Love and elephants.

Dil Tera Hogaya (2020)  is a little different from my usual fare; it's not just a movie from Pakistan, it's a TV movie from Pakistan.  It manages to feel very familiar, but with a few notable differences.

Ahmad (Jawed Sheikh) and his brother Arshad (Farhan Ally Agha) live together in their family estate in Pakistan.  The brothers get along well, but their wives, Fehmi (Saba Faisal) and Zoobi (Shaheen Khan), respectively, do not.  The women were childhood friends, but they've had a serious falling out, and they've partitioned the house, with Chanda the maid (Mizna Waqas) moving back and forth between the feuding in-laws, taking advantage where she can.

Fehmi works as a dressmaker and designer, though it seems that a good part of her business is making copies of other designers.  She's assisted by her son Annu (Feroze Khan), and she's raised him to be just as invested in the family feud as she is.  Zoobi has a YouTube channel where she cooks recipes she's stolen form other chefs, and her daughter Roma (Zara Noor Abbas) is even more eager to pick fights.  Annu and Roma do most of the actual feuding, in fact; as the movie starts, Roma lets the air out of Annu's tires so she can reach a job interview before him, he shows up to confront her, and they argue so loudly and vehemently that they're both kicked out of the building.

Ahmad and Arshad are on separate business trips to Dubai, but it's really an excuse top spend some time together without their family being actively horrible to one another.  They're trying to find a way to heal the family rift, but everything changes when Fehmi faints and is diagnosed with a brain tumor.  The men rush home, and for a while, the feud is forgotten and Zoobi and Fehmi are as close as they ever were.  Fehmi is particularly interested in getting Annu married before she dies, and Zoobi agrees to help.

Meanwhile, Roma and Annu are speaking civilly to one another for perhaps the first time in their lives, and they maybe don't hate each other after all?  Maybe they love each other?  The transition from sworn enemies to secret love interests happens really quickly, though to be fair it's a relatively short TV movie and they need to get to the song already.  Also, they grew up in the same house so they don't need to spend a lot of time getting to know each other.

And then disaster strikes.  The sisters-in-law overhear their husbands bragging about their successful scheme to bring the family closer together and get Roma and Annu married by faking Fehmi's cancer diagnosis.  Rather than get mad at their husbands, which would be sensible because convincing someone they're terminally ill is a genuinely awful thing to do, they're mad at one another.  The feud is back on, and now they're competing to see who can get their child married first.  Will Roma and Annu find a way to be together?

No.  That's not how things work in this kind of family drama/romance.  They'll make some noble speeches and give up their love for the sake of their family, but other characters will have an offscreen change of heart and everything will work out in the end. These movies don't normally end with the young couple directly addressing the camera to tell the audience that Eid is a great time to reconcile with your family and settle all your differences, but Dil Tera Hogaya was originally presented as  a holiday special, so fair enough.

So, elephant in the room.  Arshad and Ahmad are brothers, which means that Roma and Annu are first cousins.  That's a cultural thing; cousin marriage is both legal and relatively common in Pakistan, and I am not going be critiquing a culture that is not my own here.  I will say that growing up in the same household does push the dynamic closer to squabbling siblings than I would like.

Elephants aside, this is very Nineties Bollywood family drama, with big emotions, lots of talk about family values, protagonists who are kind of terrible until they fall in love, and everyone getting forgiven in the end.  It's just shorter, with one song, a handful of sets, and a small cast who mostly live in the same house.

Et tu, Jackie?

 I'm not sure what Mark Antony (2023) is trying to be.  Time travel comedy?  Gangster melodrama?  Incredibly loose Shakespeare adaptation?  Satirical commentary on all of the above?  Whatever it is, though, it commits to the bit.

 

In 1975, scientist Chiranjeevi (Selvaraghavan) has finally completed his grand invention, a telephone with the power to call the past.  he tests the phone by calling his past self, preventing an accident which cost his wife (Anitha Sampath) a leg and a teaching career.  After a bit of further experimenting, he figures out the rules; there are a lot of them, but the important ones are that the phone can only call a particular number once per day (as perceived by the receiver, not the caller), the phone can absolutely change the past, and only the caller will remember the original timeline.  he goes out to a nightclub to celebrate, and is shot during the assassination of powerful gangster Antony (Vishal.)  A dying Chiranjeevi tries to use the phone to save himself, fails, and dies with a quick speech about how no man can cheat fate, despite the fact that he has already cheated fate more than once.  

In 1995, Antony's old partner Jackie (S. J. Suryah) has taken over the business, and rules as the town's sole godfather.  Jackie is a benevolent crimelord, and is especially devoted to taking care of Antony's son Mark (also Vishal).  Mark is grateful, but he has absolutely no interest in a life of crime, because he blames his father for the murder of his mother Vedhavalli (Abhinaya).  Instead, he works as a mechanic and dreams of marrying the beautiful Ramya (Ritu Varma) and moving to a place where no one knows about his shameful family history.

Jackie's own son, Madhan (also S. J. Suryah) is very interested in a life of crime, and is planning to murder his father and take over the organization.  He's not very good at it, though,  and Jackie either doesn't notice or doesn't care, so everyone maintains a comfortable but dysfunctional equilibrium.

And then everything changes.  Ramya's mother discovers that Mark's father was the notorious Antony, so any hope of an engagement is shattered.  And then he discovers a phone locked in a suitcase stuffed in a car that used to belong to Ramya's deceased uncle Chiranjeevi.  He discovers a notebook giving instructions for how to use the phone, starts making calls, and things get weird.  

Mark wants to learn what his father was really like, so he uses the phone to prevent the death of  Antony's lawyer (Nizhalgal Ravi) and arranges a meeting in order to ask him.  He does, and discovers that his father was actually a loving husband and wonderful person, and all the drug peddling, gun running and prostitution was actually Jackie's doing, while Antony used his crime ring to protect the community.  Jackie pops up to confirm that yes, he's been the villain all along, and he's going to kill them both.  Mark manages to call his father, and history changes.

In the new timeline, Jackie is dead, Antony is gone, Mark is the crimelord and Madhan is the mechanic.  Nobody is happy.  This version of Ramya hates Mark, Mark doesn't have the skills to runa  criminal empire, and Madhan wants money, power, and revenge on Mark.  Mark tries to fix things using the phone, then Madhan steals it and calls his father, leading to a series of failed assassination attempts and a brief appearance by eighties sex symbol Silk Smitha (Vishnu Priya Gandhi).

That synopsis makes Mark Anthony sound almost mundane, just a South Indian gangster action comedy mixed with Back to the Future.  And it is, most of the time, but everything is stylized and tremendously stylized and really big.  The action scenes aren't quite Bahubali level, but they are impressively improbable, particularly the big set piece on a double decker bus.  And then 1995 Antony appears and takes everything up a level.

The plot, on the other hand, is pretty much nonsense, with time travel rules that make Back to the Future seem like hard science fiction.  And I'm still not sure if the movie is trying to be a loose adaptation of Julius Caesar, with Antony literally stabbed in the back by a circle of his closest friends and Mark trying to avenge him and right the ship of (criminal) state.

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.

Bhooty Call: Tooth Pari

 The premise of Tooth Pari: When Love Bites (2023) sounds like the opening to a terrible joke: a vampire with a broken tooth falls in love with a dentist with a fear of blood.  However, while the series is billed as a horror-comedy, and it is indeed quite funny at times, it takes its world and especially its central relationship completely seriously.  That makes all the difference.

Kolkata is divided into two different worlds.  Humans live in Upar, or "Above," and go about their ordinary lives in an entirely ordinary way.  They don't know about Neeche, or "Below," an underground complex that is home to a clan of thirty vampires, led by Ora (Anish Ralikar), but watched over by AD (Adil Hussain), a human who cares for the vampires' needs and enforces the rules as part of an ancient agreement between the clan and his family.

The rules are simple.  Vampires don't go to Upar.  If they do, they don't drink blood, they don't kill anyone, and they definitely don't convert any new vampires.  In return, the vampires can enjoy all the comforts of Neeche, and they are provided with blood from the local blood bank and protection form the Cutmundus, a secret society of elderly but dangerous vampire hunters led by the powerful witch Luna Luka (Revathi).

The youngest member of the clan, Rumi (Tanya Maniktala), feel suffocated by all the rules.  She makes frequent, secret trips to Upar with the help of two of her elders, classical dancer Meera (Tillotama Shome) and former revolutionary and current namedropper David (Saswata Chatterjee).  Rumi is careful; she targets lonely single men and men trying to cheat on their wives, bites gently, takes a little blood and brings back a few vials of the fresh stuff for her friends down below.  She also hypnotizes them so all they remember is a failed romantic encounter.  What's the harm?

And then Rumi bites the wrong neck, drinking a little too deeply and leaving her tooth behind.  Fortunately, there's a dentist nearby who works late hours.  Bikram Roy (Shantanu Maheshwari) is not a great dentist, thanks to the aforementioned fear of blood, but it is the family business, so he does his best, though he'd rather be cooking for his secret YouTube channel, "The Anonymous Chef."  Rumi meets Roy, they get along well, and since he needs her original tooth to make repairs, they keep meeting.  part of the attraction is blood, admittedly; during their first meeting he accidentally cut his finger and a drop fell into her open mouth, accidentally revealing that Roy is a virgin and his blood tastes amazing.  But it's not just the special blood.  Rumi has had a hard life, and Doc Roy is a genuinely kind person, so she can't help but be drawn to him.  Surely this innocent flirtation won't trigger a chain of events that threatens to reveal the existence of Neeche and set Kolkata on fire, right?

And then there's Sub-Inspector Kartik Pal (Sikander Kher), and his father Biren (Anjan Dutt).  Biren was also a policeman but now suffers from Alzheimers and won't stop talking about the vampires he fought on one terrible night decades ago.  Biren's reputation has stalled Kartik's career, so he drinks a lot and is assigned all the worst cases, including a man who claims to have been bitten by a "beautiful ghost" at a party.  While investigating that case, Kartik meets a beautiful girl named Rumi, and steps on some sort of animal's tooth, cutting his foot badly.

The love story plays out in fairly typical Bollywood fashion; Roy and Rumi grow closer, learning to trust and rely on one another, but she's keeping a big secret and he finds out about it from the wrong person, and he doesn't take it well.  Thanks in part to his overbearing parents, Roy is so insecure that he can't really accept that Rumi loves him for him, so when he finds out that she's secretly a bloodsucking creature of the night, he assumes that she's only after his blood, and goes too far in his efforts to confirm his suspicions.

Meanwhile, AD has realized that someone is visiting Upar and wants to crack down, Luna has reunited the Cutmundus and kills a vampire in Roy's office, and Kartik is limping around the fringes, getting closer and closer to proving his suspicion that Roy is an evil vampire who has ensnared innocent Rumi with his spooky vampire powers.

 It's a lot of plot spread over eight episodes, and the series takes its time, wrapping things up in the last episode only to introduce a handful of new and surprising plot threads out of nowhere, clearly setting up a second season.  Still, the leads are charming, Luna is an engaging villain, and the series always made me care enough to watch the next episode.

Bhooty Call: Hotel

 Hotel (1981) has a lot of Ramsays in the credits, and there's a reason for that.  This is a product of the infamous Ramsay family, who spearheaded the Indian horror renaissance in the 1970s and 80s.  The Ramsay films were famously low budget, capitalizing on gore and exploitation in order to bring in audiences, but Hotel is surprisingly high minded, despite the horde of vengeful zombies at the end.

When wealthy businessman Suraj (Navin Nischol) arrives at his new hotel, built on a scenic mountainside, he's greeted by his old friend and business partner Vijay (Rakesh Roshan), along with an assortment of people who helped make the hotel happen.  The most notable folks are real estate developer Chhaganlal Patel (Ranjeet Bedi) and his secretary Shabho (Prema Narayan), respected lawyer Kapoor (Pinchoo Kapoor), and Suraj's own assistant Lalwani (Sudhir).  Most of the early guests are comic relief stock characters, but then there's Sushma (Neelam Mehra), Suraj's great lost love, now married to the elderly and abusive Girdharilal (Narendranath Malhotra).  Vijay, meanwhile, has fallen for Vandana (Bindiya Goswami), a simple village girl who used to deliver ice to the hotel before Vijay promoted her to head cook.  

So, a varied cast of characters, all gathered in the same secluded location.  It's a great setup for a suspenseful horror movie, as spooky things begin to happen, and Vijay and Suraj inch closer to discovering the awful truth: the hotel is built on top of a cemetery, and Patel and his cronies swindled the local priest, Father Benevolent (Krishnakant) out of the land with the help of the priest's appropriately named assistant Judas (Prem Bedi).  

There's also the question of what happened to Vijay's brother Sanjay (Premkishen malhotra doing his best Rishi Kapoor impression), a free spirited musician who Suraj sent to check out the construction.  Did Patel and the others murder Sanjay because he found out about the land scam?  Yes.  I'm not particularly worried about spoilers, because by the time Vijay and Suraj start looking for Sanjay, it isn't a spoiler.  

Our heroes may not know what happened to Sanjay, but the audience does, because nearly the entire first half of the movie follows Patel as he makes crooked deals, corrupting nearly everyone around him by offering them money and pointing out that he has a pretty secretary.  Suraj doesn't show up at the hotel until the movie is halfway over, and it takes even longer for the first ghost to show up.

That's not the whole problem with the movie, but it does lead into the larger problem: there's absolutely now suspense.  Unlike a lot of vengeful Indian movie ghosts, these spirits are very careful to target only the guilty, and the audience knows who the guilty parties are, so they know who's going to die and can make a decent guess about the order.

That leaves the love stories.  Suraj's love for Sushma is heartfelt and tragic, but once Girdharilal gets Cask of Amantilladoed there's really only one way it can end.  Vijay's pursuit of Vandana is an HR nightmare.  And the interminable comic relief track involving legendary comedian Mehmood drinking a love potion intended for his wife and chasing a Bollywood producer around the hotel is both deeply unfunny and reliant on nasty stereotypes.  

Watching Patel show off his corruption skills is at least interesting, the disco number is fun, and when Hotel remembers that it's a horror movie it's fine, but there's so much filler, and because the backstory is told up front as story rather than filled in with flashbacks as the movie goes along, the pace is seriously off.  It turns out the true terror is a lack of story structure.

It's October. That can only mean one thing.

 In the fall, a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of bhoots.  So does mine, though I'm not really young anymore.  It's time for our annual Bhooty Call, a month-long celebration of the ghosts of Bollywood.