Rating: B
Dir: Guddu Dhanoa
Star: Tabu, ImShahbaan, Shahbaaz Khan, Mukesh Tiwari
This is generally (and rightly) regarded as an unofficial Indian remake of The Entity, with its story of a woman menaced by a sexually violent ghost. However, there are a lot of other influences to be enjoyed here, right from the start. The opening scene sees a car driving over a rickety bridge, which feels like a Himalayan version of the one in The Evil Dead. In the third act, it gets bored with The Entity – understandably, I feel – and switches to wholesale and blatant theft from Poltergeist instead. Between these, there’s a sequence which could have come from Christine. If you want a tour through the highlights of eighties horror in two hours, you could do a lot worse.
Indeed, I’d argue for this improving on the original Entity in several ways. There’s considerably more set-up here, introducing us to divorcee Sanjana (Tabu), and showing us her life before assaults start. She is moving to a new bungalow with her two incredibly annoying kids, and her brother, who is confusingly called Vicky (Khan). Things immediately seem off, and steadily escalates until the first of multiple spectral rapes. We care about Sanjana more this way, and while this is much less graphic, for obvious reasons, it feels as if the attacks go on longer to compensate. It’s effective. Abandoning the previous film’s finale, probably its weakest element, is another wise move. Indeed, there’s effort put into providing a “credible” rationale for events, something The Entity didn’t bother with.
For a bit, it felt like they might be going with the ghost being Sanjana’s father, who molested her as a child. However, they opt instead for variations on the Poltergeist theme. Sanjana has to save her child by descending into a real “Indian burial ground”, hohoho, from where a criminal’s spirit was unleashed by a lightning strike. The effects are decent, certainly good enough to compare with those from twenty years previously. The sequence where one daughter is sucked out of her bedroom into another world has a couple of genuinely impressive shots, and the spectral hands savagely caressing Sanjana’s body are also well-executed. Dhanoa does have a tendency to hysterical excess, though that kinda goes with the territory.
At least he opted to skip any musical numbers, something not every Indian horror movie does. For that, I thank him. Tabu delivers a strong performance: she is one of India’s leading actresses, making her only foray into the horror genre. So it’s like watching the Bollywood version of Meryl Streep get repeatedly fucked by a spook. Not a sentence I expected to write today. Her character helps hold attention, especially when the pace sags a bit in the middle, as Sanjana tries to convince her sceptical doctor (Khan) of events. He eventually brings in an expert (Tiwari) – supposedly a parapsychologist, though he acts far more like an exorcist. Regardless of how undeniably derivative proceedings all are, it was considerably better fun than expected.