The rare Triple Reverse Scooby-Doo.

 As the title implies, Bhool Bhulaiyaa 3 (2024) is the latest installment in the Bhool Bhulaiyaa franchise.  While it shares much of the cast of Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2, and one key actor returns form the first movie, this is a spiritual sequel rather than a direct sequel; there's no shared universe, but character names are the same and plot points echo the previous films, up until the point when they do not.

The first real difference is in the choice of protagonist. In the first movie, Aditya (Akshay Kumar) is a psychiatrist, using the trappings of spiritualism to help a patient suffering from a spooky but ultimately natural problem. In the second movie, Ruhaan (Kartik Aaryan) is forced by circumstances to pretend to be Rooh Baba, and winds up dealing with a very real ghost. Here Ruhaan (Kartik Aaryan again) is already posing as Rooh Baba, cheerfully driving away fake ghosts and fleecing the wealthy and gullible with the help of his sidekick Tillu (Arun Kushwah.)

A potential client (Rajesh Sharma) turns the tables by faking a haunting by the ghost of his actually very much alive niece Meera (Triptii Dimri).  Even though they know he's a fake, Meera and her uncle need the help of Rooh Baba, and the video of him freaking out over an apparent ghost provides excellent blackmail material.

Meera's father (Vijay Raaz) is the Raja of Rakhtghat,but the entire family are living in squalor in the cowshed across form the palace. The place is supposed to be haunted by the ghost of Manjulika, a supremely talented princess of the family who murdered her brother Debendrenath two hundred years ago, was burned alive as punishment, returned as a ghost to kill her father, and was ultimately sealed up behind a scary door which must never be opened under any circumstances, which is surprisingly common in this sort of movie.  Ruhaan looks so much like the portrait of Prince Debendrenath that everyone assumes he is the prince's reincarnation, here to drive away Manjulika and restore the family to prosperity.  That is certainly the thesis of the family's spiritual advisor, a Rajpurohit (Manish Wadha), who tells Ruhaan that he must open the scary door, but only on the night of Durga Ashtami.

The family moves back into the palace and starts to live comfortably for the first time in ages - the villagers are sure that Manjulika is about to be exorcised, so they're willing to lend money to the Raja again, and once the palace is ghost free it can be sold for enough money to support them indefinitely, and pay Ruhaan a tidy commission.  And soon enough Mallika (Vidya Balan) and her team show up to handle the restoration; she's not the person Meera was expecting, but Mallika explains that he's suddenly left on a long vacation.

Spooky things begin to happen, because this is a haunted house movie. But Ruhaan quickly realizes the truth: the scary door is already open, and three grifters (Rajpal Yadav, Sanjay Mishra, and Ashwini Kalsekar) have been living in the forbidden room and faking the haunting to keep people away. Ruhaan knows a thing or two about faking hauntings, so he arranges a public ceremony to drive the ghost out,and asks Mallika to play the part of Manjulika.  Everyone buys it, and nobody seems to notice that Mallika really threw herself into the part.

The "ghost" is gone, and the palace is put up for sale, drawing a few interested buyers,but no one is willing to pay the Raja's asking price. Mallika's team accidentally break a wall, revealing yet another scary door, and the Rajpuroihit discovers that Manjulika had an older sister, Anjulika.  The Raja and Ruhaan open the new scary door but don't discover much, and soon after the glamorous Mandira (Madhuri Dixit) arrives to buy the palace, though she won't sign anything until Durga Ashtami.

And then rich jerk Vicky Khanna (Shataf Figar) arrives and announces he's willing to buy immediately. He can easily match Mandira's price, so the raja quickly agrees.  Khanna doesn't want to restore the palace, he wants to remodel it and turn it into a five star hotel, which is always a recipe for disaster in an Indian ghost movie.  It makes the ghosts angry, and it seems to infuriate both Mallika and Mandira. Khanna dies in an apparent car accident that night, and suddenly Mandira is the top bidder again. 

The haunting intensifies, the masked red burning phantom of Manjulika appears to multiple characters,and both Mallika and Manjira are acting very strange indeed.  The Rajpirohit prepares Ruhaan for a final supernatural confrontation, but what nobody realizes is that this isn't a house haunted by two sisters, it's haunted by three.  

"Bhoolm bhulaiyaa" translates roughly to maze or labyrinth, and this is easily the most labyrinthine plot in the series, with a haunting that is being faked by a different ghost.  While it's complicated, the plot mostly hangs together. It's never especially scary,but the smoldering masked ghost of Manjulika is an arresting image.  And it's a movie with its heart in the right place, though I am not really qualified to judge how well it handles the social issues it touches on.

All that aside, though, there are two real reasons to watch Bhool Bhulaiyaa 3: Madhuri Dixit and Vidya Balan. They're both veteran actresses at the top of their game here, mixing spooky scenery chewing, quiet menace, and surprisingly touching moments of genuine emotion.

Bhooty Call: Machchli Jal Ki Rani Hai

 

 (No screenshots this week due to technical difficulties.)

 Machchli Jal Ki Rani Hai (2014) has all the trappings of a traditional Bollywood haunted house movie, but like Bhoothnath, the genre swerves away form horror and in some unexpected directions.  Unlike Bhoothnath, though, I'm not sure that the genre mixing is on purpose.

The movie doesn't open with the haunted house, it opens with Action Exorcist Ugra (Deepraj Rana) attempting to drive a spirit out of the body of a young girl. The attempt involves more wire-fu than you usually see in exorcisms, as well as a chase through the countryside.In the end, though, Ugra fails.  The girl dies,and the ghost retaliates by brutally killing Ugra's entire family. He's promptly arrested, but on the advice of psychiatrist Bhatnagar, he's declared insane and sent to a very nice asylum.

Years later, Bhatnagar needs Ugra's help, so he visits the asylum and Ugra is released into his company.  As they drive away, Bhatnagar fills the audience and the exorcist in on the important backstory with a long flashback.

Bhatnagar's daughter Ayesha (Swara Bhaskar) is married to Uday (Bhanu Uday), and they have a young son named Sunny (Yug Mahnot).  A few months ago Ayesha was driving recklessly and caused an accident which killed a woman. Soon after, Uday was transferred to Jabalpur in order to reopen a factory; Uday is from Jabalpur so he's delighted to be reunited with his old friends, while Ayesha could really use a change. The family move into a company guesthouse,and at first everything is going well.

Sunny quickly makes friends with Guddi (Roshni Walia).  Ayesha meets Guddi's parents; mother Urmi (Reema Debnath) is nice, but father Manohar (Murli Sharma) is surly and angrily insists that his wife and child need to stay in the house and Ayesha needs to stay away.  

And then . . . well, it's a haunted house movie, and they tend to be fairly predictable.  Ayesha starts hearing noises and seeing things around the house, and Uday refuses to believe her, or even really listen, even when people start dying.  There's a fatal accident at Uday's work, then Mangla (Sakha Kalyani) the maid dies in a freak antler accident, followed by the exorcist Mangla brought Ayesha to see.  Sunny is acting strangely. Ayesha is acting really strangely.  Bhatnagar visits and also refuses to listen to Ayesha, telling her it's all in her head even though the beginning of the movie clearly established that he believes in ghosts.

Before long, Sunny is missing and Ayesha is possessed and on a rampage.  At this point Bhatnagar remembers that he believes in ghosts, and also that he knows an Action Exorcist, so the flashback ends and the movie loops back to the beginning. Ugra confronts the possessed Ayesha, leading to the dramatic climax.

This is standard Bollywood haunted house stuff, and works in all of the familiar beats, including the scene when a passerby catches Ayesha eating something weird.  (The family's pet goldfish, just to loop back to the nursery rhyme that gives the movie its title.)  There are two twists, though.

The first twist is minor but clever; ghosts in this movie are more mobile than usual, so Ayesha and Uday's house isn't actually haunted - it's the place next door!  It doesn't have a huge impact on the plot, but it does add an extra sense of danger, with no real safe places.

That sense of danger is immediately undercut by the other twist: this isn't really shot like a horror movie, it's shot like an action movie, with bright lighting and surprisingly kinetic exorcism scenes.  At times it's practically a superhero movie; Ugra refers to his origin story at the beginning of the movie, and he is walking around with Doctor Strange's cape.  (Or its Indian equivalent.)

I'm honestly not sure if they were shooting for action horror or just stumbled into it.  It means the movie is never quite as scary as it wants to be, but the genre mix is at least interesting.

Bhooty Call: Bhoothnath

 Bhoothnath (2008) is a movie of two parts.  The film opens with the classic Bollywood haunted house scenario.  Aditya (Shah Rukh Khan) and Anjali (Juhi Chawla) are an attractive and modern young couple who have just moved in to a house on the outskirts of Goa with their young son Banku (Aman Siddiqui).  It's only when they move in that they realize that the house is supposed to be haunted, though the audience has already glimpsed the ghost driving people away.

As is typical in these films, Aditya has a job that takes him out of town; he's the chief engineer on a cruise ship, and he promptly sails away, leaving Anjali to deal with Banku, an oversized house with a very dangerous staircase, and Anthony (Rajpal Yadav), the alcoholic homeless man who used to squat there. She's already overwhelmed just getting the place cleaned when nobody is willing to work there, and that's before she realizes that Banku has a new invisible friend.

But this isn't a horror movie, it's a children's movie about a boy and his magical friend, so the ghost isn't a threat.  Banku manages to out-prank Bhoothnath, the spirit of Kailash Nath (Amitabh Bachchan) in short order, and after the requisite fall down the stairs the two become fast friends.  Which is good, because someone has to help Anjali with the house, as well as Banku's mean principal (Satish Shah) and classroom frenemy Jojo (Devandra).

It's all very by the numbers, though during the school sports day Bhoothnath refuses to use his ghostly powers to help Banku beat Jojo, instead encouraging the boy to work harder for what he wants.  Bhoothnath is full of good advice, actually, much of it revolving around forgiveness.  He helps the boy make peace with Jojo, then reconcile with Anjali after the mother and son have a nasty argument.

And that's when Vijay Nath (Priyanshu Chatterjee) returns to Goa.  Vijay is Kailash's son, and he's here to sell the family home; he's not a monster, and is quite happy to find Aditya and Anjali another place to live, but Banku doesn't want to go, and Bhoothnath absolutely refuses to lose his new family.

Normally this kind of problem is resolved through magical pranks, but the movie has already gone to great lengths to set up the importance of forgiveness and reconciliation.  Aditya returns, because it's time for the movie to enter its second part, as the senior actors all earn their keep with an emotional story about death and moving on.  The second part is pretty solid; it's a very filmi and melodramatic story, and well within the respective skill sets of Bachchan, Chawla and Khan, but it's a heck of a tonal shift, and Banku and the more comic actors like Satish Shah and Rajpal Yadav either fade into the background or vanish entirely.

Whether the movie is a children's fantasy or an emotional melodrama, though, one thing remains consistent: it is not scary at any point.  Some of the trappings of horror appear, but it's a story about family dynamics in a large but surprisingly cozy house.  They really need to do something about those stairs, though.

Bhooty Call: Stree 2

 Stree 2: Sarkate Ka Aatank (2024) is a direct sequel to 2018's Stree, and it starts with one of the better recaps of the previous movie I've seen.  The town of Chanderi is celebrating an annual religious festival, and Rudra (Pankaj Tripathi) sings a song about Stree (Flora Saini in the last film, this time played by Bhoomi Rajgor), a terrifying ghost that once haunted the streets of Chanderi, abducting men and leaving behind nothing but a pile of clothes, until the town's champion Vicky (Rajkummar Rao) manages to cut off Stree's braid and then . . . treats her with love and respect, which is what she wanted all along.  It's a fun number, and a band of kids act out the events as Rudra describes them, but it does leave out some key details.

Vicky hasn't forgotten anything, though.  He's gone back to work as a ladies tailor, but he's still pining for the beautiful, mysterious, and so far nameless woman (Shraddha Kapoor) who helped him every step of the way, even though his family and friends keep telling him that she is never, ever coming back after she took Stree's severed braid and vanished.  Sidekick Bittu (Aparshakti Khurana) has definitely moved on, and is now sort of dating the hip and modern Chitti (Anya Singh).

Rudra receives a mysterious letter which contains extra pages of the Chanderi Puran, a mysterious history of Chanderi which proved useful in the last movie.  The pages provide more detail about Stree's death, and include a warning that "He is coming back."  Who is coming back?  They find out when a terrifying headless ghost kidnaps Chitti.  It turns out that the young women of the town haven't been going off to the big city after all, they've been spirited away by the new ghost.  And the Chanderi Puran holds the answer - the ghost is the spirit of Chandrabhan (no actor listed because he's a great big CGI thing that shouts and screams rather than speaking.)  Chandrabhan was once the village headman in Chanderi, and was an abusive and womanizing drunk who brutally murdered Stree and her love as their young daughter watched; after rising from the dead Stree returned the favor by decapitating her tormentor.

Chandrabhan is specifically targeting "modern" women, and he has a very broad definition of modern; having a job or a Facebook account is enough to be added to his collection.  The women in town do their best to avoid notice, but a group of them approach Vicky and tell him to do something about the situation; he is the town's destined protector, and Chandrabhan only returned because Vicky convinced Stree to move on, so it's his fault.

(As a sidenote, the women in Chandrabhan's collection have their heads shaved, are dressed in modest saris, and are essentially placed in supernatural cold storage.  Chandrabhan draws a lot of inspiration from the monsters found in old Ramsay Brothers horror films, and particularly the headless demon sorcerer from Purana Mandir, but the movie completely avoids the exploitative tendencies of that era of Bollywood horror.)

There's some good news: Vicky keeps seeing the Woman, and the others eventually see her too.  The group decides that they need to bring back Stree to deal with the new ghost, and to find Stree they need Jana (Abhishek Banerjee), who was possessed by Stree in the last movie.  Jana is currently living happily in Delhi with his cousin Bhaskar (Varun Dhawan), who is a werewolf from a different movie.  They bring Jana back and set him loose in the ruins outside of town, which proves to be an utter disaster.

The Woman has another plan - she gives Vicky a magic dagger and tells him to look Chandrabhan in the eyes and stab him in the heart.  To lure him out they turn to Shama (Tamannah Bhatia), a famous dancer and Rudra's old friend, to perform a spectacular dance number in the heart of the town.  And it's also an utter disaster, ending with Shama kidnapped and most of the men in town possessed by Chandrabhan's rigid rules about gender roles.  Vicky's only real superpower is listening to women, which doesn't seem like it will be that helpful.

Stree 2 isn't just a sequel to the original, it's a part of the Maddock Supernatural Universe, which also includes werewolf movie Bhediya and Munjya, which features a different sort of ghost.  This is not a cinematic universe that requires a lot of homework, though.  It;s an effective monster mash in its own right, like House of Frankenstein but focused on archetypes form Indian horror cinema, with the Ramsay-like Chandrabhan matched against the more modern J-horror inspired Stree, and there's enough context provided to explain the Wolfman who shows up at the end to help.

And it's also an effective monster mash with something to say, since the real villain here is a narrow and oppressive view of society that winds up hurting everyone, including the men it's supposed to be empowering.

Or possibly the real villain is Dracula, since Bhaskar drops some pretty broad hints at the end.

Bhooty Call: Papi Gudia

 Papi Gudia (1996) opens with a near riot at the police station; Mumbai has been hit by a wave of child kidnappings, and the people want answers now.  Inspector Yadav (Tinnu Anand) has just been assigned to the case, but he already has a plan.  And that plan is apparently to wait for a lucky break; a fearless beggar woman (the IMDB doesn't list the actress, which is a shame since she is the film's true hero) happens to interrupt the kidnapper, and gives chase.  She's on foot and he's in a car, so she doesn't catch him, but she is able to provide a decent description to the police.

The kidnapper is Charan Raj (Shakti Kapoor), also known as Channi.  Channi is a skilled necromancer, and he just has to sacrifice one more child in order to gain ultimate power and rule the world.  he kidnaps another child, and Yadav has another incredibly lucky break - they literally bump into each other on the street.  Yadav recognizes the man form the police sketch, and they have a long chase/gunfight which ends in a toy store, when a seriously wounded Channi uses a long ritual to transfer his soul into a nearby doll, just before the store blows up.

The kidnapped child is Raju (Master Amar.)  He;s fine, but the police have some trouble contacting his family.  His only relative is his sister Karishma (Karisma Kapoor), and she's a popular singer, currently blowing most of the film' special effects budget in a big dance number.  They finally manage to contact her, she picks her brother up, and the police go on their way after urging Karishma to hire a babysitter next time, for heaven's sake.

Karishma has a show the very next night, and her friend Mona (Shraddha Verma) agrees to watch Raju.  Raju doesn't want to stay with Mona, so Karishma takes him out for a fun afternoon to cheer him up after the whole "attempted kidnapping by an evil necromancer" thing.  She buys him a talking doll called Channi, and Raju immediately becomes very attached, but the good news is he's now fine with Mona watching him for the night, so Karishma goes off to her next show.

And then the murders begin.

Mona first; she annoyed Raju by turning off the TV when Channi wanted to watch the news.  When Karishma returns, the house is full of policemen, led by Inspector Vijay Saxena (Avinash Wadhavan), the handsome rich kid who broke her heart years ago.  Vijay explains the situation: Mona fell, or was thrown, out the window after being hit in the head with a very small hammer.  Vijay suspects foul play, and all signs point to Raju, but Karishma flatly refuses to let the police interview him.

Inspector Yadav dies next, then the heroic but unnamed beggar woman.  Every time Raju is seen in the area, doll in tow.  The audience has seen the murders happen.  We know that Channi is the killer, but Vijay is convinced that Raju is involved, while Karishma is convinced that Vijay is pursuing some sort of vendetta against her.

But the thing is, Vijay is right.  Raju is absolutely involved.  When Karishma asks him about Mona, he explains that she had to die because Channi didn't like her and she wouldn't let him watch the news.  Raju skips school to take Channi to Yadav's house.  Raju steals Karishma's car while she's onstage so that Channi can use it to run over the old woman.  At best Raju is an accessory to multiple murders.  he certainly needs psychological help, and he never gets it; nobody even tries to take away the doll that he's clearly obsessed with.

The special effects are an obvious issue here; the movie doesn't use computer graphics or stop motion to bring Channi to life, they just manipulate the doll for the camera, using lighting and camera angles to make him look sinister.  This can be very effective in theory, but here it's not.  It's also not very practical during any sort of fight scene, so they turn down the lights and put a small actor (possibly a child) in a costume, before giving up entirely and turning Channi back into Shakti Kapoor.  The effects are silly, but that's fine; audiences will happily suspend their disbelief for the right story.

The problem is, it's not the right story.  The writing is a mess.  Everything runs on coincidence, things happen just because it's time for a new plot point, and the heroes and villains are both wildly incompetent.  Before the climax Vijay visits Channi's magical mentor (Mohan Joshi) and learns his secret weakness, which he does not use. Instead, the ending relies on coincidence (again) and blatantly rips off some of the lesser Hammer Dracula's.

 It's not all bad news.  The music is generally good or at least catchy, and nobody sells a dance number like Karisma Kapoor.  But this is a very silly movie.

Bhooty Call 2024

 It's that time again.  The nights are getting longer, the air is getting colder, and shadows start to gather in the corners of the room.  It's the spooky season.  Time for a bhooty call.

Fool me once . . .

 Avatara Purusha 2 (2024) begins as the previous movie ended, with a magical battle re-imagined as a martial arts duel lifted straight from a wuxia film.  It's an intriguing sequence, probably the highlight of both films, and promises a supernatural adventure that the movies never really deliver on.

That's followed by vital exposition.  Siri (Ashika Ranganath) wanted to reunite her broken family by presenting her aunt Susheela (Bhavya) and uncle Rama (P. Sai Kumar) with the son that Yahsoda (Sudharani), Rama's sister and Siri's mother, lost at the fair years ago.  Finding the actual missing Karna is hard, though, so instead she hired an extra known as Overacting Anil (Sharan) to play the part.  Rama remained suspicious, but Anil quickly formed a close and loving bond with Susheela.  And then the real Karna, calling himself Kumara (Srinigara Kitty), arrived, and Anil went back to life as an extra.

That's not an unusual plot for an Indian movie, except that Kumara is a master of black magic, sent by his evil mentor Darka (Ashutosh Rana) to find the key to enter the mostly empty heaven known as Trishanku, and Anil is not just a glorified extra with dreams of stardom, he's also a trained magician on a mission to save the family from the forces of evil.

Susheela's health is declining, and Kumara doesn't really show much interest in his mother, so Rama and Siri decide to bring back Anil.  They do, and he tries to find his place in the family dynamic while wooing Siri and trying to everyone from the horror movie curses sent by Kumara and Darka.  

 That status quo holds for most of the movie - subtle sympathetic magic in the background of the family drama.  Not much is happening with the plot, so the running time is padded with slapstick and sideplots that don't really go anywhere.  Anil thwarts a band of crooks who are robbing the studio where he works.  His old friend and fellow runaway from the hidden village of evil magic-users is haunted by a ghost and needs help with the right ritual to put it to rest, but wackiness ensues. Meanwhile, the main plot goes nowhere.

And then the main plot goes somewhere.  One of the family members is killed by a curse.  Susheela's soul is taken to the edge of Trishanku, and Anil must follow in order to save her, leading to a final battle, an anticlimax, and the revelation that once again nothing is as it seems, leading once again to a cliffhanger setting up the inevitable part 3.

There's enough material for one solid horror comedy here, but there's just so much padding.  The plot inches forward at a glacial pace, then suddenly accelerates when it's clear that there's no time to wrap everything up in a satisfying fashion, all to set up the next sequel.  The premise is great, but this movie could have been an email.

Evil Vampire Jumanji

The board game Ludo is a "cross and circle" game, one of the many variants of the ancient Indian game of Pachisi; probably the most common variant in the US is Parcheesi, published by Hasbro.  Versions of the game appear in the Mahabharata and the video for ABBA's song "The Name of the Game", as well as the 2015 Bengali horror movie Ludo, directed by auteur Qaushiq Mukherjee.  (Also the 2020 ensemble black comedy Ludo, but that's a movie for another time.)  

The basic plot of Ludo is incredibly straightforward.  College students Ria (Subholina Sen), Pele (Soumendra Bhattacharya), Payal (Ananya Biswas), and Babai (Ranodeep Bose) all want to have sex.  They each live at home with their respective families, so they try to get a hotel, but it isn't easy.  They're stopped by police, who demand a hefty bribe and steal Ria's food, then they're refused by several hotels in a row because they can't produce a marriage certificate to show that any of them are married.  

The last hotel they try doesn't turn them away, but the man at the desk is oddly unresponsive, and when the power cuts out they go upstairs only to discover that the hotel is full of kinky vampires.  The students flee, go to a club and freak out for a while, but then it's back to the matter at hand, finding a place to have sex.

Finally, one of them has an idea.  They sneak into a nearby shopping mall and hide out until closing.  When everyone has gone they spend some time racing around the mall, drinking, smoking, bullying one another, and generally acting like doomed teens in a slasher movie.  When one of the couples finally decides to get down to business, they're interrupted by a pair of elderly vagrants (Rituparna Sen and Joyraj Bhattacharya).  

After some initial hostility everyone calms down.  The old man wanders off, Ria goes to look for a bathroom, and the old woman takes out an ancient cloth gameboard which seems to hypnotize the others.  They play for a while, and then the old woman suddenly and messily eats Babai, literally tearing the young man apart.  Everyone (including Ria, who returned just in time) freaks out.

This is not a bad setup for a horror movie; Ludo is a game in which players make their way around an enclosed board, trying to reach a safe space and avoid getting taken out by the other players, and the characters are now trapped in an enclosed space with plenty of room to run (as demonstrated by the earlier race scene), pursued by relentless supernatural cannibals.  That's not what happens, though.

Ria, Payal and Pele all pile into an elevator, which seems to go haywire.  Pele becomes convinced that his friend dies because of the sinful women, and tries to attack them, but the door opens and the ladies escape, leaving him to be picked off easily by the old man.  Ria and Payal reach the basement, they're menaced by the old woman, who is not considerably younger and covered in blood, and then they fall into another hypnotic trance and sit down beside her as she narrates her backstory in her best Gollum voice.

That backstory takes up the entire last half of the movie, and it could have been handled with a five minute scene.  Two siblings discover the cursed game board their family has kept contained for generations, they have sex, their father curses them, and now they are cursed immortal cannibals who can never die.  Sometimes they are starving and lamenting their fate, sometimes they are playing board games with random people, an evil shaman (Tillotame Shone) shows up to try and steal the board and then vanishes abruptly, and then it's more lamenting and more board games.  

There are elements of a good movie here.  The characters are unpleasant, but the actors are good, and there are two separate interesting premises which are dropped almost immediately.  But the pacing kills it.  the first half of the movie is incredibly compressed, so we don't really get to know anything about these people apart from he fact that they really want to have sex, and once the killing starts everyone immediately shuffles into the basement for exposition.  There's no time to build tension.

The last half of the movie is just tedious.  I am not inclined to feel sorry for the cannibal couple, who went from stealing a game to eating people in almost no time, and there are few things as dull as watching other people play board games to the death.  It's an excellent example of how sometimes telling actually is better than showing - they played the game for centuries.  I get that.  I don't need to spend centuries watching them do it.

There are nice touches throughout Ludo; the reveal mid-exposition that Ria and Payal have started playing the game again without realizing it is very well done, for instance.  But then the movie makes me angry again with a sequel-hunting mid credits scene about the evil shaman plotting to unleash the evil board game upon the world by commercially releasing a game that has already been available in stores for generations.

It's frustrating.  Technically well-made, but I think the ABBA video has a better narrative.

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.