Bhooty Call - Om Shanti Om

Unlike most of this month's movies, Om Shanti Om (2007) is not a horror movie in any way, shape or form.  It's a masala flick, a heady mix of comedy, romance, reincarnation revenge melodrama, and enthusiastic celebration of all things Bollywood.  It makes the cut because it also features the rare Reverse Scooby Doo, in which our scrappy heroes fake a haunting in order to scare Old Man Mehra into confessing to a murder.

Om Prakash Makhija (Shahrukh Khan) is a "junior artist", an extra who makes his living through bavkground parts in the glsmourous world of 1970's Bollywood.  He has a loyal best friend, Pappu (Shreyas Talpade), a loving and overdramatic mother (Khiron Kher), and a dream.  One day he will be a big star, live in a big house, and get to meet Shanti (Deepika Padukone), the famous actress that he worships from afar. 

 Om gets the chance to meet Shanti sooner than he expected, when there's a fire on set and he leaps through the flames to rescue her.  She's grateful, and agrees to spend one evening with him.  With Pappu's help, he pulls out all the stops, and arranges a magical evening on an empty set.  Shanti is delighted, and they part as friends.

But Shanti has a secret; she's secretly married to producer Mukesh Mehra (Arjun Rampal).  When Om finds out, he's heartbroken, but lets her go and, after a sad song, throws himself into his acting.

Unfortunately, Mukesh also has a secret: he's engaged to another producer's daughter, and can't have Shanti around to spoil things.  She pleads with him to reconsider, but it goes badly.  Really badly.

Mukesh burns the set down with Shanti inside, then as he leaves sends some goons to make sure she doesn't escape.  Om turns up at just the right time, tries to save her, is beaten by the goons, burned, blown up, and then hit by a car.  he dies.

And thirty years later, Om Kapoor is a big star living in a big house.  Life is great, apart from his severe pyrophobia and the crazy old lady who keeps showing up at his film shoots claiming to be his mother. 

And then Om goes to a film shoot at an abandoned studio that burned down thirty years ago, and meets his father's old friend Mukesh, and the memories of his last life all come flooding back.  He tracks down his previous mother and Pappu, and they come up with a plan.  Om will recruit Mukesh to produce the film he abandoned thirty years ago, then they will use a duplicate Shanti to convince him he's being haunted, driving him to confess to her murder.  And soon enough they find their duplicate Shanti when clumsy, start struck Sandy (also Deepika Padukone) auditions for the lead.

Writer-director Farah Khan clearly loves Bollywood, and this movie is stuffed with all the things she loves about it.  In all my years of watching Bollywood, this is the Bollywoodest bit of Bollywood that I have ever witnessed.  And it is well made.  Khan made her name as a choreographer, and the dance numbers are frequent and lively and shot with a choreographer's eye; the last number recaps the entire plot so far in a splashy Broadway style number which doubles as an exemplar of "I know what you did and I'm gonna get ya" because she's Farah Khan, and she can do that. 

And then there's Shahrukh Khan.  Khan is a gifted actor, but he rarely has a chance to demonstrate that fact; people want to see his carefully crafted persona, and so that is what he delivers.  Fortunately, he's really, really good at delivering his carefully crafted persona, and Om Shanti Om was written to play to his strengths.  SRK deserves some special credit for the celebrity cameo-filled song "Deewangi Deewangi", which requires him to establish distinct relationships with thirty one different celebrities, all in the space of a few seconds each, while dancing.  He manages to communicate a lot through small gestures.

Om Shanti Om is packed with the things I love about late Nineties/early Oughts Bollywood, and manages to cram in most of my favorite actors in the bargain.  It's one Johny Lever cameo short of the full experience.

Bhooty Call - Tumbbad

Tumbbad (2018) begins by explaining the story's cosmology.  When the world was new, the Goddess of Plenty (who possessed infinite gold and infinite food) gave birth to sixteen million gods, but her favorite child was her firstborn, Hastar.  Hastar was greedy, and claimed all the gold for himself, but when he tried to take the food as well, the sixteen million other gods fought back.  They would have destroyed him, but the Goddess hid him away in her womb, on the condition that his name doesn't appear in any of the ancient histories and no one worships him, ever.  It's a very evocative myth, and it is wrong in one important detail.

Of course, you can't keep a god secret forever, and in the cursed village of Tumbbad, Hastar has attracted a cult of worshippers,  Not much of a cult, really.  There's a bedridden Sarkaar (madhave hari Joshi), his long-suffering servant/mistress (Jyothi Malshe), their two sons Vinayak (Dhundiraj Prabhakar Jogalekar) and Sadashiv (Rudra Soni), and the Sarkaar's great grandmother (Piyush Kaushik), who has become a withered, eternally hungry monster that they keep chained up, well fed, and asleep.  (She is basically Gollum, only slightly more monstrous.) 

And everything is . . . well, not fine.  Pretty damned bleak, in fact.  The Sarkaar has wasted his life looking for the family's fabled treasure, with only a single gold coin to show for it.  he uses the coin to string Vinayak's mother along, because somebody has to keep Granny from waking up and eating everybody. And then the Sarkaar dies, and things go from bleak to actively terrible.  Sadashiv falls from the mansion wall, and his mother rushes him to a doctor, leaving Vinayak to feed Granny.  But Granny wakes up.  Vinayak barely survives, but Sadashiv doesn't.  His mother takes him away to Pune, and makes him swear never to return to Tumbbad.

Years later, Vinayak (now played by Sohum Shah) returns to Tumbbad.  Granny has been reduced to a withered husk, with a tree growing out of her body, and she is still alive and lucid enough to reveal the secret of the family treasure.  He returns to Pune with a handful of gold coins, and then another, and then another, enabling him to build a new life with his wife (Anita Date), but also making his pawnbroker (Deepak Damle) suspicious.

Despite the cursed mansion and the horrible undead grandmother, this is not a ghost story.  It's cosmic horror - the forgotten god is even named Hastar!  It presents a bleak, uncaring universe in which humans are destroyed by a combination of forbidden knowledge and their own avarice, like a combination of "The King in Yellow" and Erich von Stroheim's "Greed."  It's also top of the line cosmic horror: well written, wonderfully acted, with beautiful cinematography.  And it is so, so bleak.

Bhooty Call - Stree

Over the course of my many Octobers, I have learned one thing about ghost stories: the good ones are never just about the ghost.  That's certainly the case with Stree (2018). 

The men of the small town of Chanderi have a problem.  A ghost (and possibly a witch; the lines are blurry in Indian cinema) called Stree (Flora Saini) abducts men she catches out alone at night.  Naturally, the men are terrified. They want to run.  They want to hide.  It's scary when you live where the Stree has no name.

(And the stree literally has no name; near as I can tell, the word just translates to "woman" or "female."  Naturally, this will be important later.)

One man who isn't particularly worried is Vicky (Rajkumar Rao), a brilliant tailor who believes that he's destined for greater things.  he hopes that one of the greater things he's destined for is a mysterious woman (Shraddha Kapoor) who asked him to sew a dress for her.  And the woman seems to like Vicky as well!  She asks to meet up later, and it's only slightly odd that she asks for a few ordinary household items like brandy and a lizard's tail and the hair of a white cat.  Vicky's friends Bittu (Aparshakti Khurana) and Janna (Abhishek Banerjee) are a little more suspicious, since the woman doesn't have a phone and never actually enters the temple grounds and nobody but Vicky has ever seen her and even he still doesn't know her name, but every relationship has it's issues, right?

It's no coincidence that both of the female leads are unnamed.  (Actually, looking back, I don't think any women are named onscreen.)   This looks an awful lot like one of the stories men have been telling each other for generations that asks "What would happen if women treated us the way we treat them?"  Within the story, many of the men think that's exactly what's going on, resorting to women's clothing as a way to escape Stree's wrathful gaze, and the (fairly stupid) plan our heroes come up with to deal with Stree and get their friends back certainly plays to those tropes.  But it is explicitly a stupid plan; the real solution, as Vicky eventually realizes, is to treat Stree with respect, as a person.

So, is it scary?  Not really.  There are some intense moments, but the ghost story develops slowly, and the movie is much more interested in its cast of small town goofballs.  But then, it's not really about the ghost.  It's about respect.

Bhooty Call - Mohini

I've seen a lot of Bollywood ghost stories over the years.  Sometimes they're horror stories.  Sometimes they're revenge melodramas. Sometimes they're goofy slapstick comedies.  And sometimes you get a movie like Mohini (2018), which tries to be all of them at once.

Vaishnavi (Trisha)  is a popular chef and You-tuber who agrees to travel to London for stupid and contrived reasons and pretend to be the assistant to incompetent chef Cotton (Yogi Babu.)  Vaishu is staying in a house full of comic relief (including Swaminathan, Ganeshkar, and Jangiri Madhumitha) and, well, wackiness ensues.

Vaishu is also sort of haunted - even when she's still in India, the ghost is able to reach out and swat away an obsessed fan who breaks into her house, and once she reaches London the ghost emerges long enough to scare the comic relief, at one point yelling at them for doing stupid comedy bits when she's trying to haunt them. 

Vaishu's life is not all ghosts and slapstick though; she also meets a man!  Rohit (Jackky Bhagani) is rich and charming and frankly a little too happy to make major life decisions without consulting her.  The ghost is also occasionally possessing Vaishu at this point in order to avenge her murders, but still leaves time for the young lovers to get engaged.  They're happy, right up until the point when Vaishu meets Rohit's father, KVR (Mukesh Tiwari.)  The ghost definitely recognizes him, and we get some exposition via flashback.

Mohini (also Trisha) was an architect working for KVR's construction firm.  She accidentally stumbled upon the secret child sacrifice ring KVR has been using to "bless" his building projects (apparently child sacrifice for construction purposes that there's an entire shadow industry devoted to it, including a warehouse full of children.  In London.)  KVR was arrested and promptly released, and he and his goons murdered Mohini for her inflexible attitudes about child sacrifice.

So Mohini is back, she's ticked, and she's wiping out her killers one by one.  So far I am firmly on Team Ghost.  The problem is that she's decided that even though Rohit had nothing to do with his father's crimes, he really needs to die too, and she's not that keen on giving Vaishu her body back . . .

Let me be absolutely clear: this is a very silly movie.  The special effects are endearingly cheap, and the whole movie takes place in the weird parallel universe London you see in Indian movies sometimes; there is apparently only one church in the city, and it is right by a huge waterfall that runs through the nearby forest.  The action scenes, when Mohini hunt down her killers, are fun, but there aren't enough of them, and instead the film is padded with too many comic characters.  And the plot just doesn't make a lot of sense.  The film is occasionally entertaining, but it's the kind of movie which would be greatly improved by commentary from sarcastic robots.

State of the blog.

The Gorilla's Lament has been back in business for exactly two weeks, and we already have more than two hundred reviews posted!  Obviously, the rate of new posts is going to slow down a bit, especially since I've run out of posts from the old blog to bring over.  I still don't have everything from the prior incarnation of the Gorilla's Lament, but at this point I'm just happy to have saved anything.

I'm hard at work putting together a review index, and I also need to get the tags organized so that they're a useful addition to the site.  And of course, Bhooty Call 2019 continues.

So, still plenty to do, and more content still to come!

Bhooty Call - Anjaan: SCU

It's very tempting to compare Anjaan: Special Crimes Unit (2018) to the X-Files.  After all, both series feature a skeptic and a true believer investigating paranormal cases, and both shows combine "mythology" episodes which are tightly tied to an ongoing plotline with monsters of the week.  (Or monsters of the day - during its original run Anjaan ran on a soap opera schedule rather than as a weekly show.)  In this case, our skeptic is tough talking Mumbai cop Vikrant Singhal (Gashmeer Mahajani) and the true believer is psychic rookie cop Shivani Joglekar (Cherry Mardia), who just wants to find out what happened to her brother; later Delhi police officer Aditi Sharma (Heema Parmar) joins the team. 

Rather than aliens and liver eating mutants, the Special Crimes Unit deals with cases involving ghosts and cursed objects, along with the occasional yellow eyed demon and one vishkanya in a small but crucial role.  The big difference between Anjaan and the X-Files, though, is the way the officers are treated.  Mulder and Scully are considered a laughingstock, work out of a basement, and constantly have to worry about conspiracies above them in the chain of command.  Vikrant and the gang work out of their own (admittedly haunted) police station, and they are respected and generally deferred to by the other police they encounter.  Broadly speaking, when there's something strange in a given neighborhood, the local police know whom to call.

However, the X-Files isn't the only series that Anjaan reminds me of.  Some major plot elements are very reminiscent of the gloriously cheesy Nineties superhero serial Shaktimaan.  Both shows prominently feature mysterious sages, ancient symbols, heroes of uncertain parentage, and a drug that can turn humans into demons, and both Anjaan's Vanraj and Shaktimaan's Tamraj Kilvish are Satanic figures devoted to spreading evil and sin through the human world. The tone is entirely different, of course, and Vanraj comes across as Kilvish's edgy younger brother.

So is it scary?  Well, sometimes.  It's a show made for TV audiences, which means that gore is limited, and they tend to lean into Bollywood ghost story tropes rather than try to subvert them, which can make the scary moments kind of predictable.  On the other hand, those same tropes are often very well executed; I'm still a little unsettled by the haunted wedding bus and the hungry old lady, as well as the way the yellow eyed demons move.  One final word of warning, though: the baddies on this show can and do sometimes harm children, so if that's an issue, this may not be the show for you.

Bhooty Call 2019

It's almost October.  The nights are getting longer, the wind is getting colder, and something is stirring.  If you're careful, you can catch a glimpse as it meanders through ruined havelis, down creepy rural roads, and into the corners of poorly lit apartment buildings.  The Gorilla's Lament is back from the dead, but something came with it.  

It's almost October.  Time for a Bhooty Call.

The Bhooty Call is one of our favorite traditions here at the Gorilla's Lament offices, a month-long celebration of the many ghosts of Bollywood.  Look for a batch of scary and not-so-scary movies (and this year, one TV show) starting in October.