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.