Horror comedy is still a thriving genre in Indian cinema at the moment, and Pallu Padama Paathuka (2023) is yet another horror comedy, this time relatively light on the horror and heavy on the comedy. Or "comedy." This is an incredibly broad Tamil farce, and the good news is that over the years I have built up a resistance to broad Tamil farces. The bad news is that after Go, Goa Gone I have surprisingly high standards for Indian zombie comedies.
After a cold open involving a young man getting more than he expected form his girlfriend during a forest rendezvous, the movie introduces us to Gopi (Shah Ra), a voice actor who dubs Bear Grills into Tamil. Gopi is kidnapped and brought before Don Varadha (G. M. Kumar), who is rich, powerful and blind. Varadha recognizes Gopi by his voice and thinks that he is Bear Grills, and wants him to guide him in the forest for a very important reason that I didn't quite catch. They meet a zombie, and the movie jumps ahead four years.
In the next scene, a group of strangers meet on a cliff overlooking Kanjuthanni Forest. They all intend to take their own lives, and they all have tragic backstories which are told in flashbacks. It's all classic movie tragedy, including a man whose boyfriend is getting married to a woman, a man fired just before his wedding, a man who discovers that his family are really a cult of Satanic cannibals who plan to sacrifice him on his birthday, and a man who set off a chain of accidents that killed his entire family by dropping a bar of soap. And then there's Mahesh (Dinesh), widely known as "Revolting Mahesh," who unwittingly set off a popular uprising after he was arrested for getting drunk while sitting on a voting machine. Mahesh is our hero, though he's every bit as hapless as the others.
After drinking together, the group decide to explore the forest, and they meet a swarm of zombies. Fortunately they are rescued by Sathya (Sanchita Shetty), a two-fisted action scientist. Unfortunately, she drugs them, intending to use them as zombie bait, though she changes her mind and rescues them again at the last minute, getting bitten by one of the zombies in the scuffle. Fortunately she doesn't change completely yet, and tells the men that she has an antidote in her home. They make it to her compound with only one casualty, and she injects herself with the antidote and introduces her partially zombified father, Rohit Sharma (Anand Babu) and drops some exposition.
Sathya and her father were working on a military project dubbed "Project Cthulhu," which which was . . . supposed to create unkillable zombies, so I suppose it was a success. (Project Cthulhu's logo which is just the Hydra emblem from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so the evilness is pretty easy to spot.) Rohit and Sathya had second thoughts about creating an undead army, but the military took the formula by force and accidentally released it in the compound, thus creating the current zombie outbreak.
The good news is that the zombies are pretty much confined to the forest, so they can just leave. Sathya knows the way and offers to lead them, and along the way they meet Gopi, who is not dead and instead living in the woods as a half-crazed survivalist. Mahesh is completely in love with Sathya at this point, and he writes a letter to propose to her, but after he gives it to her she is kidnapped by Nazi zombies. Gopi provides the necessary exposition: Rohit tested the formula by using it to animate the frozen body of Adolph Hitler (Hareesh Paradi), and Hitler now has his own compound full of uniformed and relatively loyal zombies. There's a problem beyond the fact that they brought back Hitler - Zombie Hitler came back obsessed with sex, and he is convinced that Sathya is Eva Braun, either because he thinks she looks like Braun or because she's the only woman in the area.
Mahesh and his friends must rescue Sathya from Zombie Hitler, and at this point the movie pretty much abandons horror entirely, treating the zombies as a bunch of guys in unconvincing makeup, and after a bizarre item number Mahesh and Hitler have to compete in a drinking contest for Sathya's hand.
This is broad farce, one of the broadest farces I have ever seen. And that is a problem, because the movie is leaning hard into the absurdity of the premise. This movie wants to be so bad it's good, but you can't make a movie that is so bad it's good on purpose, because you wind up winking at the camera rather than taking your own movie seriously. Some of the jokes land well, but many of them do not, and the film relies on lazy and sometimes homophobic innuendo.
It is not fair to compare this with Go Goa Gone, a movie with an actual budget and some A-list stars. But it's not the budget that sinks Pallu Padama Paathuka, it's the writing. Go Goa Gone puts some work into making its slacker heroes grow and change, treats its zombies as a consistent threat with consistent rules, and has an actual theme that develops over the course of the film, and Pallu Padama Paathuka does not.
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