and Spielberg return to the village to arrange a wedding.  First, they'll have to find a goat.

 The other Maddock Horror Comedy Universe movies are playing with established Bollywood horror archetypes, and there's some of that here; Munjya is a more sinister version of the mischievous child ghosts you see in some Bollywood movies, crossed with the ancient and hungry grandmother from Tumbbad, and like the grandmother he draws a lot of influence from Gollum as portrayed by Andy Serkis.  I think that's actually appropriate, since all three characters have been twisted and transformed by a sense of longing, whether that's for a ring or gold or a person.

It's that longing that drives Munjya.  (Both character and film.)  In some ways this is the anti-Darr, portraying obsession as anything but romantic.  Despite the similar situations, Bittu is not tempted to become like Munjya, and instead serves as positive model of unrequited love; it's clear that Bela sees him as a friend, so he resolves to be the friend that she needs, without expecting anything in return but friendship.  The movie is not just about the ghost, it's about respecting the relationships you have rather than twisting them into something else.

 (And yeah, the werewolf makes a cameo in the end credits scene.)

Bhooty Call 2025

 It's October, and the world is a scary place.  I think a monthlong celebration of the ghosts of Bollywood would help me feel better, though, so once again it's time for a Bhooty Call.