Past Misdeeds: Mahakaal (1988/1993)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

The life of thirty year old college teenager Anita (Archana Puran Singh) is starting to get interesting. Right now, she and her equally old student friends (among them the most terrifying monster of them all - "comedian" Johnny Lever) are still cavorting around merrily - that is when her boyfriend Prakash and his best friend Rakesh aren't dishooming the local would-be rapists - but all this is beginning to change when Anita's best friend Seela, and very soon our heroine herself, is starting to have terrible nightmares.

In them, they are hunted by a shadowy, mulletted man with a scarred face and the propensity to laugh menacingly while showing his charming iron-bladed gloves. That would probably be troubling enough for the girls, yet the worst thing is that these dreams are leaving physical traces behind. It's one thing dreaming about getting your nightshirt ripped by claws, but it's quite another when you wake up and actually find it ripped.
Still, the friends are (theoretically) young, their hair freshly sprayed and mulletted, so they decide to drive to the country-side to have a picnic and cavort some more. That works out nicely until they want to drive back home and discover that their car won't move an inch anymore. Fortunately there's a hotel nearby. Unfortunately, it's managed by another Johnny Lever and has no working phones to call home from. How immoral! Well, at least it's dry and warm.

Anita and Prakash do the boring and responsible thing by keeping chaste. Seela and Rakesh however decide to have a real picnic together in one bed. Would you believe that Seela dreams of the nice man with the interesting gloves again? Yeah, I was completely taken by surprise myself. This time, though, he's not just appearing to scare the girl; he kills her, leaving Rakesh - who of course decides to run - as the main suspect of the dastardly deed, no matter that there's no proof whatsoever against him.
Hunting Rakesh is Anita's father, your usual Bollywood patriarchal copper arsehole. Thanks to Rakesh's brilliant idea to make a visit to his school campus in bright daylight, it's a very short manhunt, and the young idiot finds himself in a nice, damp cell.

The next night, Anita dreams of Rakesh getting killed in his cell by the mullet man and his new pet snakes, and even her sceptical father looks shaken when he learns that the young man did in fact die that night.
After a few more small revelations, Dad explains who the man with the gloves is. It's a certain Shakaal, a black magician who worshipped some undefined dark gods by sacrificing children to them. Seven years ago, he kidnapped Anita's little sister to do the same to her. Her father wasn't able to save his daughter, so he poked Shakaal in the face with a torch and buried him alive in a chained box in some ruins. Obviously, the dead man has returned to take his vengeance.

If there is one thing you can count on when it comes to the films of the Ramsay Brothers, it is their absolutely shameless will to entertain in the broadest and sleaziest (for Hindi cinema) way possible. These two aren't afraid of anything, not even ripping off one of the two films by Wes Craven that are actually any good - A Nightmare On Elm Street.

Well, there is something the Ramsays were afraid of - putting their Nightmare rip-off into the cinemas when their arch enemy Mohan Bakhri had just before thrown his own version of the tale, Khooni Murdaa, on the market. Just imagine, they could have lost money! So they let the film lie and ripen for a few years and only put it out when the Bollywood horror boom had already run its course, making it their last theatrical feature before they had to flee into the land of cable TV, as far as I've heard while being hunted by villagers carrying torches.

So the fashion and the victims of Johnny Lever's "parodies" (and does Amitabh Bachchan's comeback vehicle Shahenshah truly need to be parodied?) and "satire" are very much part of the late 80s. I have a hard time imagining that this will have helped Mahakaal's financial performance, but hey, what do I know about stuff like that.

What I do know is what I find fun, and Mahakaal definitely is fun.
Sure, if you are easily angered by really brazen theft of plots, ideas, scene set-ups or musical cues, you'll probably have a hard time watching it without beginning to froth at the mouth. I find the Ramsay method here rather charming. The first half of Mahakaal copies the plot progression and characters of its model as closely as possible, but adds a lot of flavour to prepare Craven's recipe for the taste of an Indian audience. So the viewer gets to see a slightly less bloody version of A Nightmare on Elm Street plus everything he, she or it ever loved about the trashier side of Bollywood cinema - musical numbers of dubious quality (well, I actually found the last one with its golden glitter costumes from hell rather undubious, even quite delightful), heroines with an insane propensity to get very very wet, said dishooming of would-be rapists and other assorted rabble, Johnny Lever humour you can blessedly fast forward through because his scenes are not in the least relevant for anything else in the film (although you will then miss out on things like his Michael Jackson imitation, his Amitabh Bachchan in Shahenshah stick - which is actually kinda funny - and the rare Johnny action scene).

Then the last third of the film arrives, and the Ramsays have obviously had enough of following Craven, throw out the dream demon idea completely and turn the film into the monster rumble most of their films I have seen until now end in. Which is an excellent idea when it brings us a re-jigged scene stolen from Dawn of the Dead, an inexplicable, but fun bout of demonic possession and a much better water bed death scene than in the original. The only way to beat that (or bring it to an end) is of course to end the film in a bizarre beat-down that is at once gruesome, silly and absolutely insane and alone worth the price of admission.
Technically, Mahakaal is typical Ramsay Brothers filmmaking - there's not a bit of subtlety to find anywhere, yet the brothers show an exhilarating sense for hysterical in-your-face intensity when it comes to the horror sequences or the action. If it has to do with the use of zoom, manic camera movements, fog, multi-coloured lights, more fog, or bizarre interior architecture (watch out for the temple of evil!), the Ramsays know what they are doing and (or so I suspect) love it.

Memorable acting you won't find here, but at least our heroine, future TV personality Archana Puran Singh, is as game for anything as Polly (Shan) Kuan, be it fighting an invisible man, getting very very wet repeatedly, or just screaming "Nahiiiiiiiin!". Especially her screams are something I won't soon forget.
What more could I ask of a film?

Tahkhana (1986)

aka The Dungeon

The evil sorcerous son of a Thakur uses the opportunity of his father's death to make a play for the family treasure that is secreted away in a nearby dungeon and can only be found with the help of a map pendant that has been broken in two pieces - at least I think that's part of his plan. He'd also very much like to revive the evil godhood (made of clay and blood, we are informed) he is worshipping through the blood sacrifice of innocents.To keep things simple, he kills his brother and kidnaps the man's daughters to sacrifice them right in the treasure dungeon. Unfortunately for our evil sorcerer, his brother's best friend Mansingh and his men arrive just in the nick of time to ruin his plans and rescue at least one of the children, Aarti (soon to grow up to be Aarti Gupta). Sapna (growing up to be Sheetal), the other sister, is lost in the jungle somewhere together with half of the pendant. Mansingh decides that it's appropriate to entomb his sorcerous enemy in the dungeon alive together with his godhood and take Aarti in as an adoptive daughter.

Twenty years later, Aarti knows nothing of her tragic family history or her lost sister. She's in love with Mansingh's son Vijay (played by some bland guy parts of the internet - I blame the IMDB as the source of this and more errors - insist is Puneet Issar, but who definitely isn't). But the happy cavorting of the young lovers has to come to an end. Mansingh is lying on his deathbed, and before he dies, the old man tells the story of Aarti's inheritance to her, Vijay and his nephews Anand (who definitely is played by Puneet Issar) and Shakaal (Imtiaz Khan), asking them to find Sapna and help Aarti take possession of her birthright. Mansingh also hands Aarti the other half of the treasure map. The question now is just how to find Sapna.

The answer to that question is less pleasant than the usual Bollywood story of lost siblings would suggest. By chance, Sapna stumbles into the hotel Shakaal owns looking for work. Shakaal (and who would have thought that of a character in a Bollywood movie named Shakaal and played by Imtiaz Khan!?) is a proper sleazebag, and so offers Sapna a job as a dancer, but appears soon enough at her doorstep to take what he probably sees as the proper reward for his help.

Sapna isn't the kind of girl willing to prostitute herself though. During Shakaal's following attempt at raping her, Sapna is killed. It is only then that her killer sees her pendant and realizes whom he has murdered; not that he's sorry about anything he's done, mind you. Shakaal takes the pendant for himself and makes a copy to hand to his family once a proper opportunity arises, which will be soon.

Once the untrustworthy treasure map is in their hands, Aarti, Vijay and co decide to move into the Singh family's old mansion near the treasure-holding dungeon. Unfortunately, they're taking Shakaal with them, too.

But the bad guy's attempts at gaining the treasure (and trying to rape every woman he lays his eyes on) won't be the worst of our heroes' problems. The old evil sorcerer has revived his Godhood through his own death, and the unpleasant monster is now wandering the dungeon, killing whomever he can lay his claws on.

Fortunately, the local country strongman and all around swell guy He-ManHeera (Hemant Birje) is around to help put villains and monsters in their place. Or rather pillar-ly looking stone "stakes" into their hearts.

Outward appearances and a longwinded plot synopsis notwithstanding, Tahkhana is one of the less complicated films from the Indian sub-continent I've seen. Unlike many other of the horror movies made by the Ramsay Brothers, Tahkhana doesn't rejoice in the complex net of plots and subplots that make up your typical masala film. At times, the film seems consciously constructed not to be like a masala, what with it killing one of the long lost sisters off very early on. That's just not how a lost sibling plot is done in India.

I wouldn't call the film's plotting tight or lean, exactly, but it is a very simple story told in a comparatively linear way, which also explains the film's rather short (for commercial Indian cinema) running time of less than two hours. Given these time constraints, it's no wonder that there's not much room for comedic relief (although what is there is still painful enough, thankyouverymuch) or minor plots which aren't closely interleaved with the main plot. There's even only room for two musical numbers, both of which are musically forgettable and mildly sleazy - just as you'd expect of the Ramsays.

What there is room for is a number of quite entertaining action and horror set pieces, the former obviously dominated by Hemant Birje and Puneet Issar, who both also seem just too happy to show off as much chest and ass as they can get away with. The Ramsays' films are nothing if not generous with both beefcake and cheesecake; a quality I've always found highly admirable. Apart from that, Birje also is an expert in screen strongman fighting and would have played Hercules more than once if he'd gone to Italy. He's even throwing a few pillars.

The horror scenes aren't quite as great as they are in other Ramsay films. The Hammer worship filtered through an Indian style isn't as convincing as I'm used from the brothers' output, the lighting isn't as freakish, and the film's monster just isn't one of the brothers' best. The big lumbering guy is physically impressive enough, even though his combination of monk's robe, dark oatmeal face and shaggy gorilla costume is more silly than frightening, but he's just a grunting monster without any dimensions of spiritual or human evil, which seems to be a step back for a Ramsay movie.

Given the nature of Tahkhana's Big Bad, the whole film feels more like an adventure movie with an added monster than the sort of silly yet loveable and enthusiastic scream fest I by now expect of a Ramsay film. That's not to say Tahkhana is a bad film; it is entertaining enough. I just don't think it shows the Ramsay Brothers at their best.

 

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On WTF: Mahakaal (1988/1993)

On WTF! It's the Ramsay Brothers! It's a Nightmare on Elm Street rip-off! It's pure ecstasy!

(Yeah, this is what happens when they let me out of my cage to watch a Ramsay Brothers film and write about it)

 

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Purana Mandir (1984)

Curses! The Singh family could tell you about curses, if the head of their family wouldn't be so damn stuck up. Their troubles began when one of the their ancestors, a thakur (those are always trouble one way or the other) helped track down a nearly demonic sorcerer, rapist, child-murderer, grave-robber and corpse-eater (we are unfortunately not told what he thinks about kittens) named Saamri (Ajay Agarwal). It's not a big surprise that the good thakur knew only one answer to this charming list of crimes: death by beheading. Saamri didn't have much appreciation for capital punishment and cursed the Singh family terribly: each woman of the family, be she part of it by blood or by marriage, will die as soon as she gives birth to her first child until one day Saamri himself shall rise and end the Singh family line forever.

The thakur was less than amused. But he had a theory: If he put the demon's head into a chest hidden in his palace and put Shiva's trident on top, and hid his body at the local temple, there would surely be no resurrection. Pro-tip: If the local priest tells you that burning is the preferrable method to get rid of the remains, listen to him. Those guys not only know Cure Serious Wounds spells, but are also experts in demon recycling.

Alas, the thakur went with his method and so helped perpetuate the curse.

In modern times, Suman Singh (Arti Gupta, dressed in the most astonishing combinations of 80s headwear I ever had the misfortune to behold) wants to marry her supremely creepy, leering stalker-boyfriend Sanjay (Mohnish Bahl, let's not talk about him any further), but her dad (Pradeep Kumar) is strictly against it. (And honestly, I wouldn't blame him for it even without the curse.)

The young lovers think it's the class difference between them that lets Daddy sic his red waiter uniforms wearing henchmen on Sanjay. In truth, the old man has seen what the curse did to his wife, but is for some reason unwilling to tell anyone the truth.

There will be quite a bit of "Nahiiiiin" screaming and melodrama before he finally changes his mind and the young lovers decide on the solution to their problem: birth control. No, wait, that would be reasonable, so instead they pack Sanjay's friend Anand (Puneet Issar, mostly shirtless and mustachioed - I loved him) and his girlfriend into a red chevy impala and drive to the old palace to somehow solve the problem by having the friends act as if they are on holiday and Sanjay flirting with a local village girl - only to get information of course.

You can probably guess that this isn't the brightest idea, but if it leads to phenomena like moving eyes in a picture, giant bodyless ghostheads, headless ghost-bodies, Anand doing Chiba-fu when fighting against local tribals (who very much act like Hollywood Indians crossed with burning-torch-mob villagers), another chase between a coach and a car and finally the resurrection of Saamri himself, I am not going to complain.

 

I watched Purana Mandir thanks to the magic of the Internet together with Beth of Beth loves Bollywood whose review of the film you shouldn't miss. In contrast to Beth, I prefer Bandh Darwaza, the other film by the glorious Ramsay Brothers on Mondo Macabro's Bollywood Horror Collection Vol. 1 (and where, dear Mondo Macabro, is volume 2?) over it, but both films are very close in spirit. That starts with the similar monster make-up and does not end with the unfair chase scene. The biggest differences between the two films are Purana Mandir's ill-conceived comic relief sub-plot with Jagdeep and (poor) Rajendranath that stops the film dead in his tracks with a disturbingly unfunny riff on Sholay and The Good, The Bad And The Ugly and the fact that it stops for a breather a little too often.

Fortunately, the film is still a very fine piece of breathless Bollywood pulp horror with many elements to recommend it.

There are for example the nice, blue-green-red lighted locations and sets that look very much as if Mario Bava's less talented but very enthusiastic Indian twin brother had designed them. I would not want to live in a palace this foggy.

Or the musical numbers that are usually not all that well picturized but feature unforgettable sights like a belly-dancing disco aztec princess or the least seductive dance of seduction this side of Bandh Darwaza.

Speaking of the musical numbers, the best of them comes at the least expected moment. The locals are going to sacrifice our heroes to appease Saamri, the poor darlings are already bound and the knives are at their throats, when the tribals suddenly break out into the most carefree and chipper song and dance number imaginable. There is even torch juggling! I really can't conceive of what the Ramsays thought there, but it's definitely one of the supreme moments of psychotronic film I have had the pleasure to witness.

And how could I not mention my new personal hero Anand again, another proof of the mustachio theory of manliness? Not only does he help his friend Sanjay selflessly, he is also one of the greatest ass-kickers of India, his fighting style a combination of Bruce Lee and Sonny Chiba's breathing in Street Fighter. He even does the two-fingered eye-poke!

Is it any wonder that his girlfriend dreams up a dubious but hilarious nearly-sex scene when she watches him work out!?

Now add to all this Saamri's favorite killing technique - staring really hard at his opponent until the victim's eyes turn white and start to bleed (clear shades of Lucio Fulci here) and a silly but fun final fight that throws logic out of the window for a nice little burning and trident stabbing and you have a recipe for good clean fun with a deep moral message about the necessity to burn undead abominations dead.

The Ramsay's direction style is raw (some would say primitive) and direct. Subtlety is not one of their strengths, even for Bollywood film makers, yet the film achieves what it sets out to do by mercilessly pummeling the viewer with classical masala elements, pulp action and the pulp version of gothic horror (see the steadicam of evil!), leaving me breathless with happy giggling. Problems only appear when the film slows down a little - especially the middle part has some real moments of drag, which are fortunately forgotten as soon as Anand pummels someone again.

It is truly difficult to understand how I could live without films like this for so long.

 

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Bandh Darwaza (1990)

The Master leads a charmed life: He has a cooler cape than that wimpy Dracula, hypnotically red eyes and the most beautiful lair any demonic being of the vampiric persuasion could ask for. Said lair isn't just spacious as well as dark, damp and unnaturally foggy, it also contains a swimming pool (mostly used for bathing virgins before biting and de-virginizing them) and an astonishingly big ugly statue of a bat - with red glowing eyes of course. If this isn't enough to make you shiver in breathless adoration, let me tell you that The Master is the leader of his own private vampire cult as well. It is wonderful, really. Whatever The Master desires his minions - Mullet Man, Woman Who Looks Like A Deranged Drag Queen With An Unhealthy Love Of Leopard Patterns, Pudgy Man With Fake Bald Head Who Should Really Wear A Shirt, Hypno Guy With Fake Beard and Other Guy With Fake Beard - will get for him, or his minion's minions, The Nameless Henchmen Who Stole Brother Tuck's Robes, will do so. Did I mention the writhing lady dancers?

The Master's great enemy is the local Thakur (possibly the first uncorrupt Thakur in Bollywood history?), who has sworn to some day kill His Evilness. I'm not quite sure what stops him. He knows who his enemy is, he knows that The Master lives (if I may call it that) and corrupts the local female population to sin inside that swell temple on the Black Mountain, yet he does nothing. It is possible that his private troubles distract him from the more important things. His wife, and I quote here "is like a barren patch of sand" in which he has been trying to plant the strong and beautiful flowers of his children for the past five years. The state of affairs has degraded so much already that the Thakur's mother (a hobby florist?) is starting to shove pictures of other women whom she deems useful as secondary flower beds in his face.Don't you just love it how everyone is completely sure that the wife is the one who can't produce children?

Still, Thakur and wife love each other very much, and nobody is less happy about the lack of a stinking and shrieking little monster in the family than she is. But her maid - secretly a core member of the vampire cult - knows someone who can help the poor woman in her plight. She just has to follow her to The Master's temple. The wife agrees with a certain hesitation, yet follows her maid into Vampire Central. The Master promises her that he is well able to solve the little problem for her, she just has to agree that she will keep the child only if it is a boy. If it is a girl, she will have to send her to The Master. She agrees, and the gracious vampire proceeds to "bite" her. This "bite" results in the wondrous birth of a little baby girl nine months later (and solves the question who is the "barren field" in this marriage). Regrettably, the girl's mother does not want to keep her promise and refuses to give her child to The Master. This decision doesn't do her any good, though. Her maid poisons her milk and takes off to Black Mountain, baby girl in arm.

With final strength the betrayed woman tells the Thakur the truth about the child and dies (not without begging the gods to protect the girl, obviously). He finally decides to destroy "the pit of sin" and attacks it with a handful of man. And I must say, the performance of the vampire cult and its leader here is less than satisfying. Who isn't killed outright runs for her life; The Master himself succumbs to one puny dagger-poke to the heart.

Nearly a happy end, it seems, but in truth just a short twenty-five minute teaser before the main titles of the film start (and before Johnny Lever's first terrifying appearance).

Is it possible that the surviving members of the cult will start their evil works again when the baby is grown up? Is it possible that a few drops of blood will revive The Master to all his glory again?

See the answers to this questions in the rest of the movie! Also:

See an abominable dance during a musical number made worse by the bewitched sub-Mithun (our hero, oh yes) hallucinating another, even worse dancer!

See the mighty race between horse-drawn carriage and jeep!

See the female lead characters get captured and/or kidnapped so often you'll lose count! (And may I just say here that the absurd frequency of that happening is nearly subversive?)

See a woman say come-on phrases like the stinking drunk from the bar on the corner!

See Johnny Lever get slapped!

See some of the ugliest pieces of clothing of the Eighties in the Nineties!

See an Indian woman using Fu! (and getting captured anyway)

See our heroes stumble through very nice Indian landscape in search of the newest victim of a kidnapping! (Pro-Tip: She is in the same temple where you found her the last time. Not that you should look there. Or try to attack your light-hating enemy by day, for that matter)

See a man dressed like a pimp in the first half of the film, and acting like one in the second!

See Sub-Mithun-Fu and Pimp-Fu!

See The Master breaking through a brick wall! And another! And a window! And another brick wall again!

As you can see, Bandh Darwaza is a film full of charms. It may be the very dubious charms of a completely mad piece of pulp, but charms they still are. Director/producers Shyami & Tulsi Ramsay are the father's of Bollywood's short horror boom. Following this impressive outing I'd call them a mixture of Roger Corman and William Castle, in any case people whose other films I'll seek out as fast as possible.

Before I start foaming at the mouth in enthusiasm, I'll talk a little about the less successful parts of the film.

Seldom have I seen a less talented bunch of actors in one movie - those not completely made of wood are mostly trying to out-bug-eye Amrish Puri (who is the only thing really missing here), with a reasonable amount of success, I might add. Well, if I had to wear the kind of clothing they have to wear, I'd probably make bug-eyes, too.

The musical numbers are fortunately few. Not that the songs themselves were bad, it's just that none of the actors can dance any better than act. Never again will I make fun of Karishma Kapoor's dancing.

But Bandh Darwaza has some real strengths as well. The vampire make-up is stiff and weird, yet also original, and The Master with his snarling and staring makes quite an impressive figure (also observe how big he looks).

You also can't say the film doesn't have a sense of style, it just isn't a cultured style. The Ramsays aren't ashamed of the cheapness and pulpiness of their film at all, on the contrary they revel in it, bathing everything in (metaphorical and non-metaphorical) lurid colors that stop just short of breaking the moral rules of Bollywood cinema completely.

The extreme emphasis on the most lurid and extreme moments of Bandh Darwaza's script gives the film a fascinating drive, the kind of raw energy that drives a good pulp novel (that I suspect the Ramsays to be more artistic than they let on isn't important here; it's just one thing more they have in common with the best pulp writers).

 

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