The walls of Jericho are toppling.

 Kitne Door Kitne Paas (2002) is a fairly typical example of the Indian road trip movie: two attractive young people are forced by strange circumstances to travel together, and while they don't get along at first they eventually fall in love.  It sounds a lot like It Happened One Night, but a lot of Bollywood from the turn of the century sounds like It Happened One Night.

Jatin (Fardeen Khan) is young, rich, and living in America, which makes him perfect son-in-law material to a certain type of Indian parent.  Babu Patel (Tiku Talsania) is that type of Indian parent, so he leaps at the chance to set up a match with his daughter Jaya (Sonali Kolkarni.)  Jatin is an incredibly dutiful son, and he's genuinely delighted to be betrothed, even though he hasn't seen so much as a picture of Jaya.

Jatin and his overly attached best friend Jackie (Nasir Khan) are picking up the engagement ring when they bump into Karishma (Amrita Arora).  There's a misunderstanding leading to a terrible first impression, and during the argument Jatin and Karishma both drop their identical cell phones.  It takes a while, but they eventually realize what happens and agree to meet at the airport to switch their phones back, because Jatin is flying back to India to get ,married,and as it happens Karishma is also flying back to India to get married.  They are on the same flight, but Jatin is a decent person so he leaves her alone instead of harassing her for the entire flight like some Bollywood romantic heroes I could mention.

The trouble starts when they reach Delhi.  Jatin's flight to Gujurat has been cancelled,and the train service isn't running, so he needs to get a cab. The only cab driver willing to take him there has another passenger - Karishma.  She's also getting married in Gujurat. In fact, she's getting married in the same village.  Jatin and Karishma may not like each other, but they're both adults, so they can be civil long enough to reach their destination. What's the worst that could happen?

When the group stops for a meal, the cab driver (Satish Shah, in one of many roles he plays in this film) gets into a fight and is arrested. Jatin and Karishma are in a hurry, so they decide to take the cab; naturally,this ends with them getting arrested.  Fortunately Police Inspector Limbachia (Shehzad Khan) assumes that they're newlyweds; Jatin and Karishma try to correct him,but since he's going easy on them because he thinks they're newlyweds they don't try very hard. I'm sure this will have no negative consequences.

 And from there . . . well,it's a road trip movie.  They bounce from one mode of transportation to another, encountering one misadventure after another, and along the way they talk to each other and realize that they are attractive young people with a great deal in common, including dedication to their parents and a positive attitude toward arranged marriage.

Eventually they run into Limbachia again, and instead of just taking them to the village he puts them on a private bus that's been chartered by a family celebrating the anniversary of their grandparents (Rammohan Sharma and Beena Banerjee.)  Thanks to Limbachia the family thinks that Jatin and Karishma are married, and they insist that the young people stay for the party, take part in rituals, and consult with the family priest (Satish Shah again) about their future married life together, which leads to even more rituals.

By this point Karishma and Jatin are obviously in love, but neither one wants to admit it, so they part and rejoin their respective families, secure in the knowledge that they will never see each other again.  But of course it's not that simple - Jaya and Karishma are best friends, the families are close, and as the wedding day approaches (they're getting married on the same day,at the same time, in the same venue) so everybody will be spending a lot of time together.

Naturally there's a great deal of angst as the two young lovers try to pretend not to be in love.  It's not a secret that you can keep forever, but everyone who finds out is pretty understanding - even Karishma's strict traditional father (Govind Namdev) places her happiness above any potential embarrassment.  But Karishma is a very traditional girl, and she won't do anything to risk the family prestige, while Jatin will follow her lead no matter what, so the weddings are on.  It would take a miracle to unite these two, or a daring rescue from a raging fire.  Or actually asking Jaya what she wants.

There are a lot of these road trip movies in Bollywood, and Kitne Door Kitne Paas follows the formula almost exactly, though there's a greater emphasis on the needless self sacrifice.  The fire leads to a genuinely well-crafted and exciting action scene in which absolutely nobody gets punched, and that's a nice surprise, but in the end it's another movie about modern young people sacrificing their love for their traditional family values and getting what they want in the end anyway.

On the other hand, this movie has aged better than many other Indian road trip movies because Jatin doesn't start out as a sexist jerk.  The initial bad impression is the result of a genuine misunderstanding, he doesn't hit on Karishma during the road trip,and he's happy to listen to the women that he meets along the way.  That's rare for a Bollywood hero of the era, and really rare for one played by Fardeen Khan.

On the other other hand, Babu Patel makes a lot of references to American politics of the time, and they haven't aged well at all.  It's a very minor aspect of the movie, though.

I don't care if Monday's Blue.

 Blue (2009) has a very simple plot.  Professional diver Sagar (Sanjay Dutt) knows the location of the Lady in Blue, a ship which sank in 1949, carrying a fantastic treasure.  he does not want to look for the treasure, but eventually he does, and also Kylie Minogue shows up for an item number.

It's not quite that simple, but it's pretty close to that simple.  Sagar lives in the Bahamas, and he works with and for Aarav (Akshay Kumar), who is wealthy, cocky, and a determined womanizer.  Sagar, on the other hand, just wants a quiet life with his gorgeous girlfriend Mona (Lara Dutta), who dreams of opening an aquatic wildlife center.

Sagar's father was a marine archeologist, and it's rumored that he found the Lady in Blue, took some of the treasure, and abandoned his two sons.  Aarav thinks that Sagar should find the wreck, secure his future, and fund Mona's institute, but Sagar doesn't want to, so instead the two men spend their time bonding in various macho ways, like boxing and rescuing a hat from a shark.

But Sagar does have a brother.  Sam (Zayed Khan) ran away five years ago, and now he's competing in underground motorcycle street races in Bangkok.  He defeats gangster Gulshan (Rahul Dev), in the process scoring a date with Gulshan's employee Nikki (Katrina Kaif.)  Gulshan is also impressed, and offers Sam a job; he'll pay him 50,000 dollars to carry a package across town. After a bit of macho posturing, Sam takes the job.

After Sam leaves, Gulshan calls the police.  Suddenly there are four police motorcycles chasing Sam, leading to an enormous, almost apocalyptic amount of collateral damage, and also Sam losing the package.  Gulshan contacts him and tells him that he wants to be paid fifty million dollars as compensation.  There's no possible way that Sam could pay that much money, so he has to run before Gulshan kills him.  Nikki asks if he can think of anywhere he could run to, and Sam tells the woman he barely knows who works for the man trying to kill him that he'll be staying with his brother in the Bahamas.

The brothers are reunited, and then nothing happens for awhile.  Sam and Sagar hang out with Aarav for a while, they go to a club and meet Kylie Minogue, and Sagar still doesn't want to look for the Lady in Blue.

And then Gulshan shows up, threatens Sam, blows up Sagar's house, kidnaps Mona, and indicates that he would like fifty million dollars please. As it happens, Sagar knows the location of a sunken ship filled with treasure, so he teams up with Sam and Aarav to find the shipwreck and dive for the treasure.

So much diving.  The underwater scenery is impressive, but the diving scenes are sloooow and dialogue free, so the momentum grinds to a halt whenever the characters go underwater.  That's not the only padding in the movie, though.  The bike races are long, the chase scenes are long, and the the endless discussions of whether Sagar should look for the Lady in Blue are long.  There's a whole lot of nothing happening in the movie, then a very frenetic ending to wrap everything up.

That's not the problem with Blue.  The problem is that the film thinks we like Aarav.  Sagar's the protagonist, but he's written to be stolid and kind of dull (which is a shame, because Dutt is at his best when he gets to be funny and roguish) so Aarav is supposed to be the lovable scamp.  He's not. He's sleazy, obnoxious, overbearing, and insufferably smug.  This is supposed to be a pulpy adventure, but it takes forever to get to the adventure, so we just have to watch Sagar mope and Aarav brag about his money, his many girlfriends,and the fact that he always wins.

On the plus side, the music is by A. R. Rahman, and he is reliably good.

Even a man who is pure in heart.

 Bhediya (2022) is set in the heavily forested state of Arunchal Pradesh, in the northeastern part of India, and it draws from local folklore, especially the Yapum, a type of forest spirit known to take the shape of a wolf.  That's not all it draws from, though; other influences include The Wolf Man, 1982's Cat People, and just a dash of Spider-Man.

After a cold open involving a fairy tale interrupted by a wolf attack, the film cuts to ambitious young contractor Bhaskar (Varun Dhawan) updating his employer, Bagga (Saurabh Shukla), on his current assignment.  They plan to build a road straight through the jungle in a rural corner of Arunchal Pradesh, and Bhaskar is supposed to win over the locals.

Bhaskar collects his quirky cousin J. D. (Abhishek Banerjee) and meets with his local contact Jomin (Paalin Kabak). They are joined by another local, Panda (Deepak Dobriyal), who also serves as the designated dispenser of spooky warnings about the forest and its spirits not taking kindly to development projects.  Bhaskar and friends blow off the warnings, until one night in the forest Bhaskar is bitten by a wolf.  

He's bitten on the backside, but it is a serious injury requiring medical treatment, and on Jomin's advice they avoid the hospital and instead seek help from the local veterinarian, Anika (Kriti Sanon.)  And in the morning, Bhaskar is . . .  fine? His wound has healed basically overnight, and there have been other changes.  His sense of hearing has improved, and his sense of smell has improved even more.

It's not all good news, though.  Bhaskar also suffers from sudden flashes of temper, and he can understand the local animals, which will not shut up.  He begins waking up in strange places. Local businessmen who have been bribed to support the road project are attacked by some sort of wild animal, and something Bhaskar ate is disagreeing with him.

Bhaskar and his friends quickly realize what's happening; the bite has transformed Bhaskar, and on full moon nights he's striking at those who threaten the forest.  They don't think to ask who bit Bhaskar, though, and instead focus on finding some way to lift the werewolf's curse.  

They're not the only ones who have noticed, though. The police consider Bhaskar to be the prime suspect in the attacks, and at least one local officer has connected Bhaskar to the local legends about the Yapum.  In addition, the authorities have hired a band of crack hunters to deal with the wolf problem, so the forest is in danger, Bhaskar is in danger, and his friends are in danger, and the only solution is for Bhaskar to stop acting like a Hollywood werewolf and start acting like a shapechanging forest spirit.

Bhediya is a part of the Maddock Supernatural Universe, along with Stree and Stree 2, and like the Stree movies it's not afraid to tackle social issues; in addition to the obvious environmental message the movie deals with the prejudice that Northeastern Indians face.  It's a solid horror comedy in its own right,though, playing with the Hollywood werewolf mythos but remaining its own thing.  And while J. D. was actually in Stree, the movie stands alone and the connection isn't really mentioned until Vicky shows up in the end credits scene.

No grannies were shoved in the making of this movie.

 Triple Seat (2019) opens with renowned lawyer Jehangir Irani (Rakesh Bedi) being interviewed on stage.  The interviewer asks him about which cases he won but wishes that he had lost, and Irani immediately becomes wistful and spins a tale of the time when three men broke into his house late at night to ask for legal advice.  Krushna (Ankush Chaudhari) starts telling his story, which means that after only a few minutes we're already two flashbacks in.

Krushna is a good guy who works hard to support his family.  He drives a van that operates as a sort of bus service for the neighborhood, and business is good. Krushna can be a bit naive, but once he gives his word on something he absolutely will not back down, so when he receives a desperate phone call from a young woman who claims to have been kidnapped asking that he buy some minutes for her cell phone so that she can call her family, he's happy to help.  

Krushna doesn't just pay for minutes, though. He goes straight to the police station and reports the kidnapping. Inspector Bahurao (Pravin Tarde) is suspicious, and he's proven right almost immediately when the girl, calling herself Meera (Shivani Surve), calls to thank Krushna; it turns out the kidnapping was all just a college prank.

Against all odds, Krushna and Meera become "missed call friends," basically pen pals but with phone calls instead of letters. They agree to never meet, but tell each other about their lives. Meera talks about her abusive and controlling father (Vaibhav Mangale), while Krushna shares his struggles with his own widowed and alcoholic father (Vidyadhar Joshi.)

Eventually there is good news!  Krushna's family have found a match for his younger sister (Shilpa Thakre), and the families got along so well that everyone agreed to a double wedding, with Krushna marrying the groom's beautiful sister Vrunda (Pallavi Patil).  Krushna invites Meera to the wedding ceremony, but Meera reminds him that they were never supposed to meet, and jokes that if she comes Krushna will end up marrying her instead. Unfortunately her father overhears that part of the conversation, hits her, breaks her phone, and threatens to marry her off in two days.

Krushna's engagement ceremony starts well, but then Inspector Bahurao shows up to arrest him for kidnapping a girl named  Tanvi; Krushna is the last person to have called her, he's been calling her for ages, and it quickly becomes clear that "Meera" has been Tanvi all along.  Her parents beg him to release their daughter, but when she arrives at the police station, there's a whole lot of shouting.

Bahurao solves the problem as best he can: he's adopting Tanvi, effective immediately, her father isn't allowed to hit anyone, and because he assumes that Tanvi and Krushna are in love, he insists that they get married right away and won't listen to any arguments otherwise.

So Krushna is married to the wrong woman, his sister's marriage is off, and his entire family blames Tanvi.  The new couple take different paths to figure out what to do. Krushna and his friends break into the home of respected lawyer Jehangir Irani, closing one of the flashbacks, and Irani suggests a mutually agreed no fault divorce.  They'll have to wait six months, they can't tell anyone until the divorce goes through, and he needs to marry Vrunda immediately afterwards.

Tanvi talks to her mother, who tells her that marriages are made in heaven and she needs to make this marriage work, adding that the only way to do that is with the power of unconditional love. Tanvi is in a classic Bollywood romance situation,living in her beloved's house under false pretenses,and tasked with winning his family over, though with the added difficulty that she needs to win her beloved over as well.  So she Shah Rukhs the heck out of things, making everybody's  lives better even if that means giving Krushna his divorce. Krushna starts to waver, but he took a vow, and he will fulfill  it and marry Vrunda and get his sister married as well, even though both matches were arranged and nobody else is that hung up on it.

This is romance as puzzle, an "unsolved case,"as Irani puts it.  They may try to build a little suspense, but there's no question of what the end will be, so you watch to find out how they get there.  And on those terms, it's a pleasant little mystery.

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.