Weird, weird west.

Super Cowboy (2010), also known as Irumbukkotai Murattu Singam, is a Western set in India.  That's not that unusual; I've seen a lot of Indian movies that toy with Western tropes, but Super Cowboy is totally committed to the bit.  Every character looks and acts like somebody from the old West.  Sometimes that's good, and sometimes, not so much.

Singaram (Lawrence Raghavendra) is a semi-reformed thief and a terrible security guard.  After a priceless diamond is stolen on his watch, the town puts him on trial and then sentences him to death.  Singaram insists that he did not steal the diamond, but nobody cares.  They're holding him responsible anyway.

At the last moment, Singaram is rescued by a band of masked men who turn out to be middle aged dudes from the nearby village of Jayshankarapuram.  The men explain that their village is being menaced by the bandit warlord Kizhakku Katai (Nassar), master of the Iron Fort.  Jayshankarapuram had a protector, an amazing gunslinger named Singam, but he has vanished.  Singaram happens to look exactly like the missing Singam, so if he will play the part long enough to rally the villagers to fight back, they'll give him their diamond, which happens to look exactly like the stolen gem.  Singaram agrees, and so we have a plot.

 

Singaram is not much of a gunslinger, but he is a pretty good actor, and before long he's inspired the townspeople to stand up for themselves, and also managed to catch the eye of Baali (Padmapriya), the town's pretty young doctor.  Katai's henchman Ulakkai (Sai Kumar), also known as Cheetah, tries to kill the returned hero, but thanks to a combination of skillful bluffing, help from the middle aged dudes, and dumb luck, Cheetah is driven off.  Unfortunately, Katai has a plan for that.

 

Despite the Western trappings, the movie is set in sort of contemporary South India.  (The opening narration claims that it's the Eighteenth Century, but that is immediately followed by a trial scene which directly references Amitabh Bachchan.  It's not the Eighteenth Century.)  However, the tribal people living near Jayshankarapuram dress and speak like stereotypical Hollywood native Americans, though they draw upon stereotypical representations of indigenous peoples from many continents.  They're treated with more respect than the Rakshasa from Maharaj Ki Jai Ho, but that is damning with very faint praise indeed.  

Anyway, Katai's big scheme is to attack the tribals and place the blame on Singam.  It works, Singaram and friends are captured and about to be sacrificed (ugh) when Singaram saves the day and makes peace through his amazing dance skills.  The tribals agree to join the fight against Katai if Singaram will agree to marry the chief's beautiful daughter Thumbi (Sandhya).  Singaram negotiates a long engagement.

 

And then the movie suddenly shifts genre as representatives of all three factions team up to discover an ancient treasure by following a mysterious map and then solving a series of puzzles, which gives Katai's right hand woman Pakki (Lakshmi Rai) a chance to become Potential Love Interest #3.  

 

The switch in genres doesn't last long, though, because this is a movie that is passionate about embracing Western tropes, so there has to be a climactic gunfight before our hero can ride off into the sunset with his love interest of choice.  I just wish they had been more careful about which Western tropes to embrace.

Lemony Snicket's "A Fistful of Dollars."

Avane Srimannarayana (2019) starts with a murder.  Bandit leader Rama Rama (Madhusudhan Rao) has captured a band of traveling religious pageant actors because he believes that they stole a truck load of gold, and he wants it. The actors won't, or can't, tell him where the gold is, so he shoots them all, apart from the hapless bandmaster (Gopalkrishna Deshpande), whom he keeps around as a sort of mascot or court jester.

 

Years pass.  Rama Rama is on his death bed, and his men have gathered to hear who will be the next leader of the bandit clan.  Rather than passing the throne (there's a literal throne, but it's made of wood and just looks like an uncomfortable chair) on to his scary, violent son Jayarama (Balaji Manohar) or his devious and ruthless son Tukaram (Pramod Shetty), Rama Rama declares that the throne will pass to whoever manages to find the lost gold.  This goes about as well as you would expect, and soon a maimed Tukaram has been sent into exile, while Jayaram has seized power, claiming to act as regent for his dead father until the gold has been recovered.

More years pass.  Jayaram rules the bandit clan with an iron fist, crucifying the occasional bandit that questions his authority.  Tukaram is a politician, using similar methods but with a thin veneer of legitimacy.  They both want the treasure, which means they are both pressuring Inspector Srimannarayana (Rakshit Shetty) to find it for them.  

 

Srimmanarayana is probably not a very good cop; he spends a little too much time in bars, and isn't likely to take a case unless there's something in it for him.  On the other hand, when he wants to be, he's a brilliant detective, and he's very good at punching people as well.  Srimmanarayana is ably assisted by Constable Achyuthanna (Achyuth Kumar) and frequently annoyed by plucky but kind of bossy small town reporter Lakshmi (Shanvi Sristavasta).

 

All of which sounds pretty standard.  There are dueling bad guys, a dashing scoundrel, a prim love interest, and a shiny macguffin, and everybody has their own agenda, including and especially our hero.  But that's because I haven't mentioned Cowboy Krisna's, an exact replica of a Western saloon owned by an eccentric cattle magnate, where you can hire a team of hyper-competent cowboy-themed mercenaries using a convenient letterbox.

 

And then there's the secret society of actors, who lead mundane lives in town during the day, but at night they secretly dress up in costume and perform theatrical rituals in the woods, preparing for the day when their prophesied savior will arrive and help them perform their last play so that they can finally move on to the next town.

 

What I am saying is, this is a weird movie.  It's not just a bombastic, over-the-top action movie, it's also a whimsical, surreal comedy.  Or it's not just a whimsical, surreal comedy, it's a bombastic, over-the-top action movie.  Either way, it mangles genres boundaries with glee, and the end result is as charming as it is strange.

Madam, my heart is yours sincerely.

Quick Gun Murugun: Misadventures of an Indian Cowboy (2009) is the most action-packed movie about vegetarianism I've ever seen. Murugun (Doctor Rajendra Prasad) is, as advertised, a cowboy, which means he considers it his sacred duty to protect cows, especially from the people who want to eat them. (This is India, after all.) Murugun wanders the dusty plains of South India in the 1980's, accompanied only by his horse and his Locket Lover (Anu Menon), the image of his deceased sweetie who still speaks to him, mostly to nag him about getting a steady job, maybe something in IT? In the course of his wandering and gunslinging, Murugun runs afoul of Rice Plate Reddy, a gangster who plots to force all the local hotels to stop serving vegetables and instead serve beef. After a Crouching Tiger-inspired ambush in a coconut forest, Murugun is captured and delivered to Reddy, who defies centuries of villainous tradition and just shoots the hero while he has the chance. RIP Quick Gun.

As soon as he reaches Heaven, Quick Gun files the proper paperwork to be sent back to Earth. Unfortunately, the wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly, and he's sent back to Mumbai in the twenty first century. Locket Lover thinks this is the perfect opportunity to get a job selling kerosene, but instead he reunites with his older brother and sister-in-law, then sets out to track down Reddy, who has become a business tycoon and is about to launch McDosas, a chain restaurant with an all-meat menu. He also meets the lovely Mango Dolly (Rambha), a bar singer and Reddy's secret girlfriend.

What follows is a dizzying array of explosions, kidnapped housewives, and completely improbably gunfights. The special effects are, frankly, a bit on the cheap side, but it's all a part of the fun. Despite the computer-aided supernatural gunslinging, though, I think the closest comparison I could make is to Adam West's Batman; Quick Gun Murugun is a portly middle aged man in a technicolor cowboy outfit who wanders through one ridiculous situation after another, but he's also a fearless hero with a kind heart and a natural poetry to his dialogue, and the movie never loses sight of that.

"The Earth is my bed. The sky is my ceiling. The whole of creation is my native place. My name is Murugun. Quick Gun Murugun. Mind it!"

The DVD was 69 cents and worth every penny.

During my days as a substitute teacher, I was once cornered in the hall by a first grader who proceeded to tell me a story about the time he saw a snake, and the snake was going to bite his brother so he picked up a rifle and shot the snake and the snake was a robot and also they were in Nevada. If you spend a significant amount of time around small children you will probably hear many similar stories; when telling a story, a kid will generally toss in whatever comes to mind, without worrying about such trivialities as structure and continuity and causality.

Mard (1985) takes a similar approach. I don’t know anything about the production history of the film, but I’m willing to bet it started with one man saying, “You know, we’ve got a trunk full of period costumes, a trained dog and horse, a few tanks, and Bob Christo. Let’s make a movie! We can worry about the details later.” Of course there was a script - six people have assorted writing credits for the film - but Mard feels improvised. Toss in an appearance by Colin Mochrie and you would have the greatest episode of Whose Line is it Anyway? ever made.

Mard takes place at some point during the British occupation of India. It’s hard to pinpoint an exact time frame; the costumes, props, and sets are drawn from a period spanning at least a century, and that’s not considering the guy at the end who shows up dressed as Spartacus.

Our hero is Raju (Amitabh Bachchan). Secretly, Raju is the son of Raja Azaad Singh (Dara Singh), local king, who enraged the British authorities by constantly interfering with their EVIL plans. Azaad is betrayed by family friend Doctor Harry (Prem Chopra), but before being captured he has time to name his newborn son “Mard” and carve the name into the baby’s chest. (The whole “name-carved-into-the-chest” thing is one of my least favorite Bollywood tropes, but at least this time it isn’t someone carving himself to show his true love for a girl.) After taking Azaad into custody, the British attempt to capture his wife Durga (Nirupa Roy) and the baby, but Durga manages to run into town and hide the baby in a cradle in front of the orphanage, and then lead the British away. Before the British can approach the baby, he is carried away by the family horse, and deposited with a childless couple. Durga returns to find her baby gone, and is suddenly struck mute so that she can’t spoil the plot by asking sensible questions.

Doctor Harry, meanwhile, is rewarded for his treachery by being made the mayor. As mayor, he gets to hang out with such evil luminaries as General Dyer (Kamal Kapoor), Simon (Bob Christo), and the nefarious Goga (Goga Kapoor), who spends most of the movie dressed as Sherlock Holmes for no adequately explained reason. The gang are always thinking of evil things to do to the Indian people, but they never get to carry any of their atrocities out, since stuffy old Lady Helena (Helena), who dresses as a refugee from an Oscar Wilde play, always interferes. Lady Helena is apparently married to the Governor, or something; the subtitles aren’t really clear. What is clear is that she has precisely enough authority to stop Harry and his cronies form having a man drawn and quartered, but not enough authority to have them arrested or removed from power.

Harry has a daughter named Ruby (Amrita Singh.) Ruby is initially not a nice girl; when we first meet her, she is driving wildly through the village, and inadvertently dragging Durga behind her. Raju and his amazing horse (and equally talented dog) rescue Durga, and Raju beats up Ruby’s bodyguard and demands an apology on Durga’s behalf (because while he doesn’t know that Durga is his real mother, for a good Indian boy all elder women are treated as mothers). She refuses, but is intrigued by Raju’s height and unorthodox good looks, and so she invites him up to the big house and offers him a job as her new bodyguard. When he refuses, she shows her disappointment by dressing up as the Baroness, chaining him up, whipping him, and literally rubbing salt in his wounds. Raju is too manly to admit feeling pain, however, and he quickly escapes, dragging Ruby along with him.
Ruby gets a couple of minor nicks and scratches from the trees as they ride through the forest, and so Raju takes her to a nearby salt mine to rub some salt in her wounds. This makes her fall in love with him, and after a literal roll in the hay, she is completely dedicated to Indian freedom and the cause of good.

Raju continues to thwart Harry and his cronies by rescuing peasants and making time with Ruby. Harry decides that the best way to deal with his rebellious daughter is to marry her off to Dyers’s son Danny (Dan Dhanoa) , a sadistic cowboy who runs a slave labor camp where he drains the blood from exhausted workers “in order to keep British soldiers alive.” (He doesn’t refrigerate the blood, just collects it on the shelf, so I don’t know how the British soldiers are supposed to benefit. Still, it’s the thought that counts.)

Ruby is shipped off to Danny’s camp; after all, what better way to woo a woman with a new found commitment to human rights than to show her your torture chamber? Nearly every other character is also imprisoned in the camp, for one reason or another, and it falls to Raju to rescue everyone through guile and punching.

By any objective standard, Mard is a terrible, terrible movie. No one involved seems to care, though. Bachchan in particular is clearly slumming here, but he refuses to look embarrassed. He seems to be having a great time. I did too.