Bhooty Call – Shukriya

Despite the supernatural elements, Shukriya: Till Death Do Us Apart (2004) isn’t a horror movie, it’s a family melodrama like Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, a story of star crossed lovers who are surrounded by the nicest family in the world.

London-based businessman Karam Jindal (Anupam Kher) really does have it all: a loving wife, Sandhya (Rati Agnihotri); two beautiful daughters, Anjali (Indraneil Sengupta) and Sanam (Shriya Saran); an apprentice, Yash (Indraneel), who is ready to taker over the company and is practically part of the family; and, of course, lots and lots of money. Karam plans to celebrate his sixtieth birthday by using some of said money to open a new hospital, named after his late mother, which will treat the poor free of charge.

Anjali is married to a nice young man who politely stays offscreen for most of the movie. Sanam is single, and while the family really wants her to marry Yash, who absolutely adores her, but she thinks of him as a friend. Instead, she uses a bizarre little fortune telling box which informs her that her true love will be a musician. Soon after, she meets aspiring musician Ricky (Aftab Shivdasani). She likes him, he likes her, she invites him to her father’s birthday party, and, after she’s gone . . .


He’s hit by a truck and dies.

Karam, meanwhile, is haunted by a voice which claims to be Death – his death, specifically. Karam does not want to die, so he convinces the voice to let him have four more days, which will be long enough to put his affairs in order and oversee the opening of his hospital. He also tells the voice that it doesn’t understand how hard it is to be human, so Death decides to take a holiday, borrowing the body of the recently deceased Ricky to become a guest in the Jindal household. Sanam doesn’t understand why Ricky is calling himself Rohan, but she’s thrilled that the man she believes is her destined love is staying with them, while Death/Rohan/Ricky is intrigued by her and the promise of this Earth thing called kissing. And you can probably predict exactly what happens next.

Or maybe you can’t. The twist, if there is one, is that Karam has no need to learn any valuable lessons (except maybe listen when the doctor tells him to cut down on the salt, but that ship has pretty much sailed.) Karam’s priority has always been his family; even before he learns that he’s going to die, we see him tell his wife and both of his daughters that he loves them. He uses his four extra days to manage the circumstances of his death, rather than to repair any fractured relationships, because the relationships are all already strong.

This is another one of those movies where absolutely everybody is nice. The parents are nice, the sister’s are nice, the human incarnation of Death is nice. Even Yash, who is clearly set up to be the villain, is very nice, apart from one shocking moral lapse. That’s what really works about Shukriya; it’s worth fighting for four more days of this life, but you know it’s going to end anyway.

Bhooty Call: Purani Haveli

With Purani Haveli (1989), the Ramsay brothers attempted to recreate the success of Purana Mandir by making essentially the same movie, only with two monsters, even more potential victims, and a stronger focus on the star-crossed lovers than on actually explaining anything. The results are . . . let’s say mixed.

Wealthy heiress Anita (Amita Nangia) lives with her uncle Kumar (Vijay Arora), his wife Seema (Neelam Mehra), and Seema’s sleazy brother Vikram (Tej Sapru). They are, naturally, slowly but surely embezzling her money, and are scheming to marry Anita to Vikram so that they can just take the money directly. Unfortunately for them, Anita has noticed that Vikram is a nasty little creep, and has given her heart to poor and allegedly hunky photographer Sunil (Deepak Parashar).

Kumar decides to buy a creepy old mansion for reasons which are never explained. While inspecting the place, the seller is crushed by a creepy animated metal statue, while Kumar wanders outside and through an exploding graveyard, only to be killed by the Beast, a monster which looks like it’s half Wolfman, half demonic golliwog.

Meanwhile, Seema and Vikram hire a gang of thugs to chase away Sunil. It doesn’t work, naturally, so Seema resorts to Plan B, and forces Anita to tell Sunil that she’s never loved him and is going to marry Vikram after all. Sunil believes her, because he has apparently never seen a movie before. Fortunately, his assistant Mangu (Satish Shah) and platonic gal-pal Shobha (Shubha) have seen movies before, and when Seema sends Anita, Vikram, and a small group of her friends and his henchman on a trip to the creepy old mansion, they convince Sunil to follow them.

The group settle in for a long stay. Vikram quickly shows his true colors and tries to attack Anita, but Sunil shows up at the last minute and beats him up. Then everybody goes back to the house, and the attempted rape is never mentioned again. That night, Vikram’s buddy Michael gets drunk and wanders the halls alone, only to be thrown out the window by the walking statue. The gang dig a shallow grave in the back yard, drop the body in, and go back to what they’re doing, rather than, say, calling the police or leaving the house.

After Michael’s death, things get kind of creepy. Someone (and I still have no idea who) keeps digging up Michael’s and Kumar’s bodies and leaving them around the house for the women to find. The Beast uses his Freddy Krueger powers to cause bad dreams and disturbing hallucinations. The men laugh off any concerns as silly women being silly, and they all decide to stay in the house for a few more days, despite the fact that somebody died.

At this point in the movie, horror doesn’t really seem to be much of a priority. Instead, Seema drives down to the mansion in order to scheme against Sunil and Anita, while Mangu gets his own lengthy subplot about his long lost identical twin brother, a bandit chief named Gangu. It isn’t until late in the film, after much plotting, romance, and identical bandit hijinks, that Vikram accidentally releases the Beast and scary stuff resumes in earnest.

Sometimes, I’ll watch a movie and spend the rest of the week wondering what happened. That’s not the case here; I know exactly what happened, I just can’t quite figure out why, or how. I’m geeky enough that when I watch this kind of movie, I want to be able to figure out what the rules are, and that’s just not possible here, because there’s not enough exposition. We do find out that the Beast is a Beast because of the curse on the house, but we never find out how the house became cursed in the first place, or where the murderous statue came from. And that’s just one of the nagging questions still bothering me. If the Beast is sealed beneath a crypt behind the house, how did it kill Kumar and the teenagers at the beginning of the movie? Who was moving the bodies around? Why did Kumar want the house in the first place, and why did Seema send Anita there? It makes my head hurt.

However, there are some things I liked about the movie. The big slow lumbering statue was treated as a big slow lumbering statue, able to kill people who are unsuspecting, drunk, or both, but not much of a threat if you’re able to run, and it had kind of a neat design. The romance plotline was predictable but not awful, and led to more songs than the average horror movie. And the comic relief was occasionally sort of funky; Satish Shah certainly seemed to enjoy chewing the scenery as the bandit king with a heart of gold.

If you like Ramsay style horror movies, this isn’t a bad choice. Just don’t expect it to make sense.

Bhooty Call: Mahal

Mahal (1949) has all the trappings of a Bollywood ghost story: an abandoned mansion, a mysterious woman singing at night, and scary stock footage of bats and snakes. It’s really a tragedy rather than a horror movie, though. Just like Hamlet and Oedipus and Othello, Mahal‘s protagonist is a potentially decent guy whose life is consumed and ultimately destroyed by a single overwhelming flaw; in this case, he’s the most gullible man in the world.

On a dark and stormy night, Hari Shankar (Ashok Kumar) visits the mysterious old mansion his father bought at auction. He convinces the kindly old gardener, the mansion’s sole caretaker, to tell the story of the tragic lovers who lived and died in the mansion thirty years ago, then sends said old gardener to tell his friend Shrinath (Kanu Roy) that he’s in town. On foot. At two in the morning. Through a rainstorm. And Shrinath lives four miles away.

Once the gardener leaves, Hari discovers a portrait which looks very much like him. He’s already half convinced that he’s the reincarnation of the doomed lover who built the mansion when he hears a mysterious woman’s voice singing. He follows the voice, and manages to catch a few glimpses of the beautiful woman (Madhubala) singing, but she vanishes every time. Whatever she is, though, she’s not a hallucination, because Shrinath, who arrived just in time, can see her too.

Shrinath convinces Hari to leave the house, but he can’t stay away for long. he returns, and speaks to the woman, who calls herself Kamini. She explains that yes, she’s a ghost, and he is the reincarnation of her lost love. Now they can finally be together, but first Hari must kill himself (which he gleefully agrees to do) in which case they can be united in death, or he can kill the gardener’s daughter, allowing Kamini to take over her body so that they can be united in life. Hari hesitates for a split second, then agrees to do whatever Kamini asks of him.

Before Hari can kill anyone, though, Shrinath returns, accompanied by Hari’s father (M. Kumar). They take Hari away and quietly marry him off to Ranjana (Vijayalaxmi), hoping that he will settle down and forget all this ghost nonsense.

Unfortunately, Hari can’t forget this ghost nonsense. On the wedding night, just as he’s about to lift Ranjana’s bridal veil, he hears a clock and is immediately consumed by thoughts of Kamini. He decides to take his wife to a far away place where he can love her, free of the distractions of his imagined past, and, after an odd interlude in which they watch a tribal woman suspected of adultery undergo a trial by knife, they settle in an old creepy cabin in the mountains which is infested with stock footage bats and snakes and unconvincing crow puppets.

(Trial by knife is just like trial by fire, except that instead of setting you on fire, they throw knives at you. If none of the knives hit you, then you’re innocent. As the basis for a legal system, I can see some flaws.  Also, if she survives the trial, you're legally obligated to kiss her.)

After two years, Hari still hasn’t lifted his wife’s bridal veil, literally or metaphorically. Ranjana is living in a desolate cabin in the middle of nowhere, isolated from nearly all human contact, with a husband who completely ignores her and will not tell her why; it’s hard to blame her for taking desperate action, even though it ends badly for pretty much everyone.

Mahal is considered one of the great classics of Indian cinema, and I can understand why; the cinematography is great, and it features attractive, doomed people making lovely speeches at each other. On the other hand, it’s difficult for me, sitting in my living room in suburban Utah in the year 2011, to really understand Hari, or “Kamini”, who isn’t exactly a ghost and turns out to have a lot more in common with Hari than either of them realize. These are Tragedy People; they make horrible decisions, then speak beautifully about Fate when things go wrong.

And while he is indeed incredibly gullible, that’s really Hari’s tragic flaw. He knows he’s a Tragedy Person – he wants to be a Tragedy Person. As soon as he sees the portrait, he’s instantly consumed by the idea of being the tragic hero haunted by the ghost of his lost love. It’s easier to pine for the wife you lost in your last life than it is to get to know and learn to live with your wife in this one. Being fifteen for your whole life must be exhausting; it’s no wonder he dies young.

When you wish upon a . . . butterfly?

Once Upon a Warrior (2011) is the story of what happens when nine year old Elora Danan and the blind swordsman Zatoichi team up to save the world and rescue Madame Xanadu from Malificent (as played by Lady Gaga) and her army of brainwashed orc cosplayers. It’s not exactly masala (the movie actually sticks to one genre throughout) but it is certainly Influence Soup.

The kingdom of Sangarashtra is being terrorized by the evil ghostly sorceress Irendri (Lakshmi Manchu, assisted by as much scenery as she can chew), who carries a powerful “Black Eye” which can transform ordinary men into her brainwashed warrior slaves. Desperate for relief, the people turn to the Teardrop Cult, a network of religious hucksters who promise spiritual protection from the power of the Black Eye and are worse than useless when it comes to actually protecting anything.


When the children of the village of Agharta fall sick, hapless everyman Druki (Vallabheneni Ramji) is sent to an isolated mountain monastery to retrieve Moksha (Harshitha), a little girl with amazing healing powers. Moksha will need protecting, and Druki, while brave, isn’t really up to the task, so the blind warrior Yodha (Siddharth) is sent along as her bodyguard.

Almost immediately after the trio set out on their journey, Moksha asks Yodha about his past, which leads to a long flashback about Yodha’s love for the Gypsy fortuneteller Priya (Shruti K. Haasan), and the tragic but clearly foreshadowed end to their romance. Nearly everything in this flashback will later turn out to be incredibly important.

And from there . . . well, it’s an epic quest. Moksha and her friends travel toward Agharta. Irendri’s men try to capture them, for nefarious magical reasons. There’s a visit to Irendri’s creepy fortress, Yodha fights a bunch of guys, we find out what happened to Priya, and it all leads to a dramatic confrontation on the night of the lunar eclipse.

Once Upon A Warrior has a number of clear clear influences, and doesn’t make much effort to hide any of them. Despite this, the film has a very consistent tone throughout; it feels like a modern day cinematic fairy tale. Despite the epic quest trappings and the nation in peril, the stakes are mostly personal, and the star-crossed lovers really are at the center of everything. It’s the kind of story you’d expect from one of Disney’s better animated features, in fact; perhaps that’s not too surprising, since this is billed as Disney’s first live-action Indian film.

Once Upon A Warrior even looks like an animated movie brought to life, with rich colors and gorgeous, improbable landscapes. The special effects are literally fantastic; they’re not always convincing, but they are always magical and imaginative.

Once Upon A Warrior does have some flaws. It takes a while to get really started, and the plot is overshadowed by the atmosphere; as fantasy epics go, there isn’t much plot at all, really. Our heroic band consists of Yodha, Moksha, and Druki, and Druki mostly stands around looking surprised.

I don’t know that anything about this movie is really groundbreaking; the film pulls from a number of sources to create a story that feels comfortably familiar. On the other hand, it looks fantastic, and features a delightfully over-the-top villain, so I don’t really mind.

What could possibly go wrong?

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: After years of research and a final burst of mad genius, a brilliant scientist creates new life, an artificial man. When he rejects his creation for petty reasons, it strikes back at him through the woman he loves, with a little running amok on the side. It’s one of the oldest plots in science fiction, and it’s also the plot of Endhiran (2010).

After ten years of hard work, Doctor Vasi (Rajnikanth) has finally completed his mechanical man, Chitti (also Rajnikath). After a brief interlude to win back the heart of his neglected girlfriend, Sana (Aishwarya Rai Bachchan), Vasi presents his creation to the world, and the world is impressed.

Things don’t go quite so well when Vasi’s colleagues at the university get the chance to examine Chitti. Nobody gets called mad (unfortunately), but when Vasi’s mentor Doctor Bohra (Danny Denzongpa) has the chance to run the robot through its paces, he declares that it’s too dangerous to be allowed to mix with people.

It’s true that Bohra is secretly evil; he’s building an army of killer robots in his basement which he’s hoping to sell to the highest bidder, and he’s consumed with jealousy over Vasi’s success. On the other hand, Bohra is also completely correct. Chitti obeys orders without question, but has no sense of context, no sense of restraint, and no sense of the value of human life. Vasi specifically did not install any form of Asimov’s laws because he hoped to give Chitti to the army, and a soldier might have to take human life. So Vasi has created a robot which could harm or even kill anyone at any time, just because his instructions were not clearly worded. Chitti is far too dangerous to be around people.

Vasi asks for one more chance, and Bohra gives him a month. Vasi decides that the best way to teach his robot about the subtleties of human society is to give it emotions (because we humans have emotions, and we don’t have any trouble getting along.) Thanks in part to a lucky lightning strike, he succeeds, and the new, improved Chitti promptly falls in love with Sana. Tensions mount as Chitti becomes more and more persistent, and rather than install a ‘No Means No’ chip, Vasi dismantles his creation with an axe, and throws the parts away.

And that’s when Bohra finds Chitti, brings him home, repairs him, and installs a special Red Chip which turns the robot from amoral to actively evil. Then he leaves the now malevolent, brilliant, and lovesick robot alone in the basement with his own half-completed army of killer robots. This doesn’t work out well for anybody.

Whenever a movie draws this much inspiration from Frankenstein you can expect heavy-handed subtext about tampering in God’s domain, and the epilogue, set twenty years in the future, certainly implies that everything that went wrong is a natural result of daring to create a machine that can think for itself. I have to say, though, that I’ve never seen anyone tamper in God’s domain quite so incompetently. Vasi creates a robot without any limits on its behavior other than direct orders, and when that proves to be a mistake he adds emotions, giving his creation motivation but still no control. Nobody in this movie has much sense, but Vasi is the dumbest smart guy I’ve seen onscreen in a long time.

However, this is a killer robot movie, not a primer on using science responsibly. And as a killer robot movie, it’s a great success; the fight choreography (by Yuen Woo Ping, the Farah Khan of violence) is dynamic and blissfully implausible, the musical numbers are colorful and frequent, Aishwarya is suitably pretty, and the special effects are quite advanced for an Indian movie, and certainly imaginative. This is a movie with a giant snake made of robots, and that counts for a lot.

He is Franz Cough-ka!

What do you get when you mix a Stephen King story, a glossy Bollywood thriller, a generous helping of Kafka, and perhaps a dash of Bugs Bunny? Even after seeing No Smoking (2007), I’m still not quite sure. It’s certainly interesting.

Because this is, in large part, a Kafka homage, our protagonist is named K (John Abraham). K is a wealthy, self-centered and arrogant businessman who loves smoking, much to the distress of his long-suffering wife Anjali (Ayesha Takia). (K is also conducting a half-hearted affair with his busty secretary Annie (also Ayesha Takia), but she and Anjali may or may not be the same person.)

Anjali is so tired of K’s constant smoking that she leaves him. K decides that he’d rather be married than a smoker, so he visits “The Laboratory,” a recovery facility enthusiastically recommended by his old smoking buddy Abbas (Ranvir Shorey).

The Laboratory turns out to be a maze of stone rooms staffed by wrestlers and women in burqas, in the corner of a forgotten slum which is hidden underneath a dingy carpet shop. The man in charge, Baba Bangali (Paresh Rawal), forces K to sign a contract, then explains the terms. The first time K smokes, his asthmatic brother J (Sanjay M. Singh) will be placed in a room with all the cigarette smoke K has ever exhaled. After the second cigarette, K loses two fingers. After the third, Anjali will be killed. Smoke the fourth cigarette, and J goes back into the room with all the smoke. And if K smokes five times, Baba will have to take extreme measures.

K is, naturally, incredulous, but he quickly discovers that no matter where he goes, the Laboratory are watching him.

K decides to follow the rules, until old friend and cigar entrepreneur Alex (Joy Fernandas) stuffs a cigar in his mouth. And then things get weird.

No Smoking is a very dense film; I’m not sure I’ve figured out exactly what happened, let alone what the deeper meaning might be. On the other hand, I don’t think this is a movie you need to “get” in order to enjoy. It’s a slick, stylish, dark, and visually interesting thriller, worth a watch even if it doesn’t have an easily grasped meaning.

The kids are not okay.

It’s no secret that the Bollywood viewing sections of the internet and I don’t always agree about movies; I am an open, admitted, and unironic fan of Johny Lever, after all. Mela (2000), however, may finally be proof that I am living in Bollywood Bizarro world.

Roopa Singh (Twinkle Khana) is a free-spirited young woman who is loved by all of the happy villagers of Chandanpur, but especially by her brother Ram (Ayub Khan) and Gopal (Omkar Kapoor), a young boy with a serious crush. Ram has fixed Roopa’s marriage to a colleague in a distant vilage, and while Roopa doesn’t want to leave her brother and her home, the other happy villagers convince her to cheer up and come to the village fair, because nothing bad ever happens at village fairs, right?

Something bad happens at the village fair. Bandit leader and part time terrorist Gujjar Singh (Tinnu Verma), in town to assassinate a visiting government minister (Kulbushan Kharbanda), notices Roopa dancing, and decides to abduct her. Before long the village is in chaos, Ram and Gopal are dead, and Roopa has thrown herself off a cliff in order to escape Gujjar’s lecherous clutches.

Roopa survives the fall, miraculously unscathed. She’s angry, afraid, and a little unhinged, and she fixates on the idea of finding her fiance-to-be so that he will protect her and avenge her. To this end, after the usual misunderstandings, she hitches a ride with truck driver Shankar (Faisal Khan) and his sidekick, aspiring actor Kishen (Aamir Khan), who happens to be looking for an actual woman to costar in his new production.

Roopa’s intended turns out to be a huge disappointment, almost as bad as Gujjar. While escaping from him, Roopa runs straight into a band of Gujjar’s henchmen. Fortunately, Shankar and Kishen come to her rescue, and she decides that her avengers and rescuers have been in front of her the whole time.

Roopa may have found her champions, but she still doesn’t really trust them, so rather than tell the truth and ask for their help, she decides to make the already smitten Kishen fall in love with her, thus cementing their loyalty. This . . . is not a great plan.

Mela was a box office disaster. One of the most widely criticized aspects of the film was Twinkle Khanna’s performance, but, and this is probably evidence of my being a resident of Bizarro World, I thought she was really good. Women in Bollywood movies tend to react to atrocity in one of two ways, either lapsing into stereotypical Bollywood insanity, or becoming Kali and killing absolutely everybody. Khanna’s Roopa behaves more like . . . well, like a woman who’s just been through a profound trauma. And a lot of this is conveyed through body language and facial expressions; Roopa visibly shrinks whenever anyone tries to touch her, and during Kishen’s show (which is attended by some of Gujjar’s goons) she alternates between bravado and abject terror. She’s clearly not okay, and it colors every interaction she has.

I won’t pretend Mela is a good movie; it’s a standard Sholay flavored revenge melodrama and Western homage, with broad comedy, a heroine more consistently imperiled than Pauline, a villain who looks like he should be in the Village People, and a plot that doesn’t make an awful lot of sense. On the other hand, the movie features one surprising performance, colorful dance numbers, a few literal cliffhangers, plenty of last minute rescues, and the mighty sideburns of Johny Lever. It may not be a good movie, but it’s certainly not boring.