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.

Bhooth Bangla

 

 There have been more vampires than usual in Bollywood lately, but Bhooth Bangla (2026) is not a vampire movie.  Sure, the villainous Vadhusur skulks in darkness, commands a literal army of bats, owns a castle that the protagonists inherit, and turns one of the comic relief characters into a knockoff Renfield, but he draws the line at drinking blood. Not a vampire, he just stole Orlok's look.

Meanwhile, Arjun (Akshay Kumar) has a problem.  His much younger sister Meera (Mithala Palkar) is engaged to the bland but handsome Rahul (Perin Malde), but Rahul's family astrologer keeps making more and more demands for the ceremony.  Meera has already had to marry a tree, and now Arjun is having trouble finding a wedding venue that will pass astrological muster.

And then a lawyer (Alexx O'Nell) shows up with some good news: Arjun and Meera's grandfather, Dushant Acharya (Rajesh Sharma) is dead!  The siblings didn't know that they had a grandfather, but he has died and left Meera a fortune and a palace in northern India.  The money's nice, but a palace is a wedding venue that they don't have to pay for, so Arjun leaves their London home and flies to India to check the place out.

When Arjun arrives he meets the palace caretaker, Shantaram (Asrani), who explains that the palace is haunted and cursed, complete with the requisite mysterious locked room that must never be opened under any circumstances.  In fact the entire village of Mangalpur is cursed, as the demon Vadhusur won't permit any brides in the area; he carries away newlywed women and kills any other members of the wedding party he can catch.  (Vadhusur has a complicated backstory to explain his actions; the short version is that he's half god, half demon, cast into darkness because of his mixed heritage, and his war against the gods ended when a divine nymph with lightning powers married him in order to get close enough to stab him.  vadhusur needs to sacrifice thirteen brides to bring him back to full life, and they have collected twelve so far.)

 Arjun doesn't really believe in the curse and it's a free venue, so the wedding is on, and wedding planner Jagdish (Paresh Rawal) arrives to get the palace into shape, bringing a small group of employees including his own nephew Balli (Rajpal Yadav.)  And then mildly spooky stuff starts to happen, but the first half of the film is largely devoted to the comedy part of horror comedy, and far too many of the gags involve Arjun hitting Balli or Jagdish repeatedly burning his backside in a series of improbable accidents.  

Probably the most important thing that happens in this part of the film is that Arjun is electrocuted in another improbable  accident and revived by Priya (Wamiqa Gabbi), a writer who happened to be passing by while researching local legends.  Except that Priya is actually trying to find her missing twin sister Chitra, who vanished on the way to her wedding.  Arjun and Priya hit it off, and she promises to return in time for the wedding.  And the next day he spots Priya, dressed in a sari, and she seems surprised that he can see her.  The flirting intensifies.

The haunting also intensifies, and even Arjun has to admit that something's wrong, especially when a friendly monk who was visiting to check the palace for soirits is killed in by flying debris during a sudden storm. Arjun finally manages ton get in touch with his father  Vasudev (Jisshu Sengupta), who tells him all about the curse.  Arjun tries to cancel the wedding, but Meera arrives, accompanied by Rahul's family.  Rather than explain things to his sister, Arjun decides that the wedding is back on, leading to further shenanigans as he tries to keep his sister's wedding on track while protecting everyone from the ghost.  

 There are some obvious similarities to the Bhool Bhulaiyaa series, including the haunted palace, the forbidden room, and most of the cast.  There are some significant differences, though; the plot is drawn more from old Ramsay Brothers movies than the pure ghost stories you see in the Bhools Bhulaiyaa, and the balance of horror and comedy is different, with incredibly broad physical comedy in the first half followed by some genuinely effective action scenes and real scary moments in the second half.  I kind of get why; the supporting cast are veteran comedians and they are given a chance to trot out some of their classic material, but I just don't find hitting Rajpal Yadav very funny, and it makes Arjun come across as really unlikable.  

The movie picks up considerably when it stops being a comedy, and the scene of Arjun menaced by Vadhusur, with light as his only weapon, is genuinely well done.  And while the plot is very predictable, it's also well crafted and holds together well.  For me movie's real flaw is that Tabu is really underused; she makes a cameo appearance in an extended flashback, and she is always wonderful.  I would have liked more.

 

 

"The Beatles," now in cartoon form.

 

 In 1965 ABC premiered an exciting new cartoon based on pop culture sensation "The Beatles," and it probably seemed like a good idea at the time.  Each episode of The Beatles featured two stories named after Beatles songs, padded out with additional skits and sing-alongs.  And while the show managed to run for thirty nine episodes, we are only looking at the first one, because I am not emotionally prepared to watch the entire series.

The first story, "I Want To Hold Your Hand," opens with the band rehearsing for a gig in Transylvania.  It's difficult, though, because even in Transylvania the Beatles can't go anywhere without running into hordes of adoring fans.  Ringo has a bright idea: they can rehearse in the spooky abandoned castle just outside of town!  They do, but the castle isn't actually abandoned, it's home to a large selection of monsters, including a ghost, an executioner, a witch, the Wolfman, Dracula, and Frankenstein's Monster.  (The Monster does at least attempt a Boris Karloff impression, though it sounds more like Bobby Pickett.) 

And the monsters chase the Beatles through the castle in a sequence which I would swear was lifted from Scooby-Doo, except that the first episode of "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!" didn't premiere until 1969.

Finally the monsters reveal that they actually like the music, so the Beatles perform "I Want to Hold Your Hand" for them and then turn green and collapse.  Did they die?  Probably not, because this is just the first episode, but it sort of seems like that. 

The second story takes place on a cruise ship.  The Beatles try to escape their legion of adoring fans, and wind up stealing a yellow submarine and diving under the sea to an octopus's garden in the shade, where they meet an overly affectionate lady octopus.  To escape they perform "I Want to Hold Your Hand," because "Octopus's Garden" hadn't been written yet.

As a cartoon, this is not very good.  The animation is cheap, the writing relies on tired jokes and sub-Ruth Plumly Thompson-tier puns, and the plots are only there to string the songs together.  (The songs are actually good, obviously.)  The cartoon attempts to emulate the quick cuts and frenetic pacing of A Hard Day's Night and Help!, but the episodes are so short that there's nothing to latch onto, and the stories wind up emulating the worst aspects of Help! with several episodes in which the band travel to faraway places and meet ethnic stereotypes.

 As a Beatles product, it's even worse.  The band do not provide their voices, obviously; all of the voices are provided by Paul Frees, Lance Percival, Julie Bennett, and Carol Corbett, and the band just don't sound like themselves; Percival's Ringo does at least sound like a Ringo Starr impression.  Ringo is also treated very much as the dumb one, while John is the smart one and therefore treated as a bossy martinet.  If it weren't for the songs and the haircuts, you wouldn't be able to tell that this was supposed to be about the Beatles at all.

 In short, this cartoon does not treat the concept of "The Beatles Meet Dracula" with the respect it deserves.  

 

Stupid Zombie Hitler.

 

 

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.

 

 

Just hosting a picture or two.. Don't mind me.

 

Chandra the Vampire Slayer

 

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As the title implies Lokah Chapter One: Chandra (2025) is the start of yet another cinematic universe, combining superhero trappings with Malayalam folklore and myth.  That means that there are mid- and post-credit scenes to set up future entries in the series, as well as an extended cameo form the protagonist of the next planned movie, but that's the future, and I am just looking at the movie in front of me.

 The movie features a Bond-style cold open, with Chandra (Kalyani Priyadarshan) stealing an unknown but important item and then fighting an assassin working for an organization called Ishtar.  (This is the last time that Ishtar will be mentioned in this movie.)   Chandra wins, and after an animated credit sequence showing her adventuring through various places and time periods, she arrives in an unnamed Indian city which looks an awful lot like Bengalaru, where her contact Prakash (Nishanth Sagar) instructs here to lie low and rest for a while.  And Chandra does exactly that.  She loves in a small apartment, works nights as a waitress, and spends her spare time reading a book called "They Live Among Us," a supposedly comprehensive look at the supernatural world.

And then there are the neighbors.  Sunny (Naslen) lives across the street.  He's unemployed and spends his time hanging out with his friends Venu (Chandu Salim Kumar) and Naijil (Arun Kurian).  The trio seem to live in an entirely different genre than Chandra; "three layabout guys have misadventures" is practicially iots own subgenre in Indian cinema.  Sunny catches a glimpse of Chandra and is immediately smitten, but he doesn't get a chance to talk to her until they wind up in the same autorickshaw.  Sunny finally manages to start a conversation, and winds up inviting Chandra to Naijil's birthday party.

While Chandra is trying her best to lay low, she can't stand by while well-connected thug Sundari (Viahnu Priya Thoppil) threatens one of her coworkers with acid.  She smashes the acid flask in his hand and quickly knocks him unconscious.  Unfortunately, Sundari is the younger brother of Gajendran (Shivajith), a local politician who also runs the city's organ trafficking ring.  Gajendran hands the case over to Nachiyappa (sandy), a corrupt and deeply misogynistic police officer.  

The birthday party goes well (apart from a visit by Nachiyappa, looking for illegal drugs), and Sunny strikes up an odd friendship with Chandra.  There is something strange about her, though - she only goes out at night, Sunny's cat is terrified of her, and the sight of blood makes her visibly uncomfortable.  Also she doesn't seem to eat and she never drinks . . . wine.  After Chandra is ambushed by Sundari and a group of organ traffickers, Sunny tries to rush to the rescue, only to watch in horror as she grows fangs and bites throats, then asks him to help dispose of the bodies.  

 Chandra finally admits the truth - she's a yaksha, which for the purposes of this movie means she's a big ol' vampire.  Actually she's a specific yaksha, Kalliyankattu Neeli,  whom some fear as a monster and others worship as a goddess.  Sunny is sworn to secrecy, and this might be sounding a bit like Thamma.  The tone is pretty different, though - Thamma is a part of the Maddock Horror Comedy Universe, and it shows.  Chandra is funny at times, but the overall tone is darker.  Chandra defends the oppressed, but she's still dangerous, and Sunny knows that.

And things get worse.  Nachiyappa realizes that Chandra is responsible for Sundari's death.  There's fight, Nachiyappa is bitten, Sunny is shot, and everybody  runs away.  Sunny and Chandra are labelled as terrorists, the police get closer and closer, and Chandra's old friend Michael (Tovino Thomas), a Chathan (though the subtitles call him a goblin) has to temporarily save the day with his mastery of illusions before running off to star in the next movie.  And Nachiyappa is starting to change . . .

 There is a lot going on in Chandra; it feels less like a movie than an entire season of a supernatural action series crammed into two and a half hours.  The pacing isn't the only thing that's uneven; Michael's scenes represent a noticeable shift in tone, which goes away at the same time he does.  On the other hand, there's a lot to like here.  Vampires/yakshas as a metaphor for the underprivileged fighting back is interesting, and Kalyani Priyadarshan is a strong lead.  The film looks great - the city has a fantastic neon noir style, and the action scenes are frequent and elaborate, but it's still easy to see what is going on.  And I like how different this is from the Maddock movies - there's room in the cinema for different takes on Gothic heroism.

My Brother the Car

 

 Kutti Pisasu (2010) looks like a bit of a mess, a confusing blend of genres which includes vengeful ghosts, transforming robots, a spunky kid, a tiny evil guru, and the Invisible Man, all with Shaktimaan-level special effects.  But there's more to this movie than meets the eye: this is a devotional movie, and the end result is something like "Devi Maa meets Transformers."

Gayathri (Sangeetha) and Pichumani (Ramji) are a happily married Brahmin couple with a very nice house which they share with their precocious daughter Priya (Baby Geethika) and Gayatri's pandit father (Delhi Ganesh).  Priya is about five, but she's such a talented dancer that she gets to star in a big televised dance number, and this has no bearing on the plot whatsoever.  The art contest she won at school is a bit more impactful, as her teacher and classmates are all impressed by the yellow antique car she claims to have drawn without noticing.

Priya is slightly odd in other ways as well - when her grandfather asks her about favorite family members, she mentions a dark brother who only appears in her dreams, and she keeps repeating things that Gayatri's deceased friend Savithri (Kaveri) used to say.  And sure enough, on a dark and stormy night Priya is possessed by Savithri's spirit.

Surprisingly, that is a good thing.  Savithri's family have been protected by the Goddess Kali (Ramya Krishnan) for the past two hundred years, after an ancestor asked the Goddess for a boon, and while Kali clearly enjoys her work, she still takes it very seriously.  So what happened to Savithri?  A flashback eventually explains.

 Five years ago Savithri lived with her brother Karuppu (Ganja Karuppu).  She was absolutely devoted to her friend Gayatri, and for some reason as also engaged to scuzzy biker Nanjappan (Riyaz Khan.)  Nanjappan and his friends like to hang out in an apparently haunted mansion which is also a cave, and that's where they are reunited with old friend Mandhira Moorthy (Shafi), who is now a powerful magician.  Moorthy has a plan to attain the power of a god, but it requires a virgin sacrifice, and Nanjappan is happy to volunteer his fiance.  Kali appears to Karuppu and delivers a vague warning, but Karuppu refuses to interfere with his sister's wedding plans and tells the mystery woman to go away, which means that the Goddess is powerless to help.

The ritual is scheduled to take place on the same day that Gayatri goes into labor, and after dropping the mother to be off at the hospital, Karuppu goes to fetch his sister, only to discover that she's been abducted and taken to the haunted house.  He reaches the house and manages to spoil the ceremony, but dies alongside his sister, and the vengeful magician binds his soul to his car, chaining the vehicle to prevent him form taking automotive vengeance.  (Moorthy may have seen Taarzan the Wonder Car and decided to play it safe.)  

Five years later, Kali destroys the chains binding the car, and Savithri takes possession of Priya, because it is time for vengeance.  And so they take vengeance!  On Saturday one of Nanjappan's friends is ambushed down at the docks by an old yellow car which transforms into . . . well, it transforms into Bumblebee from Transformers.  Priya shows up to join in the fight, and the fire-breathing five year old delivers the coup de grâce.  Priya returns home and darkly warns that someone killed on a Saturday will be joined by someone else on the next Saturday.  And sure enough, on the next Saturday another of Nanjappan's friends is killed at an empty circus, and the security footage shows Nanjappan performing the deed.  He's arrested.

Priya/Savithri convinces Gayatri to let her continue her vengeance, but asks her to swear not to tell anyone, which I am sure will not cause any problems down the line.  Mandhira Moorthy returns and breaks Nanjappan out of prison, then sends his tiny Nepalese guru Kullumani (Kadhal Dhandapani) to impersonate Priya and convince Gayatri to tell the spirit of her friend to go.  Bad things happen, and soon it's clear that Kali will have to personally intervene; it may be what She was planning all along anyway.

I do not have the space to explain just how bonkers this movie gets, and just how bad the special effects are.  Still, the presence of Kali really ties everything together, and the Goddess is so powerful that pretty much everything can be explained.  Ramya Krishnan obviously having a fantastic time, and her performance drives the movie, which is just as well because the apparent lead, Baby Geethika, is a child who was probably cast for her dance skills rather than her acting.

Merry Monster Mash: Thamma

 It was bound to happen sooner or later.  The Maddock Horror Comedy Universe has been dropping hints about vampires for a few movies now, and the bloodsuckers arrive in force with Thamma (2025), bringing us that much closer to Bollywood's own House of Frankenstein, though perhaps not Abbot and Costello Meet Stree.

This is Bollywood not Hollywood, and like the other Maddock movies the film mixes movie monster mythology with ancient Indian legend; strictly speaking these are Betaals rather than vampires, created to protect the world by drinking the spilled blood of the demon Raktabīja.  We first see the Betaals in action as they feast on the armies of Alexander the Great, but by the present day they appear to be confined to a stretch of forest in northern India, and bound by a strict code that forbids the drinking of human blood.  Not every Betaal is happy with this arrangement.  In particular, Yakshasan (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), the sire and leader (or Thamma) of this sect believes that they should grow their forces and use their power to take over the world.  He is confined to a cave and bound by mystical chains until one of his descendants breaks the law and sires another Betaal, though, so it should be fine.

Mild-mannered journalist Alok Goyal (Ayushmann Khurrana) is not fine.  His attempt to create a viral  video clip has gone viral for all the wrong reasons, so he's gone camping with some colleagues deep in a secluded stretch of forest in northern India.  His selfie is photobombed by an enormous and angry bear, and he is chased through the woods by said bear, finally collapsing in a makeshift center, so he doesn't notice when something tosses the bear away and rescues him.

 When Alok wakes up, he's being tended by the beautiful but mysterious Tadaka (Rashmika Mandanna).  She promises to take him home when he's recovered from his bear-inflicted injuries, and that gives them plenty of time to fall in love, though every time Alok tries to kiss the girl, she vanishes.  (Mostly because she doesn't want to be tempted to drink his blood; Tadaka is obviously a Betaal, and the movie doesn't try to hide that fact.)  Tadaka is not supposed to keep humans in Betaal territory, though, so they are captured and brought to answer for their crimes.  They escape, and Alok convinces her to return to Delhi with him, because it's time for some fish out of water comedy.

Alok was declared dead after he went missing in the forest, and while his mother Sudha (Geeta Agarwal Sharma) is just happy to see him, his father Ram Bajaj (Paresh Rawal) is suspicious, especially because this striking woman appears to be interested in his son.  The comedy gets more complicated when a group of Betaals are sent from the forest to bring Tadaka back, Tadaka reveals her true nature to Alok while defending him and herself from a gang of rowdies, and Police Inspector P. K. Yadav (Faisal Malik), assigned to investigate the fallen rowdies, turns out to be a member of an urban faction of Betaals. Yadav insists that Tadaka go home.  She does, Alok follows, and after a fatal car crash Tadaka has to make a choice.  She chooses to save Alok by turning him into a Betaal, and then things get really complicated.

 Thamma is deeply rooted in the Maddock Horror Comedy Universe; Alok's father consults with Elvis Karim Prabhakar (Sathyaraj), the faith healer and exorcist from Munjya, and series stalwart Jana (Abhishek Banerjee) is also consulting with Prabhakar on a werewolf-related problem, leading to a cameo by Varun Dhawan and a completely gratuitous "Wolfman vs. Dracula" clash.  

On the other hand, this is a slightly different genre than the other Maddock movies.  They were all intensely personal hauntings that happened to resonate with particular social issues, while this is a story of star-crossed lovers set against a background of grand vampire politics.  Thamma is funny, but it's romantic-comedy funny rather than comedy-comedy funny.

Still, Thamma hits the necessary romantic beats, giving Tadaka a bit more agency than the usual star-crossed heroine while letting Alok display the appropriate dogged determination.  The movie has a great cast and some interesting world-building, and it sets up big things for the future of the franchise while still delivering a satisfying and self-contained story.

Merry Monster Mash: Veerana

 Veerana (1988) is billed as a vampire movie, and there is certainly a blood-drinking creature of the night who leans heavily into vampire tropes, but this is also a partial remake of the 1983 American horror movie Mausoleum, and that's just the start; this movie is a rich stew of cultural influences, mixed together with a bit of gore, annoying comic relief, and as much sex as the filmmakers could get past the censors.

The movie was written and directed by the Ramsay Brothers, and every good Ramsay movie needs a curse.   This time heroic Thakur Mahendra Pratap (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) and his brother Sameer (Vijayendra Ghatge) discover that something is preying on the villagers and drinking their blood, so Sameer goes out looking for the creature responsible, armed only with a jeweled Om given to him by his brother.  While driving through the woods he's approached by a mysterious woman (Kamal Roy) with a bat pendant and fantastic hair, and she invites him back to her haveli.  After chatting for a while, Sameer decides to take a bath, and the woman invites herself along, but at the last minute he snatches the bat pendant and she transforms into the hideous witch Nakita.  Sameer subdues her with the Om and takes her to the village, where the villagers hang the witch and seal her in a coffin.

What they don't know is that Nakita has help.  Baba (Rajesh Vivek) is an evil wizard who lives in an underground lair decorated like the cover of the 1978 AD&D Player's Handbook, assisted by a cabal of black-robed monks straight from a classic Italian horror movie and a silent circle of rock-headed guys who wandered onto the set from a Hercules movie.  Baba retrieves Nakita's coffin and vows vengeance.  Soon he gets his chance when Sameer is driving Thakur's daughter Jasmine (Vaishani Mahant) back to her boarding school.  the car breaks down and Sameer wanders off to find water for the radiator, giving Baba the opportunity to hypnotize Jasmine and take her back to his lair, where he performs a ritual to bind Nakita's soul to the girl.  Sameer follows them to the lair, but he is quickly overcome by the evil monks.

Baba brings Jasmine back to her home and explains that the car met with an accident and Sameer died.  A grateful Thakur offers Baba a job in the house as a creepy servant, and strange things start to happen, because this is now The Omen.  Jasmine occasionally acts very strange, and she's oddly hostile to Sameer's widow Preeti (Rama Vij).  Things escalate, and when Preeti mysteriously dies (not that mysterious, since she was alone with Jasmine and screaming "she's going to kill me" at the time) Thakur sends Sameer and Preeti's daughter Sahila to stay with her grandmother in Bombay.  

 Time passes - twelve years, to be exact.  Sahila (Sahila Chaddha) has passed her exams, and Thakur invites her to visit and celebrate.  She makes her way back to the village, accompanied by her cousin Hitchcock (Satish Shah), an aspiring horror filmmaker.  They are waylaid along the way by a large henchman (Gorilla - that is the actor's screen name) sent by Baba, but fortunately they are rescued by Tarzan.  Well, they are rescued by Hemant (Hemant Birje), but the script makes sure to remind the viewer that Birje played Tarzan in the 1985 movie Adventures of Tarzan.  Hemant needs a job, so Sahila invites him to join her, and after a short interlude in a strange hotel and a dance number, the pair are in love.

Meanwhile, Jasmine (Jasmin Dhunna) has grown up beautiful and strange.  She spends most of her time in her room, but occasionally wanders in the forest and around the village, seducing lonely men and taking them to secluded places where she can kill them and drink their blood.  All her family knows is that she's still having fits, and the family doctor (Narendra Nath) says that she needs a psychiatrist.  Fortunately he is a psychiatrist, which means that they don't need to introduce a new character.  On thew other hand, skeezy servant Raghu (Gulshan Grover) knows more than he's telling; he tends to follow Jasmine when she wanders, so he knows about the seducing lonely men but not about the blood drinking.

 

And then the movie spins its wheels for a while; the bodies keep piling up, Jasmine is acting stranger than usual and occasionally shows her true face, but it takes a while before anybody manages to connect the dots.  Instead, the movie keeps cutting back to Raghu's bitter feud with Baba's pet cat.  Eventually Hemant realizes that there's something suspicious about Baba the sinister bearded manservant who carries a black cat everywhere, and the movie rockets to a suitably bonkers conclusion, complete with a genuinely clever method to permanently dispose of the vampire.

 

This is probably not a very good movie, but I really enjoyed it.  The film has tremendous style.  Actually it has several styles, but when it;s concentrating on horror it echoes classic European Gothic horror movies from the seventies, and the cinematography is genuinely good.  Jasmin Dhunna is magnetic, Satish Shah is less annoying than the usual comic relief in this sort of movie (Hitchcock even gets a moment of heroism), and Hemant Birje quickly settles into his role as a modern day Peplum protagonist who wandered into the wrong genre.  It's a wonderful blend.