Bhooty Call: Dhilluku Dhuddu 2

 Dhilluku Dhuddu 2 (2019) is billed as a "spiritual sequel" to the original Dhilluku Dhuddu; while both movies feature haunted houses and star-crossed lovers, the only real connection between them is branding.  Which is just as well, because I haven't seen the first one.

Maya (Shritha Sivadas) is being haunted, but it's a very specific haunting.  She never sees the ghost, but every time a man says that he loves her, the ghost will wait until he's alone and then beat him up.  It doesn't seem to kill anyone, which is very restrained for an Indian movie ghost, but it does rather put a damper on her love life.  That might be okay, since the only men we see taking an interest are either creepy, like the guy who follows her through a dark alley demanding that she love him back right now, or inappropriate, like Karthik (T. M. Karthik), her direct supervisor at the hospital where she works.

Meanwhile, our hero Viji (Santhanam) is . . . well, he's a jerk.  Viji works as a rickshaw driver and lives with his uncle (Rajendran).  Uncle and nephew are public nuisances, drinking every night, shouting and moving furniture through the streets, and picking fights whenever any of the neighbors try to get them to be quiet.  Viji does actually have a tragic backstory to explain his bad behavior, but it does not matter to the plot in any way.

Viji hurts his hand while disrupting a local politician's ceremony and beating up the requisite goons, and in the morning he demands that his neighbors get him medicine.  One of those neighbors is Karthik, fresh from his own ghost-delivered beating, and that gives him an idea.  He sends Maya to perform physiotherapy, and the whole neighborhood does their best to encourage Viji to fall in love.

The neighbors don't have to do much, honestly.  Maya is beautiful, kind, and pious, and when she lights a candle for his deceased mother, Viji falls immediately.  He even temporarily gives up drinking for her, and sober Viji is much less unpleasant, so she seems to be falling for him as well.  Viji gathers his courage, and just before Maya leaves to visit her family in Kerala, he confesses his love.  She tells him the same thing she told her other suitors, to ask again the next time he sees her, and that night, the ghost appears and beats him up.

Unlike Maya's other suitors, Viji doesn't scare that easily. Karthik explains that Maya's father Garudaraja Bhattadhri (Bipin) is a powerful magician, and Viji and his uncle travel to Kerala to ask for Maya's hand.  They have a bit to drink along the way, so Viji acts like a jerk when he meets Maya's father, disrupting his magical ceremony and generally being awful.  He survives the inevitable attack by sword wielding goons, but that still doesn't solve the ghost problem, so he goes to rival guru Chakra Mahadevi (Urvashi) for help.

And up to this point, the plot is basic Bollywood (or Kollywood, in this case) romance, with the young couple needing to earn their happy ending by navigating parental objections; it's Chennai Express with ghosts.  But there's a twist - both gurus are frauds, and the ghost has been around for over a century, summoned by a previous King of Black Magic to protect his daughter from the lecherous George Williams, a British nogoodnik who made a habit of seducing and abandoning Indian women.  

The ghost can be exorcised, but only if Viji and the rest of the cast can find the scroll used to summon it, now hidden in a bungalow filled with angry spirits.  It sounds like a recipe for some genuine scares, but instead the final setpiece is a Haunted Mansion style romp through the bungalow, with a drastic increase in slapstick in an already slapstick heavy movie.

The humor in Dhilluku Dhuddu 2 is very broad.  That can be a good thing, because it means the good jokes translate well, and there are some genuinely good jokes here.  It can also be a bad thing, because when the jokes fall flat, the language barrier won't help, and that also happens more than once.

When the movie is at its best, it has a sort of fairy tale feel.  Maya telling her suitors to ask again later is a classic fairy tale test of their courage, determination, and worth.  Viji is the one who passes the test, so he gets the girl.  It doesn't change the fact that he's a big jerk, though.  Maya can do better.

Bhooty Call: Chandramukhi

 If you've seen the first Bhool Bhulaiyaa, then the plot of Chandramukhi (2005) is going to sound very familiar.  There's a reason for that; both movies are a part of a chain of remakes in different languages, stretching back to the 1993 Malayalam film Manichitrathazhu.  Still, casting matters.  This is a Rajnikanth movie, so the viewer can expect extra fight scenes, plenty of dancing, a song about how Indian village life is just better, and of course Rajni's usual understated humility.

The movie opens, like so many ghost stories do, with a dispute over building contracts.  An important contract has been awarded to Ganesh Construction, run by Senthil (Prabhu), and his angry rivals respond by trying to kidnap a vanload of Ganesh employees, but they are immediately rescued by Sathil's adopted brother Saravanan (Rajnikanth), a respected psychiatrist who has just returned from America.  The angry construction thugs vanish from the movie right after that, along with the whole contract dispute plotline; they seem to be in the film in order to be beaten up, assuring the viewer that yes, this is indeed a Rajnikanth movie.

Senthil has another problem, though.  He's recently married Ganga (Jyothika), but his mother had promised to marry him to his cousin Priya (Malavika), thus putting an end to an interfamily feud.  Priya's family don't know that Senthil is married now, so Saravanan offers to explain things to Priya's aunt Akhilandeswari (Sheela) and the rest of the family, and check out the haunted castle Setnhil bought while he's in the neighborhood.

Obviously, the family assumes that Saravanan is the promised groom, and though he tries to explain they really don 't let him get a word in edgewise, so instead he goes to check out the palace.  It is supposedly haunted by the spirit of Chandramukhi, a dancer in the court of the wicked king Vettaiyan.  When he found out that Chandramukhi was in love with Gunasekaran, he killed them both.  Chanramukhi's angry ghost returned for some serious haunting, but he had the ghost sealed in a Room Which Must Never Be Opened, guarded by a giant snake, then left town.

Sethil and Ganga arrive and clear up all the confusion.  They announce their intention to move into the haunted castle, and Akhilandeswari decides that everyone will move into the haunted castle.  And they do, and everything is fine.  Saravanan meets Durga (Nayanthara), the gardener's granddaughter, and he flirts with her by acting like a jerk at every opportunity until she realizes he has a good heart after all.  Meanwhile, Ganga becomes more and more fascinated by the story of Chandramukhi, and decides to open the Room Which Must never Be Opened.

After Saravanan is called away to attend to a patient, she gets her chance.  She convinces Durga to help her get a key made, and they open the room.  Ganga is delighted, but things start going wrong almost immediately, when the blacksmith who made the new key suddenly dies.  Things start getting spooky, with a mysterious voice singing at night, Ganga's sari mysteriously catching on fire, and a near fatal fishtank accident. The family quickly decides that Durga must be responsible.

And then Saravanan returns, just in time to foil an attack on Priya, though no one gets a look at her assailant.  It is time for Saravanan to bust a ghost, but to do that, he needs to figure out who the ghost is.  (It's Ganga, obviously, but he needs to figure that out.)

As in Bhool Bhulaiyaa, there's some question about whether the ghost is real or just a manifestation of Ganga's psychological problems, and as in Bhool Bhulaiaa, it doesn't really matter.  Saravanan's psychological approach seems to help, and so does the exorcism performed by the intimidating sage Ramachandra.  The psychiatrist and sage work well together, rather than arguing over whose worldview is correct.

The narrative is a bit more jumbled this time, though.  In addition to the evil contractors who appear in the opening and are never seen again, Akhilandeswari has an ill-defined evil scheme which never goes anywhere, though it does lead to a fight between Saravanan and her personal servant Oomaiyan (a shirtless Sonu Sood.)  Even the computer generated snake gets a lot of buildup but never interacts with any human characters and then just leaves.  

But ultimately it all comes down to the cast.  Rajnikanth displays his usual swaggering charm, but Jyothika steals the entire movie, effortlessly switching between charming as Ganga and chewing all the scenery as Chandramukhi, within the same scene and sometimes within the same line.  Most of Rajnikanth's movies in this era were named after the character he played.  Chandramukhi is an exception, and Jyothika earns it.

Bhooty Call: Tooth Pari

 The premise of Tooth Pari: When Love Bites (2023) sounds like the opening to a terrible joke: a vampire with a broken tooth falls in love with a dentist with a fear of blood.  However, while the series is billed as a horror-comedy, and it is indeed quite funny at times, it takes its world and especially its central relationship completely seriously.  That makes all the difference.

Kolkata is divided into two different worlds.  Humans live in Upar, or "Above," and go about their ordinary lives in an entirely ordinary way.  They don't know about Neeche, or "Below," an underground complex that is home to a clan of thirty vampires, led by Ora (Anish Ralikar), but watched over by AD (Adil Hussain), a human who cares for the vampires' needs and enforces the rules as part of an ancient agreement between the clan and his family.

The rules are simple.  Vampires don't go to Upar.  If they do, they don't drink blood, they don't kill anyone, and they definitely don't convert any new vampires.  In return, the vampires can enjoy all the comforts of Neeche, and they are provided with blood from the local blood bank and protection form the Cutmundus, a secret society of elderly but dangerous vampire hunters led by the powerful witch Luna Luka (Revathi).

The youngest member of the clan, Rumi (Tanya Maniktala), feel suffocated by all the rules.  She makes frequent, secret trips to Upar with the help of two of her elders, classical dancer Meera (Tillotama Shome) and former revolutionary and current namedropper David (Saswata Chatterjee).  Rumi is careful; she targets lonely single men and men trying to cheat on their wives, bites gently, takes a little blood and brings back a few vials of the fresh stuff for her friends down below.  She also hypnotizes them so all they remember is a failed romantic encounter.  What's the harm?

And then Rumi bites the wrong neck, drinking a little too deeply and leaving her tooth behind.  Fortunately, there's a dentist nearby who works late hours.  Bikram Roy (Shantanu Maheshwari) is not a great dentist, thanks to the aforementioned fear of blood, but it is the family business, so he does his best, though he'd rather be cooking for his secret YouTube channel, "The Anonymous Chef."  Rumi meets Roy, they get along well, and since he needs her original tooth to make repairs, they keep meeting.  part of the attraction is blood, admittedly; during their first meeting he accidentally cut his finger and a drop fell into her open mouth, accidentally revealing that Roy is a virgin and his blood tastes amazing.  But it's not just the special blood.  Rumi has had a hard life, and Doc Roy is a genuinely kind person, so she can't help but be drawn to him.  Surely this innocent flirtation won't trigger a chain of events that threatens to reveal the existence of Neeche and set Kolkata on fire, right?

And then there's Sub-Inspector Kartik Pal (Sikander Kher), and his father Biren (Anjan Dutt).  Biren was also a policeman but now suffers from Alzheimers and won't stop talking about the vampires he fought on one terrible night decades ago.  Biren's reputation has stalled Kartik's career, so he drinks a lot and is assigned all the worst cases, including a man who claims to have been bitten by a "beautiful ghost" at a party.  While investigating that case, Kartik meets a beautiful girl named Rumi, and steps on some sort of animal's tooth, cutting his foot badly.

The love story plays out in fairly typical Bollywood fashion; Roy and Rumi grow closer, learning to trust and rely on one another, but she's keeping a big secret and he finds out about it from the wrong person, and he doesn't take it well.  Thanks in part to his overbearing parents, Roy is so insecure that he can't really accept that Rumi loves him for him, so when he finds out that she's secretly a bloodsucking creature of the night, he assumes that she's only after his blood, and goes too far in his efforts to confirm his suspicions.

Meanwhile, AD has realized that someone is visiting Upar and wants to crack down, Luna has reunited the Cutmundus and kills a vampire in Roy's office, and Kartik is limping around the fringes, getting closer and closer to proving his suspicion that Roy is an evil vampire who has ensnared innocent Rumi with his spooky vampire powers.

 It's a lot of plot spread over eight episodes, and the series takes its time, wrapping things up in the last episode only to introduce a handful of new and surprising plot threads out of nowhere, clearly setting up a second season.  Still, the leads are charming, Luna is an engaging villain, and the series always made me care enough to watch the next episode.

Bhooty Call: Hotel

 Hotel (1981) has a lot of Ramsays in the credits, and there's a reason for that.  This is a product of the infamous Ramsay family, who spearheaded the Indian horror renaissance in the 1970s and 80s.  The Ramsay films were famously low budget, capitalizing on gore and exploitation in order to bring in audiences, but Hotel is surprisingly high minded, despite the horde of vengeful zombies at the end.

When wealthy businessman Suraj (Navin Nischol) arrives at his new hotel, built on a scenic mountainside, he's greeted by his old friend and business partner Vijay (Rakesh Roshan), along with an assortment of people who helped make the hotel happen.  The most notable folks are real estate developer Chhaganlal Patel (Ranjeet Bedi) and his secretary Shabho (Prema Narayan), respected lawyer Kapoor (Pinchoo Kapoor), and Suraj's own assistant Lalwani (Sudhir).  Most of the early guests are comic relief stock characters, but then there's Sushma (Neelam Mehra), Suraj's great lost love, now married to the elderly and abusive Girdharilal (Narendranath Malhotra).  Vijay, meanwhile, has fallen for Vandana (Bindiya Goswami), a simple village girl who used to deliver ice to the hotel before Vijay promoted her to head cook.  

So, a varied cast of characters, all gathered in the same secluded location.  It's a great setup for a suspenseful horror movie, as spooky things begin to happen, and Vijay and Suraj inch closer to discovering the awful truth: the hotel is built on top of a cemetery, and Patel and his cronies swindled the local priest, Father Benevolent (Krishnakant) out of the land with the help of the priest's appropriately named assistant Judas (Prem Bedi).  

There's also the question of what happened to Vijay's brother Sanjay (Premkishen malhotra doing his best Rishi Kapoor impression), a free spirited musician who Suraj sent to check out the construction.  Did Patel and the others murder Sanjay because he found out about the land scam?  Yes.  I'm not particularly worried about spoilers, because by the time Vijay and Suraj start looking for Sanjay, it isn't a spoiler.  

Our heroes may not know what happened to Sanjay, but the audience does, because nearly the entire first half of the movie follows Patel as he makes crooked deals, corrupting nearly everyone around him by offering them money and pointing out that he has a pretty secretary.  Suraj doesn't show up at the hotel until the movie is halfway over, and it takes even longer for the first ghost to show up.

That's not the whole problem with the movie, but it does lead into the larger problem: there's absolutely now suspense.  Unlike a lot of vengeful Indian movie ghosts, these spirits are very careful to target only the guilty, and the audience knows who the guilty parties are, so they know who's going to die and can make a decent guess about the order.

That leaves the love stories.  Suraj's love for Sushma is heartfelt and tragic, but once Girdharilal gets Cask of Amantilladoed there's really only one way it can end.  Vijay's pursuit of Vandana is an HR nightmare.  And the interminable comic relief track involving legendary comedian Mehmood drinking a love potion intended for his wife and chasing a Bollywood producer around the hotel is both deeply unfunny and reliant on nasty stereotypes.  

Watching Patel show off his corruption skills is at least interesting, the disco number is fun, and when Hotel remembers that it's a horror movie it's fine, but there's so much filler, and because the backstory is told up front as story rather than filled in with flashbacks as the movie goes along, the pace is seriously off.  It turns out the true terror is a lack of story structure.

A circus with bite.

 Vampire Circus (1972) is a movie that delivers on its promises: there is a circus, and there are multiple vampires.  However, if the title makes you think that this will be a lighthearted campy romp, think again; these vampires are specifically targeting children, and this movie gets dark.

Children have been vanishing from the village of Stetl, and village schoolmaster Albert Muller (Laurence Payne) is horrified to discover why.  His own wife Anna (Domini Blythe) has been luring the children through the woods and into the nearby castle, where Count Mitterhouse (Robert Tayman) feeds on them.  There's no real explanation given for why Anna is doing this; she just seems to be really into Count Mitterhouse, so much so that she spends most of her screentime naked.

Muller is a poor teacher from a poor village, so he has limited options, but you don't have to be rich and powerful to lead an angry mob, so Muller leads an angry mob to the castle.  There's a fight, many men die, but in the end Muller manages to stake the vampire, though not before he has a chance to curse the villagers, swearing that their children will die to bring him back from the grave.  The other villagers want to punish Anna for being an enthusiastic accessory to child murder, but Muller asks them to let her go.  This is a mistake; she runs back into the castle, where the Count revives just long enough to send her to his cousin Emil (Anthony Higgins) at the Circus of Night.

Fifteen years later, Stetl is in the grips of a mysterious plague.  People are dying in droves, and the neighboring communities have placed armed men at roadblocks surrounding the village, threatening to shoot anyone who tries to pass.  The influential men of the village gather to debate the cause of the plague and what can be done about it.  Some think it's the work of Count Mitterhouse and his curse, while others, particularly recently arrived Doctor Kersh (Richard Owens) believe it's a disease, and what the town needs is medicine.  And surprisingly, given that this is a vampire movie, we eventually learn that Kersh is right.  It's just a disease which responds to conventional treatment.  Of course, at that point in the movie, Stetl has other things to worry about.

Kersh breaks through the barricade with the help of his teenage son Anton (John Moulder-Brown.)  Anton asks his father to find Muller's daughter Dora (Lynne Fredrick) in the capital and urge her to stay where she is and not try to return to Stetl, because Anton is the only person in the movie with any sense.

Meanwhile the village has visitors!  The Night Circus has arrived, lead by a mysterious and apparently Romani woman (Adrienne Coeri.)  The villagers call her by a different name, but I am just going to call her Anna, because she is in fact Anna.  (It's possible that no one recognizes her with clothes on, but perhaps the fact that she's played by a different actress now has more to do with it.)  It's a small circus, but it hits most of the bases, with animals, a clown (Skip Martin), a strongman (David Prowse), and twin acrobats Helga (Lalla Ward) and Heinrich (Robin Sachs).  They are creepy as hell, but it's not like the quarantined villagers have anything better to do, so every night the show is packed.

And then things start to happen.  Dora shows up in the village, much to Anton's dismay; he loves her, but he would really rather she was somewhere less doomed.  The mayor's daughter Rosa (Christina Paul) is captivated by the show's black panther, particularly when the panther turns into Emil.  The mayor himself (Thorley Walters) collapses after a terrifying vision in the hall of mirrors.  And children start to vanish, because this is in fact a vampire circus.

We are not dealing with the cream of the vampire crop here - Mitterhouse may be a Count with his own castle, but he's also a doofus with bad hair who hangs out in his basement waiting for his girlfriend to bring him children.  Emil has the cool "turn into a panther" power, but he spends half the time lounging in his cage and the other half looking like he's late for Godspell rehearsals.  And Helga and Heinrich . . . well, they're pretty great actually, but they are evil henchmen and spend their time henching evilly.

On the other hand, the villagers are just villagers, without a Dutch vampire hunting scholar or cowboy to be seen.  Anton is brave and sensible and the closest thing the movie has to a hero, but he's just a kid and there's only so much he can do. In the end it's vampires versus villagers, and while most of the village is wiped out by the end of the movie, all of the vampires are destroyed.  Angry mob wins on a technicality.

Bela Lugosi's Dad.

1943's Return of the Vampire was a spiritual sequel to Tod Browning's Dracula, bringing Bela Lugosi back to play a legally distinct version of the vampire who made him famous.  Dracula's Daughter (1936), on the other hand, is the direct sequel to Browning's film, and begins just as the previous film ended, with two comic policemen discovering Renfield's body sprawled across a street in Whitby.  Soon after they find Von Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) and the body of Dracula (a wax dummy), and Von Helsing is arrested, which means that both films revolve around characters being investigated for the murder of Bela Lugosi.

(And that's not a typo - it is Von Helsing in this movie, rather than Van Helsing.  Apparently the good professor changed his name between movies.)

Von Helsing proudly admits to driving a stake through Dracula's heart, but explains that it can't be murder when Dracula has been dead for centuries.  The police are skeptical, but Von Helsing refuses an attorney, instead asking for Jeffrey Garth (Otto Kruger), a psychologist and former student, as he believes that Garth is the only man in London who could possibly understand what happened.  There's no mention of contacting any of the surviving characters from the previous movie, though Von Helsing should know by now that ignoring Mina is always a mistake.

As it happens, Garth is not in London.  He's on a hunting trip to Scotland complaining bitterly about the women in his life when he's interrupted by his secretary Janet Blake (Marguerite Churchill), who's come up from London to fetch him.  Garth and Janet bicker on the way home.  They're clearly supposed to have a light-hearted and flirtatious relationship straight out of a screwball comedy, but it doesn't really land; Garth comes across as a sexist jerk, while Janet plays silly and sometimes mean-spirited pranks on him.

Meanwhile, Von Helsing's Dracula problem solves itself, as the Count's body vanishes form police custody.  No, Dracula has not risen from the grave; the body was taken by Dracula's daughter, the Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden) and her manservant Sandor (Irving Pichel.)  Marya hopes that destroying the Count's body will free her from the curse of vampirism and burns the body on a pyre, but Sandor is pessimistic, telling her that all he sees in her eyes is death.

Marya begins the next night still hopeful, proclaiming that "I can live a normal life now, think normal things.  Even play normal music." But Sandor is correct, as a heartbroken Marya realizes when the lullaby she's playing on the piano turns dark and spooky.  She resumes the hunt.

All murder and no play makes Marya a dull girl, though, so she also mingles with high society, and at a party she runs into Garth, who is expounding on psychological treatments for addiction and obsessive thoughts.  She's fascinated and even hopeful, and makes an arrangement to meet Garth the next night, while Janet and Sandor glower in the background.  

That night Marya tells a piece of her story, talking about dark thoughts and influences brought on by a dead man, and Garth suggests that she try confronting her cravings rather than hiding from them.  Marya takes his advice, and goes to her studio to paint.  Sandor collects a young woman named Lili (Nan Grey) on the street, dragging her to the studio to serve as a model, and Lili relaxes when she sees the Countess, despite the multitude of red flags raised by the situation.  Marya tries, she really does, but in the end she cannot resist and attacks Lili.

The young woman survives and is brought to the hospital where Garth works, suffering from anemia and amnesia.  Garth tries to treat her with hypnotism, but Lili dies after revealing just enough information that Garth realizes it was Marya who attacked her.  After Von Helsing explains things in very small words, Garth realizes that Marya is a vampire.  Marya, in turn, decides that there is no cure for her condition, and plans to go back to Transylvania with Garth; when he refuses she and Sandor kidnap Janet and take her to the old country, thus forcing Garth to follow.

Dracula's daughter is probably best known today for lesbian subtext, and there is definitely subtext.  Marya talks about Garth as her potential consort and companion through eternity, but she does not look at Garth like she looks at Lili and especially Janet; there's a long lingering shot of Marya slowly leaning in to a mesmerized Janet, a long prelude to a kiss that never happens thanks to Garth's sudden arrival.  And the movie is about a woman struggling to overcome or at least conceal her true nature so that she can live like everybody else, though that particular metaphor shatters when you remember that her true nature is "undead monster who must kill to live."  It's tangled and complex, making this a movie that people can and do write papers about.

Marya is also an early cinematic example of the angsty and reluctant vampire, more Louis than Lestat.  It's certainly a compelling performance; Holden's magnetic eyes draw the viewer in, inviting the viewer to sympathize with the monster.  

That said I still have questions about the "daughter" part.  According to Von Helsing, Marya's barely over a century old, while Dracula is well over five hundred.  is she supposed to be his biological daughter, or daughter in the sense of "vampiric offspring?"  Or both?  Either way, she certainly isn't shy about moving into Castle Dracula.

It was a graveyard smash.

 Naangam Pirai (2013) , also known as Dracula 2012, hints at an intriguing premise; what if Dracula traveled to India, and had to navigate an entirely different supernatural world while quenching his blood thirst.  That was the premise of Hammer Studio's Kali, Devil Bride of Dracula, which was never filmed but later was released as an audio drama, The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula.  Naangam Pirai, on the other hand, flirts lightly with that premise but instead answers an entirely different question:  What if we remade 1992's Bram Stoker's Dracula, only set in India and with a budget of thirty five dollars?

 

Roy Thomas (Sudheer Sukumaran) and his new wife Lucy (Priya Nambiar) are traveling to London for their honeymoon, but at Roy's insistence they spend a few days at Bran Castle in Romania.  Roy has always been fascinated by the legend of Count Dracula, and he hopes to find his way into the sealed room in the basement where, as everybody knows, Dracula was entombed after being defeated by the Romanian Bishops.  Before making the attempt, though, he calls his guru, the pandit Suryyamoorthy (Nassar) to confirm that Indian spiritual practices can invoke foreign spirits.  Suryamoorthy says yes, and does not ask any follow up questions, which in retrospect was a poor decision.

Roy finds his way into the secret room in the basement, because security at the castle consists of one guy stationed outside.  he succeeds in contacting Dracula's spirit, and Dracula explains, in English, that he needs to possess a dead body in order to walk freely through the world.  The door opens, and Dracula enters in the form of a genuinely terrible CGI demon bat thing.  Said demon bat thing slooowly kills Roy, over the course of an entire day, while Lucy and the police search the castle.  Then Lucy goes back to the hotel to take a bath, and Dracula, now in Roy's body, shows up to bite her.

Back in India, Roy's brother, a policeman named Benny (Krishna) and the rest of the family are worrying about Roy and Lucy, who have vanished without a word.  Meanwhile, Raju (Aryan) delivers a set of long boxes filled with dirt to the mansion of one Doctor William D'Souza.  D'Souza is strange (and is also Roy.Dracula using an alias), but Raju is easily impressed, especially after D'Souza saves him from a pack of wild dogs and invites him to stay overnight.  And D'Souza is absolutely fascinated when he spots a picture of Raju's fiance Meena (Monal Gajjar), who is, of course, the reincarnation of the Princess of Transylvania, Dracula's long lost love.

Meena is Suryamoorthy's daughter, but the old pandit is away on a pilgrimage.  The real problem for Dracula is Meenat's sister Taara (Shraddha Das), who has sensed unspecified danger and is performing a ritual to keep her family safe.  Dracula uses Raju to gain an introduction to Taara, and asks her about the ritual.  She explains that once it's finished, the family will be safe from supernatural attack, which means that Taara is suddenly Dracula's first target.  He puts on his fightin' cape and interrupts the ritual.  Taara bravely defies him until he tears off her protective amulet, then she's immediately overcome by his hypnotic powers.

Meanwhile, Benny has been approached by the mysterious Doctor Paul Robinson (Rabhu), who explains the whole vampire business and steps into the Van Helsing role.  And when Suryamoorthy returns from his pilgrimage and learns what happened to his daughter, the stage is set for an epic battle of good versus evil.  or it would be, if the fearless vampire hunters weren't so incompetent.  They make too many mistakes to list here, most crucially, they know that Meena shouldn't be left alone at night.  Meena explains as clearly as she can that she shouldn't be left alone, because she can't resist Dracula when he's with her.  They promise Meena that they will not leave her alone.  Then they immediately leave her alone so that they can grab something from outside, only to be menaced by a swarm of easily avoided bats.  

Fortunately for Meena and the world, Dracula is also not very good at his job, which means that the fate of the world comes down to Raju and Dracula having a shirtless fist-fight in a cemetery.

 Nangaam Pirai has a low budget and it shows, especially in the Shaktimaan-level special effects.    And that's fine, even when they insist on bringing back the unconvincing demon bat thing over and over again.  The acting is . . . . not subtle, and that's fine, too.  A bit of scenery chewing can be fun sometimes, and good writing makes up for a lot.

And then there's the writing.  I don't generally like the "Mina is Dracula's reincarnated lost love" plotline, but it can absolutely work in an Indian context.  It does not work here, because the movie doesn't do anything with it.  It's an excuse for Dracula to go after Meena, but Dracula doesn't need an excuse to go after Meena.  He's a vampire!  It's what they do.

The real problem with the movie is that you can see occasional flashes of a better movie, which then get dropped.  Taara is set up as an intriguing foil for Dracula, then she immediately crumbles and becomes one of his brides.  Both the brides of Dracula have fleshed out characters and a real connection to the heroes, but they vanish for most of the movie.  Suryamoorthy musters all his spiritual strength and calls upon his Goddess, promising an epic supernatural climax, but nope, shirtless fist fight.  

Ignore the hints of a better movie, and Naangam Pirai is reasonably entertaining nonsense; for all its many flaws, it's not boring.  But if you try to take it seriously, it's a bit frustrating.

No, the one with Jack Palance.

Bram Stoker's Dracula (1974) opens just as the novel does, with solicitor Jonathon Harker (Murray Brown) visiting the Transylvanian estate of one Count Dracula (Jack Palance), who is interested in buying real estate in England.  Dracula is brusque, rude even, though he is intrigued when he glimpses a picture of Jonathon's fiance Mina (Penelope Horner), her good friend Lucy (Fiona Lewis), and Lucy's fiance Arthur (Simon Ward.)  Jonathon cheerfully tells Dracula where they all live, because Jonathon is an idiot.

This is a TV movie, though, so they don't have the time or budget for a carefully crafted mood o0f unease and Jonathon's slow descent into inescapable horror, so things move fairly quickly.  Dracula quickly tires of pretending to be human, so when he chases his vampire brides (Sarah Douglas, Virginia Wetherell, and Barbara Lindley), he isn't afraid to show the fangs.  He forces Jonathon to write a letter to his employer, finalizing the sale of the Carfax Estate, and another to Mina saying that he'll be traveling in Europe for a time.  Then Dracula leaves, and Jonathon tries to escape but is caught by Dracula's brides.  RIP Jonathon.

After a quick and atmospheric shot of the wreck of the Demeter, the scene shifts to Mina, arriving to visit an ailing Lucy.  No one knows why Lucy is wasting away, but Arthur has called in another doctor, one Abraham Van Helsing (Nigel Davenport) to help.  Van Helsing has a very surprising theory (it's vampires!) and he is of course completely correct, as events follow the general outline of the book, only on an accelerated timeline and with a smaller cast.  (There's no Renfield, and Lucy is stuck with the most boring of her suitors.  No cowboys here.)

But there is a twist, or at least it was a twist at the time.  This is the earliest example I can find of a Dracula motivated by the search for his reincarnated love.  (To be fair, Blacula got there first, but Blacula is not Dracula.)  This time the reincarnated love is Lucy, and it works much better than a Dracula pining for Mina.  Dracula transforms Lucy, but once she's destroyed he's furious, and only attacks Mina out of spite.

This is an angry Dracula in general.  Jack Palance is perhaps not the best choice for suave and seductive, but he's great at smoldering menace.  This is also the first movie I know of that explicitly makes Dracula the same person as Vlad Tepes, and he brags about his martial exploits.  he also gets a few tacked on action scenes, wading through faithful household servants and an entire hotel's worth of men who try to stand in his way.  

Columbia Pictures and Francis Ford Coppola actually purchased the rights to use the title "Bram Stoker's Dracula," so these days this movie is usually billed as "Dan Curtis's Dracula" or simply "Dracula."  If anything, it's "The Cliff Notes to Bram Stoker's Dracula," but Palance's performance makes up for a lot of literary sins.