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.