Bhooty Call: Pyaasa Haiwan

 The Ramsay family is not responsible for Pyaasa Haiwan (2003); the movie was made by Bollywood exploitation merchant Kanti Shah.  However,  it looks like it's attempting to be a Ramsay picture, borrowing a traditional Ramsay plot (a wealthy family and their creepy mansion are haunted by a demonic creature out for revenge, while scheming relatives plot a murder) and the traditional Ramsay formula (low budget and a bit of exploitation).  Clearly, Shah had less of a budget than the Ramsays, so he filled in the gaps with more exploitation, then dropped anything resembling comic relief so he could fit in even more exploitation.

The movie is not shy about the monster.  There's a cold open with a middle aged man and his young girlfriend sneaking into the abandoned mansion for a romantic rendezvous only to fall afoul of the monster, so we get a good look at the critter almost immediately, and it is . . . unimpressive. The monster is a guy wearing most of a gorilla costume but without the headpiece - it's one diving helmet away from being Ro-Man from Robot Monster.  (It's a cheaper gorilla suit, as well, though to be fair they did give the creature furry sideburns and plastic Dracula fangs, so they've made some effort.)

After the cold open we cut to former servant and current mystic Shakaal (no idea who played him; the IMDB is not exactly helpful with this movie) tells the house's new owners about what happened to the old owners.  Ajit (Vinod Tripathi) is the spoiled son of Ranjit Singh.  Ranjit goes to the big city to arrange for Ajit's marriage, so Ajit has the house to himself.  He spends entirely too much screentime watching porn, then calls over his girlfriend for a bit of canoodling.  Unfortunately Ranjit comes home early and shoots the girlfriend, then banishes Ajit to the house of his responsible brother.  Ajit immediately hits on the maid, then spies on his sister-in-law bathing, so his brother shoots him.  Ajit comes back to life as a horrible monster, takes his revenge, and then sets to work being monstrous and attacking everyone who enters the house, killing the men and assaulting the women.

The new owner's daughter (who does not seem to have a name) does not believe in monsters, but once she hears the story she vows to destroy the creature.  She wanders around an unconvincing cemetery for a while (the tombstones are balsa wood crosses with names written on them in Sharpie), meets a stranger (Vinod Tripathi) who offers her shelter, and after the stranger lures her to his house and reveals himself as the monster, she reveals that she was hunting him all the time and stabs the monster with a convenient sword!

But it's not that easy.  The monster comes back to life, kills her, and vows to destroy her family, then does nothing about it.

Time passes, and we meet our nameless heroine's sister Kamini (Sapna Sappu).  Kamini is in love with Shankar (played by Kanti Shah himself) and her father does not approve, so she and Shankar run off to set up house in the mansion, with the help of creepy servant Shambu.  Her maternal uncle (also Vinod Tripathi) expects that she will die and he'll get his hands on the family fortune, so he sends his daughters Sonia and Anjali to kill Kamini just in case.  They bring their useless boyfriends, and everyone settles into the mansion.

It takes a while for things to actually happen, but eventually Anjali's doughy middle aged boyfriend Rahul is killed, and the local police inspector (Vinod Tripathi once again; you might think he's secretly the monster in a  clever disguise, but nope) insists that they're all suspects and all have to stay in the house so they can be slowly picked off one by one.  And then the wheels start to spin.  The ladies go swimming.  Sonia schemes.  Shankar and Kamini have a love scene which drags on and on and on.  And poor Anjali is exploited by one man after another, all of whom promise to protect her though no one ever does.  

Eventually the monster starts killing people one by one, until all that is left is Kamini and Shekhar, and Shekhar is particularly useless.  (He's a man without a trace of feck or gorm.)  The unkillable monster chases Kamini into a cemetery and then falls on a cross and dies, the end.

I want to be clear - this is a really bad movie.  It's not just that it's cheap, though it is cheap; the monster is what the monster is, and there are three or possibly four mansions all with identical layout and furnishings.  This is lazy.  The plot doesn't really hang together, and there are clearly scenes missing.  The movie is padded with scantily clad women being pawed at by men or writhing on a bed, and the same stock footage of lightning flashes onscreen every few sentences.  And the actors speak most of their lines directly to the camera.

The men are useless.  The women are targets; monster rape is one of my least favorite horror movie tropes, and this movie leans heavily on it.  Kamini's sister is great, and if you have to watch this movie for some reason (maybe you lost a bet?) it's best to stop right after she kills the monster for the first time.

Bhooty Call: Tahnkhana: The Dungeon

 

The other Ramsay movies we've covered this month have all had clear inspirations; Mahakaal is obviously a remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, while Bandh Darwaza is clearly a movie about a vampire, even if it's not ripping off any specific incarnation of Dracula.  Tahkhana: The Dungeon (1986) breaks the pattern.  It's not particularly original, but it snatches inspiration from so many sources that it ends up as something of a One Monster Mash.  

The movie starts with some complicated backstory that ultimately doesn't matter that much.  A dying Thakur has two sons.  One (Trilok Kapoor) is good, and the other (Narendra Nath) is evil.  The Thakur leaves everything to the good son, including the family mansion and the family hidden dungeon complex containing a fabulous treasure. The evil son uses black magic to take his revenge, killing his brother and kidnapping his nieces, Aarti and Sapna.  He plans to sacrifice the girls to bring his patron monster to life for some reason, but they are rescued by the good son's good friend Mangal (Bhushan Tiwari), and the evil son is imprisoned in the dungeon with his clay devil-god. Sapna runs off into the woods for some reason.

Twenty years pass.  The evil brother finally dies, bursting like a giant pimple, and that counts as a sacrifice, so the monster (Shamshuddin) is alive and awake but trapped in the dungeon.  Mangal also dies, and he charges his son Vijay (Kamran Rizvi) with reuniting the sisters and reclaim the treasure.  He also charges his nephews Anand (Puneet Issar) and Shakaal (Imtiaz Khan).  Vijay is dating Aarti (Aarti Gupta), so he's happy to reunite the family, and Anand is a good guy and happy to help, but Shakaal doesn't believe the story and returns to Bombay.

Meanwhile, Sapna (Sheetal) is in Bombay, looking for work.  She tries a hotel, and Shakaal convinces the owner to give her a chance, so she's hired as a dancer.  Shakaal has a nasty ulterior motive, though, and ties to assault her, accidentally killing the young woman.,  While disposing of the body he discovers her amulet, which forms one half of the map to the treasure, and when Vijay and Aarti show up with Aarti's half of the map, he's suddenly a lot more helpful.  

Shakaal claims that Sapna sold the locket to a girl at the hotel and moved on, and since they now have the complete locket they decide to find the treasure first and the sister later.  What they don't know is that Shakaal created a fake locket in order to mislead them, so they are working from a faulty map.  

On the way to the village Vijay and Aarti are rescued by Heera (Hemant Birje), and while the movie never lets us forget that Birje played Tarzan, he spends most of the movie dressed as Rambo.  Heera and his fiancé Panna (Preeti Sapru) join the expedition, and Shakaal shows up with a crew of disposable henchmen.  And for a while this is a mummy movie, with an unprepared crew of explorers delving into a deadly underground complex while an ancient and slow moving monster picks them off one by one.

However, Shakaal is a bit of a monster himself, and he tries to attack Panna.  Heera beats him up and he's kicked out of the expedition, but nobody calls the police or anything, so he's free to sneak in and try to steal Aarti's half of the amulet.  he chases her into the dungeon, she discovers the treasure, and suddenly the monster is loose in the village and there's an angry torch-wielding mob trying to stop it.

The monster is initially described as "formed of sacred soil", and it requires sacrifice to give it a soul and bring it back to life.  In the middle of the movie it's following tropes established in bad mummy movies, and then at the end it takes a sharp turn into Frankenstein.  It never talks, so it cannot give us any insight into its nature.  Shakaal from Mahakaal and Nevla from Bandh Darwaza don't really talk either, but they both clearly wanted things, whereas this monster just wanders around killing without explanation.  This does not make for a compelling antagonist.

The rest of the movie is equally jumbled.  The jokes fall flat (it's enough to make one long for the subtle comedic stylings of Johny Lever), the romantic track lacks any tension at all, and at the end, the survivors wander off without the treasure, and they don't even bother with a pithy comment about the nature of greed.  People die, nobody learns anything, and it's all so forgettable that I didn't even realize that I've already reviewed this one until the movie was halfway over.

Bhooty Call: Mahakaal

 Mahakaal: The Monster (1994) is often billed as "The Indian version of A Nightmare on Elm Street," and that's mostly accurate.  This horror movie about a terrifying specter who strikes through the dreams of his victims while wielding an impractical knife glove shows definite influence from the Elm Street series, but it is bonkers in its own special way.  It's also not the only Bollywood take on Freddy.  In fact, the film started production in 1988, but was shelved to avoid competing directly with 1989's Khooni Murda, also known as "The Indian version of A Nightmare on Elm Street with nudity and music by Bappi Lahiri."  Mahakaal is the movie that people remember, though.

It's only fitting that the film begins with a nightmare, as college student Seema (Kunika) is pursued through the set for the "Total Eclipse of the Heart" video by a scarred and menacing figure (Mahaveer Bhullar) with a hand full of knives.  She wakes up screaming, with claw marks on her arm, and then she . . . goes to school.  She does tell her best pal Anita (Archana Puran Singh), who is properly horrified, and soon enough Anita has a similar dream!

Anita has problems when she's awake as well.  While walking alone on campus she is attacked by fellow student Randhir (Dinesh Kaushik) and his gang of ruffians.  Before Randhir manages to assault Anita he's stopped by her boyfriend Prakash (Karan Shah) and Seema's boyfriend Param (Mayur Verma).  The fight is stopped by the college principal, who lectures everyone and doesn't bother to find out why they were fighting, then sends everyone back to class.  No one ever bothers to report Randhir to the police, despite the fact that Anita's father (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) is a police officer.

Anita's friends decide to cheer her up by taking her on a picnic, and they decide to bring canteen (Johny Lever), the aspiring actor and huge Michael Jackson fan who runs the campus canteen.  And it works!  After the picnic and accompanying musical number Anita feels much better, but the car breaks down, so the group are forced to spend the night and a mildly creepy hostel run by a different Johny Lever character.

At the hostel, Seema and Param have sex, and because this is a slasher movie, Seema has another, fatal nightmare, and Param watches her die but can't make himself do anything.  Soon param has other problems, as he is arrested for Seema's murder.  Anita is the only one who believes him, but he doesn't have long to languish in jail, since the killer strikes him next.

The bodies start adding up, and Anita, her mother (Reema Lagoo), and Prakash discover her father looking at the knife glove that he keeps in a drawer.  We finally get some backstory about the evil sorcerer Shakaal who used to sacrifice children in order to gain more magical power.  When he sacrificed Anita's sister Mohini (Baby Swetha), her father buried Shakaal alive, which in Bollywood horror is guaranteed to produce an angry vengeful spirit.  Anita is now armed with knowledge, but Shakaal is armed with magical powers, control over dreams, his own extensive dungeon complex, and a glove with attached knives.

I have been focused on the horror here, but the movie does not always do that.  This isn't much of a romance, but there are more songs than you normally see in Bollywood horror, and Johny Lever has a surprisingly big role, playing three different characters and showcasing his Michael Jackson impression at every opportunity.  The movie doesn't just shift genres, it lurches violently from one tone to another, and that works surprsingly well. The masala elements are at least fun and frenetic, while the horror set pieces are nicely atmospheric, with Randhir's brief encounter with Death Bed, the Bed that Eats as a particular highlight.

But the movie's real highlight is Archana Puran Singh as Anita.  Anita's no hero; she panics a lot, and screams more often, but she keeps fighting throughout the film.  She's driven in a way that the protagonists of Bandh Darwaa were not, and Singh keeps her interesting and sympathetic throughout.  Horror movies rely on their villains, but a good hero can make all the difference.

Bhooty Call: Bandh Darwaza

 Bandh Darwaza (1990) is sometimes billed as "The Indian Version of Dracula," but that's wrong on two levels.  First, there have been multiple Indian adaptations of Bram Stoker's over the years; I've reviewed a bunch of them.  Second, and more importantly, Dracula has an actual plot.

The demon Nevla (Aniruddh Agarwal) certainly looks the part, though, spending the entire movie dressed as Bela Lugosi.  Nevla lives (or unlives) in the cursed Black Mountain, surrounded by a gang of misfit cultists, and every night he turns into a big bat and hunts for blood.

Meanwhile, the Thakur Pratap Singh (Vijayendra Ghatge) and his wife Lajjo (Beena Banerjee) are hoping to have a child, and they've tried exactly one thing, visiting every temple they can find to seek divine intervention.  The family maid, Mahua (Aruna Irani), is secretly a member of the cult, and takes lajjo aside and offers Nevla's help.  Lajjo is so desperate that she agrees, and they visit the Black Mountain together.  There's a ritual, Lajjo is hypnotized, and Neval makes his offer - she will have a child.  If the child is a boy, she can consider it a free gift.  If it's a girl, then the child belongs to the Black Mountain.  Lajjo agrees (though I do not think that an agreement made under the influence of spooky vampire hypnosis wouldn't hold up in court.)  Then Nevla takes very direct action to produce said child.  (I also don't think spooky vampire hypnosis counts as consent.  Nevla is a bad guy.)

The child is born, and it's a girl.  Mahua demands that the wife turn the baby over, and when Lajjo refuses, she poisons her.  The wife lives just long enough to confess everything to the Thakur.  He storms the Black Mountain with his men and a gun, and apparently wins, but the movie immediately jumps ahead several years.  

Thakur's daughter is now a young adult named Kamya (Kunika Sadanand), and she is introduced to the audience in her room, working out in leotard and leggings, as the comic relief servant Gopi (Johny Lever!) spies on her from just outside her door, firmly establishing the film's exploitation credentials.

 

Kamya is in love with, or perhaps fixated on, her childhood friend Kumar (Hashmat Khan), but Kumar only has eyes for Sapna (Manjeet Kullar).  One night Sapna is driving home through the spooky woods when she meets a strange woman (Shayamalee) who needs a ride to the Black Mountain.  When she drops the woman off, she discovers that the Vanishing Hitchhiker left her book behind, so she tries to return it, only to discover the cult, now led by Mahua, performing a human sacrifice.  She runs away.

Kumar and her other friends don't believe her story, and eventually Kumar insists on taking her to the Black Mountain to prove that nothing happened.  They arrive discover the hidden evil temple with its sacrificial altar and enormous bat statue, and since there's no blood on the altar he smugly declares that he was right all along and there's nothing suspicious there.  Sapna does discover the book, though, and takes it away with her.  

The book turns out to be full of evil spells, and Kumar still insists that it's nothing unusual.  When Sapna is alone the Vanishing Hitchhiker returns to ask for her book back, but when Kumar appears she's already vanished, along with the book.  The book winds up in Kamya's hands, though.  Kamya uses a spell to summon Kumar, but Sapna and her brother Anand (Satish Kaul) arrive in time to interrupt.  Kamya hides, and the pair bring Kumar to his senses.

The cult invites Kamya to join a ritual at the Black Mountain, but it's all a ruse to use her blood to reanimate Nevla.  It works.  Nevla is back (though a bit more slimy than he used to be) and Kamya winds up as his hypnotized bride, alternately chained up, sleeping in a glass coffin, or sent out to gather more women for Nevla.

And then the movie spins its wheels for a long time.  Sapna and Kumar try to rescue Kamya but fail, more than once.  Kamya lures Anand's wife Bhanu (Anita Sareen) to the Black Mountain, then she escapes before being lured back again.  There are several trips to the Black Mountain and back, and nobody ever makes a plan or thinks to bring any weapons, until finally (finally!) the cult makes an attempt to kidnap Sapna directly, which they could have done at any time.  (Sapna actually acquits herself pretty well; she's a better fighter than Kumar.)

The Thakur finds out about the vampire situation, and he brings new ideas to the table, like "make a plan" and "carry holy symbols" and "get help" and suddenly our heroes start having a lot more success.  If this was Dracula, they would have had access to Mina Harker compiling available information and making plans accordingly, and the movie would have been twenty minutes long.  But it's not Dracula.

This isn't Dracula, but it does resemble a gender-flipped Veerana.  It has many of the same beats, and includes similar tropes, but there's a lot more wheel-spinning, Nevla doesn't have the magnetic charm of the earlier movie's Jasmine, and the evil lair decor isn't nearly as good.  Bandh Darwaza is a fine choice if you're in the mood for Ramsay vampires, but there are other options.

Bhooty Call 2026.

It's October, time for our annual Bhooty Call, a month long celebration of the ghosts of Bollywood.  Thanks to a generous patron, this year we'll be focusing on the royal family of Bollywood horror, the Ramsays.

I dream of Rambha

 Genre boundaries in Indian cinema are famously fluid, but Ramba Oorvasi Menaka (2026) presents an unexpected mix.  The movie is by turns a devotional movie with a clear moral that is not presented subtly, a supernatural sitcom like Bewitched, and a black comedy with a rapidly rising body count.  Normally at this point I would be saying that tone is an issue, but it really isn't; there are highs and lows, but it's best to just relax and enjoy the ride.

Ages ago, an ascetic performed powerful devotions to gain the attention of Rambha (Raashi Singh), Oorvasi (Vishnupriya Bhimeneni), and Menaka (Prisha Singh), the three most prominent Apsaras of the court of Indra.  His devotions are successful, and the three appear and grant him a magical book; by tracing the correct pattern on the book's cover, he and his descendants will be able to call the Apsaras from heaven to perform favors and grant wishes.  Generations pass, eventually the proper pattern is forgotten, and the book becomes a curious family heirloom, treasured but best left on the shelf.

Suri (Allari Naresh) does not want to leave the book on the shelf.  He's obsessed with unlocking the proper pattern and then asking the Apsaras to make him a star.  In the process he has run the family theatrical company into the ground (largely because he refuses to perform personally) and racked up a mountain of debt, but it's all going to be okay once the Apsaras arrive.

Suri also has a personal nemesis, police inspector Appala Naidu (Tarak Ponnappa), who hates the theater and is holding a bitter grudge against Suri for stealing his girlfriend Chinni back in Primary school.  After the local orphanage loses its well because of an overly enthusiastic theatrical performance, Appala sees the chance to finally get rid of his rival, but his supervisor intervenes and instead Suri and his sidekicks CEO (Naresh) and Parimala (Srinivasa Reddy) are sent to work at the orphanage for a week under the supervision of the orphanage's strict but beautiful headmistress (Surbhi).

Naturally the headmistress is Chinni, and she still loves Suri after all these years for some reason.  Her father is not impressed with the young man, but Chinni has made her choice, so he decides that Suri can marry her in a month if and only if he can clear all his debts first; otherwise she'll be married off to Appala.  That's no problem - if Suri can summon the Apsaras.

Naturally Suri finally stumbles across the right pattern and manages to summon Rambha and the others, but before he can do any proper wishing they are summoned back to Indralok by Indra (Vennela Kishore), who is angry about all the abuse Suri has shouted at the heavens over the years.  Before they leave Suri gets them to promise to return at the same time the next night, and he spends the day preparing a long, long list of wishes.  He's late to the next night's meeting, though, and when he arrives Rambha explains that the Apsaras have been stripped of their powers for a month and exiled to earth.  Indra did not want to leave them defenseless, though, so he left them with a curse: any man who touches Rambha, Oorvasi or Menaka with lust in his heart will immediately die.  

Suri has a month with Apsaras and no magic, so he has to find a way to dodge his creditors (many of whom keep discovering the Apsaras and then dropping dead), find a way to clear his debts, outwit Appala, and (of course!) find a way to pay for an operation for his terminally ill mother. Meanwhile in Indralok, Indra and sage Narad are rooting against Suri while Sachi Devi (Hari Teja) wants to see the mortal succeed, and Yamaraj, the God of Death, is getting annoyed at all the dead creditors.

There is a lot going on here, but the tone remains surprisingly consistent.  It helps that the Apsaras have promised to bring back all the dead creditors once they get their powers back, so dealing with the bodies is more of a temporary inconvenience than a serious life changing event.  The romantic track is silly, but Surbhi is perfectly charming and gets to have a distinct personality most of the time.  The divine comedy is fun, and while this isn't exactly a Yama movie per se, I am always glad to see him show up.

Does Suri learn his lesson and learn to succeed by his own efforts rather than seeking to get rich quick without any effort?  Of course he does.  But the journey is the fun part.

It's not a saga, it's a love story.

 Jaane Tu . . . Ya Jaane Na (2008) isn't trying to be a grand sweeping romance.  It's a quirky little post-college romantic comedy about young people confronting life in the big world outside, but it still managed to become an enormous hit, beloved by an entire generation of young Indians.  (Except for some girls named Aditi, who quickly grew tired of their classmates singing a certain song at them all the time.)

The movie opens with Jiggy (Nirav Mehta), who is on a date with Mala (Renuka Kunzru).  The date is not going well, perhaps because he brought his friends with him: grumpy Rotlu (Karan Makhij), sweet Sandhya, AKA "Bombs" (Alishka Varde), and feisty Shaleen (Sugandha Garg), who is as gay as the producers could get away with at the time.  (Nobody says anything onscreen, so you have to pay attention to who she's dancing with  in the big musical numbers.)  The fact that Jiggy chose to take Mala, who is a flight attendant, to the airport on her day off to meet two other friends doesn't help either.  The flight is delayed, so the friends decide to tell a reluctant Mala a story about Jai (Imran Khan) and Aditi (Genalia D'Souza), the friends they're there to meet.

Jai (Aditi calls him Ratz") and Aditi (Jai Calls her "Meow") are best friends with contrasting personalities.  Aditi is tough and scrappy and prone to big emotions, while Jai is cool-headed and clever and a committed pacifist who solves his problems with words, a talent he demonstrates when he defeats the campus bully Vivek (Padam Bhola) without raising a fist.  Jai was raised by his mother Savitri (Ratna Pathak) to honor the peaceful legacy of his late father Amar Singh Rathore (Naseeruddin Shah), but the truth is that Amar was a brawling Rajasthani noble, and his portrait occasionally comes to life to argue with Savitri about Jai's destiny.  The Rathores have three prerequisites for manhood (get in a fight, go to jail, and ride a horse) and Jai doesn't seem likely to complete any of them.

Aditi's parents (Anuradha Patel and Jayant Kripalani) invite Jai over to ask about his impending marriage to Aditi, which is a huge surprise to both of them.  They announce that they have no intention of marrying each other, and instead decide to set each other up with suitable mates; Jai wants someone sweet and sensitive and romantic, while Aditi wants someone macho who can protect her.

Jai finds his match first.  Meghna (Manjari Fadnis) is sweet and dreamy and honestly kind of annoying, though Jai doesn't seem to notice.  Aditi does, though, and she also notices that Jai is spending all his time with Meghna rather than her, and she's not as okay with it as she thought she would be.  Aditi ignores her feelings and accepts a proposal from Sushant Modi (Ayaz Khan), who is rich and charming and has a black belt and a possessive streak, as demonstrated when he fights two Rajasthani cowboys (Sohail and Arbaaz Khan, Salman Khan's brothers) who were dancing with his ex girlfriend.  It's not as much fun as Aditi expected, but she ignores the obvious red flags and carries on.

Jai meets Meghna's toxic parents, and it quickly becomes clear that her whimsy is a defensive measure, and she really needs all of the therapy.  Aditi tells Sushant that she would like to attend film school in New York before marriage, and he does not react well at all.  Everybody knows that Jai and Aditi belong together (even Mala knows!) but will they figure it out?  (Obviously yes, since this is a story that they are telling Mala about how Jai and Aditi got together, but it's the journey, not the destination.)

So why was this movie so popular?  I have a few theories.  First, while it's a light and fluffy romantic comedy, it's a well-crafted light and fluffy romantic comedy.  The frame story is used to good effect, the friends all share an easy chemistry, and the always splendid A. R. Rahman provides the music.

Second, the movie respects its characters.  Aditi gets to remain tough and spunky and doesn't have to get "glammed up" to get Jai to notice her.  And while Jai is obviously going to complete the three requirements for Rathore manhood along the way, he doesn't have to morph into an action hero. Jai is still the same cool-headed pacifist at the end of the film.  He throws exactly three punches in his fight scene, and he makes it very clear that it's a special one time thing.

And finally, despite the frame story and a few surreal elements (like the talking portrait and the recurring Rajasthani cowboys) it's a very grounded movie.  It's not an aspirational saga, it's a look at some ordinary young people dealing with complex emotions.  It happened to come out at the right time, and like Dil Chahta Hai before it, it captured the zeitgeist.

No, the other Skaktiman.

 

 Shaktimaan (1997-2005) is a long running TV serial that finally answers the question "What if Clark Kent was Captain Marvel?", starring Mukesh Khanna as the stalwart superhero who always makes the right choice.  Shaktiman (1993) is an action movie and family drama featuring Mukesh Khanna as an ordinary man who makes a number of questionable choices.  It's important to know the difference.

Khanna plays Diler, who manages the Shimla home of Rai Bahadur Laxminarayan (Kulbhushan Kharbanda).  Diler's wife Parvati (Anjana Mumtaz) has just given birth to a son, and while Rai Bahadur is happy for his employee, it's a painful reminder that he and his wife Lakshmi (Beena Banerjee) cannot have children.  Diler overhears his employers wishing to adopt his child, and over Parvati's objections he makes the offer, certain that this will give his son a better life.  The deal is made, and Lakshmi and Rai Bahadur name the boy Vikram, or Vicky, which is a dangerous choice.  Nine times out of ten in Bollywood, a character named Vicky is going to be a spoiled college bully, and there's a high correlation to being played by Gulshan Grover..

The Laxminarayans return to Bombay.  (It won't be called Mumbai until 1995.)  Three years pass, and it turns out that Lakshmi is pregnant.  The family return to Shimla, and Rai Bahadur is immediately called back to Bombay.  It's terrible timing; Lakshmi promptly meets with an accident and dies just after giving birth.  Diler makes another poor choice and tells Parvati that they should kill the baby, ensuring that nothing disrupts Vicky's cozy life.  She is rightly horrified and flees with the baby, and when Rai Bahadur returns Diler tells him that Lakshmi and the baby both died, and he's already cremated them so there's no need to investigate any farther.

 Parvati arrives in Bombay, but she has no idea how to find Rai Bahadur, so she settles into a life of grinding poverty in order to provide for the baby, who she names Amar.  Time passes, and then the movie becomes a college romance.  Amar (Ajay Devgn) is now a stolid working class hero who loves  his mother.  He also loves Priya (Karisma Kapoor), a lovely and charming rich girl who happens to be the daughter of the Police Superintendent (Parikshit Sahni), a fact which will be important later.

Vicky (Gulshan Grover) has turned out to be a spoiled college bully with his own little posse of henchmen.  He manages to be worse than the usual Bollywood Vicky, in fact; Adult Amar is introduced beating up Vicky to stop him from assaulting a female classmate, but nobody bothers to tell anybody about the assault, so Vicky doesn't face any consequences.  (This will also be important later.)

The college romance section establishes character, but nothing much actually changes.  Amar loves Priya, and she loves him.  Vicky continues to be a creep, and is continually plotting to get rid of Amar so that he can have Priya, but she's not interested and responds with pranks.  They go to Shimla on a school trip, and then come back.  There's a little fighting.

 

Vicky is being spoiled by his father's secretary/comic relief Dimagchand (Tiku Talsania). who does nothing to curb his bad behavior.  Diler, who has repented of his terrible choices and become a taxi driver, occasionally pops up and gives the boy Shaktimaanish advice, hoping to set his secret son on the straight and narrow, but as far as Vicky is concerned he's just a random cab driver and not worth listening to.

 The genre shifts again when Amar leaves college to become a police officer.  Vicky goes from bad to worse, which fits in with the plans of crime lord Tiger (Ajit).  Tiger lends the boy money as part of a scheme to punish Rai Bahadur for testifying against his son.  

And then things get complicated.  Priya, who is apparently still in college, is harassed by another student (Shashi Kiran), which makes her so angry that she publicly threatens to kill him.  Vicky is so angry that he actually does kill him; this is not really to protect Priya, he's just drunk and territorial.  Tiger and his men quietly take pictures of the murder, while Diler, who happens to be passing by, takes the body and sends Vicky away.  Diler drives around trying to find somewhere to hide the body, and winds up stashing it in the trunk of a parked car . . . which happens to belong to Priya.  She discovers the body and decides to hide it rather than tell the police, by which I mean her father and Amar.  And while she's trying to hide the body she's spotted (and photographed) by Vicky.  

So, Priya is being blackmailed by Vicky, who wants her to marry him.  Vicky is being blackmailed by Tiger, who wants to use the young idiot to help him get revenge and money.  Amar is placed in charge of the murder investigation, because of course he is.  Diler is tormented by his misdeeds, both old and new.  And Parvati is still hoping that she will somehow find her husband and everything will be fine.  (Everything is not fine.)

Shaktiman's plot is not anything really new or groundbreaking; it's basically four stock Bollywood plots in a trenchcoat, and each of the plots have been done better in other movies; there are noticeable plot holes.  On the other hand, the elements of the plot are presented well.  Gulshan Grover gets a bit more screen time than usual for his weasely villain act, and even manages a bit of pathos.  Ajay Devgn beats people up with style and enthusiasm and fight choreography lifted from Jackie Chan movies.  Mukesh Khanna makes a fine tragic hero.  And nobody sells a dance number like Karisma Kapoor.

 

This is a very early 90s Bollywood movie.  (You can tell by the costumes.)  It's not exactly good, but there's always something going on.

 

Sisters are doin' it for themselves.

 

 Cinematic universes are hard.  Movies are hard to begin with, but it can be tricky to figure out just how interconnected you want to be.  There's a scale between "basically unrelated movies apart from the odd reference or cameo" and "really really just a series of sequels with pretensions."  So genuinely, credit where credit is due: Alpha (2026) add new characters and concepts to Yash Raj Film's Spy Universe, which does keep it from ending up as "The adventures  of those three guys, and one of them is married to Katrina Kaif," like Rohit Shetty's Cop Universe.

 The movie opens with a look at the past of Vikrant Kaul (Anil Kapoor), who became the new chief of R&AW at the end of War 2.  It is 1999, and in the aftermath of the Kargill War, Kaul is working with Colonel Fateh Singh Lakhawat (Bobby Deol) to create a super soldier to create a super soldier program called Alpha.  Three years later, the first batch of super soldiers is ready, and after a staged demonstration Alpha is approved.

 During the presentation, Fateh mentions that in addition to enhanced strength, speed, and senses, the super soldiers also have heightened healing abilities, and Kaul is paying close attention.  His wife Janaki (Dia Mirza) is pregnant, but that pregnancy is very dangerous due to a congenital heart condition.  Kaul steals a dose of Alpha and secretly doses Janaki, and suddenly the pregnancy is going well and the heart condition seems to have gone away.  And that's when they discover that all of the test subjects have suffered from cerebral hemorrhages.  Including Janaki.

Janaki dies, but the baby has survived.  The Alpha program is shut down.  And that's when Fateh executes one of the classic Bollywood action movie plots; he takes the baby, replacing her with a stillborn child, leaving Kaul devastated and Fateh free to treat the girl, who he names "Sita", as his personal science project.  Sita grows up conflicted but loyal to her adoptive father, who trains her in combat skills while scientist Dr. Varghese (Dibyendu Bhattacharya) draws her blood every week and gives her a guinea pig on her twelfth birthday, which is a bit on the nose.

Years pass.  Sita grows into a skilled assassin.  And after eliminating all of the officials who signed off on Alpha, in a variety of creative ways, she returns to Fateh's base, kills a wave of soldiers, and blows the place up, taking the guinea pig with her.  Fateh isn't home during the attack, but Sita is saving him for last, as she explains to Soldier, the guinea pig.  (I'm going to pretend that Soldier was named after the Bobby Deol movie.)  

 R&AW is assigned to find the killer, and Kaul realizes the connection between the victims.  He tracks down Fateh, who brags about the child kidnapping and reveals that he has shaped Kaul's long lost daughter into a weapon, and Kaul somehow manages to resist punching him in the face.  (At this point; obviously there will be facepunching later.)

 But Kaul has a secret of his own.  Fateh kidnapped Sita before discovering that Janaki actually delivered fraternal twins.  Sita's sister Durga (Sharvari) is living in Spain, using her supersoldier abilities as  an extreme athlete.  Durga has always idolized her lost sister, and when she learns that Sita is alive she's enthusiastic about helping to bring her home.  She flies to India, intending to meet her father at his safehouse in Kashmir, but Sita got there first.

Naturally there's a fight scene.  Also naturally, Sita has already learned that Fateh is a villain, and she's really there to talk to Kaul.  Fateh's men arrive, and Kaul insists on staying behind to cover his daughters' escape.  It's a few days journey to the next safehouse, and  that means the sisters have time to bond a bit.  The next safehouse is also attacked, and the sisters have to battle special forces ninjas with the help of Kabir (Hrithik Roshan).  Kabir is more than capable of keeping up with their super soldier skills, and manages to perform stunts that he couldn't do even in his own movie, but once again he stays to cover their escape because this is only a cameo.

The rest of the plot is pretty straightforward.  Fateh wants to harvest Sita's brain in order to create a stable form of Alpha, but once he realizes who Durga is he realizes that he has a backup.  There are fights, there is family bonding, and the true extent of Fateh's villainy is revealed, leading to Kaul punching him in the face.

 The Spy Universe has played with sci fi elements, including the super virus and jetpack fight in Pathaan, but this is straight up superhero stuff; the movie even bills itself as an origin story.  The action is ramped up as well, and that's actually a problem for the film, since there are so many big ridiculous fights that they start to blend together.  I will say that Alia Bhatt and Sharvani make convincing action heroes.

Alpha definitely falls closer to the War corner of the Spy Universe, with a hero whose loyalties are initially unclear.   It also continues the search for human connection that is the underlying theme of the Spy Universe as a whole, contrasting Kaul's fatherly love with Fateh's cynical manipulation.  That's not the only theme explored, though; the super soldier syndrome is named after toxic masculinity, and Fateh makes it clear that that is not a coincidence.  His ideal soldier is really a hyper macho warrior, able to win wars by being tough and macho and free form any emotional weakness.  And he is proven pretty conclusively wrong about that.

There's a lot that I like in Alpha, but as a whole it's incredibly dour and po-faced.  The concept is great, like a blend of Frankenstein and Seeta Aur Geeta, but it's never quite as fun as that sounds. 

 

 

Nothing Up My Sleeve

 

 Dhoom: 3 (2013) has everything you would expect from an entry in the Dhoom franchise: motorcycles, increasingly improbable stunts, terrible police work, male bonding, and an antihero who completely overshadows the series leads.  It also has a tremendous sense of style and some remarkable performances in this silly, silly movie.

The film opens in 1990 Chicago.  Iqbal Khan (Jackie Shroff) and his son Sahir (Siddharth Nigam) have one chance to impress banker Warren Anderson (Andrew Bicknell) and convince the Western bank of Chicago not to foreclose on their fledgling "Great Indian Circus."  It is a remarkable performance, skilled stage magic mixed with Cirque du Soliel style acrobatics, but Anderson is not impressed, because it's not dumb enough.  He explains that circuses are stupid, and people only want to see stupid things.  This is Sahir's villain origin story, so there's really only one way it can end.  Iqbal takes his own life, and Sahir is left (almost) alone and very, very angry.

Years pass.  Sahir (now played by Aamir Khan) is about to reopen the Great Indian Circus, but he has other interests; he's been pulling off spectacular bank jobs, breaking into branches of the Western Bank of Chicago, throwing the money at the crowd, and then escaping through a combination of parkour and genuinely ridiculous motorcycle stunts.  That may be why the Western Bank of Chicago and/or the Chicago PD decide to call in Jai Dixit (Abhishek Bachchan), India's leading motorcycle detective.

Jai naturally brings along his sidekick Ali (Uday Chopra), motorcycle mechanic turned annoying police officer.  They are met at the airport by Chicago PD's Victoria Williams (Tabrett Bethel) and because she is blonde and attractive Uday immediately starts objectifying her despite Jai urging him to act like a professional.

Sahir has been searching for the perfect leading lady for the circus, and that is why nerdy Aaliya (Katrina Kaif) barges in and demands a chance to audition.  Sahir offers her five minutes, and warns that if he looks away for a second it's over.  She delivers a performance straight out of All That Jazz, with added acrobatics.  Naturally, she gets the job.

Jai sets a trap for Sahir, appearing on television to dare the mysterious bank robber to rob again.  Sahir responds by going to meet Jai as himself, claiming to be a concerned citizen with a circus background who once worked with an embittered clown who knew how to vanish from one location and appear in another.  And Jai lets him join in on the planning, even sharing security codes with the civilian he just met.  You might think this is part of a cunning plan on Jai's part, but he's just bad at his job.

sahir strikes again, using his inside knowledge, and escapes with an even more ridiculous motorcycle stunt.  Jai follows in a helicopter and shoots into traffic, wounding Sahir on the shoulder, then realizes that the civilian he gave the access codes to must be the one who used them. He goes to the circus and confronts Sahir, demanding to see his wounded shoulder.  The shoulder is not wounded, Jai is humiliated, and he and Ali are kicked off the case.  (Naturally they keep working the case, because they are maverick cops.)

There's a trick.  The trick is Sahir's identical and autistic twin brother Samar, who has been kept hidden since before Iqbal died for the sake of the act.  Sahir and Samar can perform amazing feats of misdirection since no one knows there are two of them, and that is also really helpful when fleeing the scene of a crime.  Samar is onboard with committing crimes to avenge his father, but he is his own person with his own interests.  He loves spending Sundays out in the world by himself, and he loves Aaliya, who does not know the secret and has no idea that she's been performing with two different men all this time.  Sahir and Samar have a close bond, at least until Jai accidentally discovers that Samar exists and sets out to exploit that.

The action in the Dhoom series escalates from movie to movie, and Dhoom 3 adds gadgets.  Samar's and Sahir's motorcycles are tricked out Bond-style, with impractical grapple guns and the ability to convert to jet skis.  Like the other Dhoom movies, this is a very male world, and Jai's wife Sweety (played in the earlier movies by Rimi Sen) doesn't even get mentioned.  Jai's important relationships are all with men; he's exasperated with Ali, feels betrayed by Sahir, and betrays Samar in turn.  (He does feel terrible about it.)  Ali is a bit creepy around Victoria, but it doesn't go anywhere.  There is some genuine feeling behind Samar's relationship with Aaliya, though.

Dhoom 3 does have two advantages over the previous film, though.  The first is Aamir Khan, Bollywood's "Mr. Perfectionist," who is incapable of phoning in a performance, no matter how ridiculous the movie is.  He acts the hell out of both his characters, and it lifts the film.

The second advantage comes from a simple syllogism.  The movie is set in Chicago.  Bob Fosse co-wrote and choreographed the musical Chicago.  Therefore Dhoom 3 should channel Fosse whenever possible. Aaliya's sizzling audition scene and the movie's opening tap number are clearly Fosse inspired, but there are touches of Fosse sprinkled throughout all the dances, and Sahir spends most of the movie wearing a bowler hat.  It's not the most Fosse thing I've seen come out of Bollywod (that would be the song "Jab Bhi Ciggaret" from the movie No Smoking,) but it does give the movie a strong and distinctive style that the other Dhooms lack.