Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema.
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick.
Today. This is an exciting intrigue in the Weird House Cinema catalog because we are going to be covering our first film from India. It's always fun when we can dive into a new film culture, a new national film tradition. And I know, for me personally Indian cinema Bollywood in particular, this is a whole area of film that I really don't have much of any exposure to. So I was excited to watch this movie research it a bit because not only is it is it Bollywood, it is Bollywood horror.
We're going to be talking about Purana mandir A not only a horror movie, but like the horror movie from India from nineteen eighty four.
This is also my first full viewing of a Bollywood movie. I've watched a lot of clips from them before. Often, like people will clip out really great musical numbers from them and put them online, so I've seen plenty of those, but yeah, this was the first time I've seen the whole thing. But man, this movie was mostly great, at some points awful and really got my mind cranking about the what it means to have musical numbers in a film.
Yes, because one of the if you don't know anything, or you don't know much about Indian cinema and Bollywood in particular, you may know that there are musical numbers. It's a big song and dance numbers. And I think at times this can be like knowing this can be kind of like a barrier to entry. You might think, well, I don't know if I'm up for that. I mean,
I'm not a musical fan. Or even if you decide, oh, well there's a horror genre I want to get into that, but then you realize there are musical numbers, maybe you're going to hold back, but yeah, it's to sort of break that down, like, well, how different is that from anything we watch over here? You know, we have this a genre of musical obviously that goes in various directions, but also we have strong musical segments in various pictures
where you'll feature a particular track. It just maybe you don't have characters actually singing that song.
Yes, I agree with all of that. I mean It really got me thinking, why don't American horror movies tend to have musical numbers in them? And if they did, why would we say, well, actually, this is just a totally different genre now it is a musical. Why couldn't all genres have musical numbers, because, as you say, music features in other movies, diagetic and non diegetic music features in as long as the characters aren't singing, it's not
a musical. But there's no particular reason I think of why the fact that characters do sing in a movie should make that a separate genre from whatever the narrative content is. So yeah, I think we should have more fantasy, sci fi movies, whatever, horror movies that have characters singing songs, because songs are great. Now that I've experienced a Bollywood film, it in no way takes away from my enjoyment of this as a cheesy horror movie. And I don't really
see why you would resist. I think maybe there's one impulse that says like musical numbers could take away from the seriousness of the film. There's another that says it could take away from the quote realism. I'd say, if you're overly concerned with either of those, maybe you shouldn't be making a horror movie.
I think another sort of barrier to entry or sort of expectation is that might be for many and it was kind of this way for me. Is I expected going into a musical number to be clunkier and take me out of the picture more. And there are sections of the film that do manage to take me out of the picture and are clunky, but the musical numbers, like you get the impressional like this, this is down to like an art just in Indian cinema in general, And so if a movie's going into a musical number,
they know what they're doing. They like it's you're gonna have a smooth takeoff and landing with the emotional arc of whatever that particular song happens to be.
Every time a song kicked in, I was like, okay, now we're cooking. Even the kind of sad, slower paced songs.
Yeah, yeah, because it's it's it's not coming out of nowhere, it's coming out of what's going on emotionally with the characters, or especially towards the end of this picture, with like the driving nature of the plot.
Oh yes, the human sacrifice song I think was my favorite song in the movie.
All right, So again, this was my first Bollywood film. I'd never watched one in its entirety, like you had seen some clips, so I had to I had to do a little extra reading about everything. There's a lot of things about Bollywood cinema that I was not familiar with and just did not know about. So, for instance, bear with me if you already knew all of this. But when we talk about Bollywood cinema, we're talking about films specifically coming out of the Mumbai film industry. Mumbai
formerly known as Bombay. You get it, like Bombay plus Hollywood equals Bollywood. And while it's perhaps the most well known internationally of the various Indian film centers, Indian cinema is not a monolith like India itself. India cinema consists of various languages and cultures and in the different cinematic traditions and centers have like different strengths, different histories and
so forth. So with some of the various extras on the disc or discs that we looked at for this as well as some articles, it was a real learning experience for me to familiarize myself somewhat with this. I mean it goes beyond genre with this, just whole realm of cinema.
By the way, just as one example of other film subcultures of India, I know there is also the so called Tollywood, which refers to Tollywood with a tea, referring to films made in the Telugu language, which is one of the many languages of India.
Yeah. Yeah, And then likewise you have in Pakistan you have Lollywood that is centered in Lahore. I didn't know anything about Lollywood either until I started absorbing some of these extras on these discs. But this film Purana Mandha from eighty four is very much Bollywood. It is a
Bollywood film, it is a Bollywood horror film. And it's going to be interesting to discuss exactly what all of that means because to a very large degree, the filmmakers the other here, the Ramsey brothers, are pushing into an area that had traditionally been less successful and more of
fringe within Bollywood cinema. But still it's going to have things in it that are very much part of the Bollywood blueprint, and that includes a compelling story of starcrossed lovers, a fair amount of family melodrama, multiple music numbers, Now this was interesting. I was looking at an excer where it was an interview with a critic Omar Khan, and he pointed out that eight or so musical numbers per movie is pretty standard.
Oh so this seems under the average, right, I think there were maybe five in this movie.
Is that right? I lost count after a little while, just because I'm not used to seeing any in my heart, but I saw something where he was talking about a later Ramsey Brothers film where he's like, well, there are only four musical numbers in this, which may seem like a lot too Outsiders, but like really it's like a half load. But on top of the music, on top of the horror, which we'll get to, we also have
martial arts action, you got a little dancing. You've got some comedic segments which we're probably not going to talk about too much other than to say they are are they are awful. But all of this comes together into what felt to me it's kind of like a circus. Right. It's like you go to a circus, They're going to be a number of acts. You may not be there
primarily to see the clowns. You may be there to see the trapeze act, but the clowns are going to be there because somebody came with the expectation of clowns. Within talk of Bollywood film in particular, i've seen this described as Massala film that is a reference to the spice blend. You know, you're going to the theater to see this show, and by golly, it needs to deliver a little something for everyone. A little of this spice, a little of that, all under the big top of cinema.
Now, if it sounds like that's a lot to fit into one movie, it is. This is a long movie. This is definitely the longest movie we've covered on Weird House, right.
Yeah, it beats out Blade by twenty minutes, which I think is it's important to keep that in mind because it's not absurdly long, like they are longer. Plenty of longer Bollywood films, and there are plenty of longer Western films as well. Avatar two is longer than Piranhamundi, so you know, don't necessarily let the linth, you know, keep
you away from these films. And there's an intermission too, so you got that going for you love an intermission now the disc we watched this on, and I'll give a full mention of that and just a bit here
has an introduction from Indian horror expert Tim Paxton. He provides the intro and he points out that Parana Mandir is one of the most important films in Bollywood history and probably the most important film in the history of Indian horror cinema specifically in one of the interesting things here is produced on a very modest budget, but it was a colossal hit. I was looking at some of the numbers and if I was doing my math correctly, it like multiplied its budget in revenue on the scale
of something like Rocky or Blair Witch Project. Like that level of success. Just did amazing business.
Have you read anything from somebody who knows it was about the Bollywood market, like what audience has responded to so much about this movie in particular? Like why was it so popular? Well?
Omar Con gets into this a little bit on some of the extras from this blue ray set, and a lot of it kind of comes down to luck, you know, like the Ramsays at this point had been pumping out horror content since seventy two, I believe, and none of those films had certainly had anything like the success, but they were out there. It was on the fringes, you know, And so I mean, I guess part of it is like by this point they definitely knew what they were
doing with a number of these elements. They knew how to put together things, they knew how to do them a sola film offering. So they did have a little bit for everybody. And I don't know, it was just like the right time, Like audience has just really responded
to it. And he described it as being like a generational date movie, like if you were going to cinemas in India during this time period, you saw this movie and it was also he points out, you know, probably going to be especially for for how mainstream it became. It was offering things people just hadn't seen before because Western horror films could only really enter into like the the general zeitgeist there so much because they weren't coming in on like satellite TV or anything. They were they
were coming in on it. They weren't being shown in the theater for the most part. They were coming in on VHS tapes and those were in rare, you know, and there were those were hard to get. Only certain people had access to those. And so this is a film that has some really scary stuff in it, and you can just imagine how much more scary it is if you didn't have direct exposure to say The Exorcist or the first Evil Dead movie or something like that.
I can also see how it would be such a great date movie since it has you know, it's like, it's like scary, so the classical cliches. It gets you hugging clothes because you know, because the same reason out here are about to do something evil. But it's also got a great love story.
Yeah, yeah, you got again. You've got a romance of the heart of it. You've got family melodrama the heart of it. You've got the music, You've got the comedy, you've got the dancing girl. You've got all these things that any given viewer is going to be wanting to see out of a Bollywood film. But it's also offering something that is new, and that the newness ends up being key because this kicks off a horror boom in India.
The Ramsey Brothers end up coming out a lot of additional horror films, they have competitors, and also, you know, other folks just jump in to try and ride that bandwagon, and it actually they end up writing it out by something like I want to say, ninety two, so the
boom doesn't last too long. But during that time, everybody gets in there, and some of the films are supposed to be quite good, but there's a sort of sameness to everything, and after a while people seen it and it loses that new edge that this film seemed to have.
I think a similar thing happened with some of the biggest money making horror films in the United States in the eighties. Also kind of the Slasher for Me got repeated and played out to death.
Yeah, or the or later on the speaking of Blair Witch the found footage formula. Because you know, that's a case where, for the most part, people hadn't really seen
a film like this. It was produced on a very low budget, made tremendous money, and lots of folks jumped in there to try and recreate that success, and God goodness, off the top of my head, I'm not sure anybody really did, so, yeah, I think it's a it's a good comparison though only in terms of like sort of business and impact, not so much style.
I think following the blair Witch model, the Paranormal Activity franchise did pretty good, Okay, I think, hmmm, I'm trying to think of another one. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, the found footage style is obviously very appealing because it's cheap to make. But when people were trying to just make, you know, cash in on found footage movies with very uninspired ideas, I think a lot of them missed out on how creative the original blair Witch project actually was.
Yeah. Yeah, And I mean that's kind of like written across the horror genre. Wherever you look, right, a successful horror movie comes out and somebody's gonna think I can do that. Horror is easy. Horror films can't be that hard to do, and there is an art to it. There is a certain amount of style, and then there's a certain amount of luck to hitting things just right. And that's what Perana Mander seems to have done. Let's
see just a couple of other notes. Paxton points out that this movie, which deals specifically with a resurrected evil decapitated wizard, does draw heavily on two prior films, One American in one Spanish nineteen fifty eight is The Thing that Couldn't Die that stars Robin Hughes as the Wizard Gideon Drew, and nineteen seventy two's Horror Rises from the Tomb starring Paul Nashy as the Wizard Alaak Demarnac. This is a film, of course, we discussed on Weird House Cinema.
Not expect that. Yeah, Paul Nashy plays the Wizard. He's actually part of like an evil sorcerer power couple in Horror Rises from the Tomb. Right, he has a he has like a wife or a girlfriend who's also a powerful wizard. Yeah.
I mean the thing about Paul Nashy films is Paul Nashy monsters you're supposed to feel some sort of sympathy for, you know, that's where he's coming from. He's coming from that that that love of universal horror and sympathy for the monster, the wizard. In this film, Samri is unlovable. He is just a complete monster. Every crime that is committable he has done. We are not meant to have
any sympathy at all for Samri. And and ultimately have to say, even though the early stages of the film do, like the historical opening does kind of mirror the opening of Horizons from the Tomb, it ultimately goes in its own direction as opposed to being anything like like a clone of that movie.
Well, on one hand, yes, I agree. Samri is not sympathetic at all in terms of the narrative. He doesn't have like a tragic love story or anything like that. There's nothing likable about him except just his physical vibe. Like the presence of the actor who plays summary in the opening is so cool.
Oh, absolutely, Yeah. The performance here by aj Agarwal is tremendous and this is a role that launched him as like a true monster actor for Indian horror cinema.
We'll have to come back to him.
Yeah, we'll come back to him for sure, because he's at a light. There are long stretches of the film where he's not there, but when he is there, he's tremendous. Right. Just a couple other small points before we get to the trailer. Basically the film is predominantly in Hindi, though the characters do throw in a little English here and there, and the action ventures into a rural setting, so you'll
hear some characters speaking another dialect or language. It's referenced in the Hindi dialogue as well, but I couldn't find an indicator of which language this is.
I noticed something interesting in the movie where a couple of times somebody would say something in Hindi and then they would say the same thing again in English, almost as if for emphasis. And I don't know if that's like something specific to Bollywood movies or just a quirk of this movie in particular, or a convention of of Hindi language in general. I don't know, but I thought that was interesting.
Yeah, with that, with that specifically and just generally out there,
we'd love to hear from listeners after this episode. If you have more experience with Bollywood cinema, if you, if you speak Hindi, if you certainly, if you, if you have experience with the theater, experience of going to these films, all of that is on the table, because I've heard it pointed out that it's one thing to watch like a Bollywood film or a Bollywood horror film in your living room by yourself, But that of course was not how they intended a film like this to be viewed, No,
this was to be viewed in the theater.
Can you imagine how much fun it would have been to like see this in a pact theater of like young people out on date night?
Oh yeah? And can you imagine how afraid people were again if you hadn't seen many horror films and you had to see Sammary. I mean, he's terrifying almost all the time on the screen. He's at least unnerving, if not just outright terrifying. All right, well, I mean the elevator pitch on this one is basically it's the biggest Bollywood horror film of them all. It's the it's the
granddaddy of Bollywood horror films. It's your basic evil wizard, multi generational family curse romance film with added music and comedy. We have a trailer here. I don't think we're going to play at all, but we'll play at least a nice sampling of this so you can get sort of an audio taste of what's ahead.
How many another.
Shaw man? How about rights? Gonna be all right? Well, before we go any further, if you would like to watch this movie for yourself, if you'd like to check out here, go and see it, and then come back
to the rest of the episode. Well, you don't have to depend on sort of weird stream to view this film, because there's a wonderful Bollywood Horror limited edition box that is out from Mondo Macabre, and I checked out a couple of discs from this, the disc for this film and then a disc for another movie that had some extras on it, and we rented these discs from Atlanta's own videodrome rental store.
It's a great print, though it does warn you that there will be some variable quality and different scenes of the movie due to just like storage issues with the film over the years, so the restoration is a bit patchy in places. But for the most part it looks great.
Yeah, there's one particular I don't even know what to call it, but there's some sort of an error in the final print that we have on the disc here that has almost kind of a psychedelic quality to it, and I didn't really I don't think i'd seen it on a film before, this particular kind of noise. So it's very watchable. Nothing in this gets in the way of your enjoyment of the movie, all right, well, let's jump into the people involved here. The main ones to
really highlight here are the Ramsey brothers, the directors. It's impossible to discuss Indian horror cinema without discussing the Ramsey brothers. Again, they had been doing this since seventy two, and this is the movie that kicked off an enormous boom in Indian cinema for horror. And even like contemporary horror movies, they still have connections to the work of the Ramsey brothers here. Now, Ramsey brothers, I think can at times refer to just different sons and grandsons of f U Ramsey.
But in particular the directors here are Shyam Ramsey and Tulsi Ramsey. Chyam lived fifty two through twenty nineteen and Tulci lived nineteen forty four through twenty eighteen. Other Ramsey brothers would get in on directing game at times, like Kishu and Kieran. But yeah, these are the main two we're talking about. They're the ones who directed horror films in the early seventies, beginning with a nineteen seventy two film.
In the title for this one translates to two yards under the Ground so already like kind of a grim beginning there. They followed this up with a string of horror and creature films. There's one from eighty two Matt Kasaya. I'm probably mispronouncing that, but it looks interesting to me because it has some sort of like big creature water monster in it. I'm not sure this one is available widely in the West, but I put it on my
radar because it looks interesting. Neat monster anyway. But anyway, all of these films that they were putting out, these were outliers. The horror pictures just weren't viewed as culturally viable. They weren't seen as potentially anything that would make money at the box office. So it was more fringe stuff. And you know a lot of these pictures, particularly Ramsey productions at the time, they were also pushing boundaries of
what was accepted in Hindi cinema at the time. As again, as Omar Khan points out, most Indian film viewers had little or no exposure to Western horror films and Indian horror films were barely a thing. In fact, I saw an interview with aj Aguah, the main monster actor in this picture, and he said that he didn't know the difference between horror films and regular films before being cast by the Ramses, like that's how little horror was established
in the general audience's mind. But with this movie again, it hits it just the right time, takes off. Nineteen eighty four becomes a huge hit, a generational date movie, as Cohn describes, it sets off this massive boom that doesn't really subside till ninety two. The Ramsees continue to apply their trade, tons of competitors and imitators trying to get in on the craze as well, until overexposure kicks
in and the boom ties out. The Ramses followed this movie up with nineteen eighty five's Telephone nineteen eighty five's three D Samary What, which is obviously the Yeah, the three D sequel of sorts to this movie.
Well, but I thought the evil Wizard was destroyed at the end of this movie.
If an evil wizard makes you enough money, there's no destroying him. He will come back. There's a nineteen and I'm not Also, I haven't seen three D Samary. I assume it's Samar because it's the title is the name of the character. But you know, sometimes a movie like this, maybe it's not a direct sequel, maybe it's a spiritual sequel.
I'm not sure. But there are a slew of interesting looking features that they came out with in the wake of Parana Mandir, including Takhana from eighty six, Verana from eighty eight, Pirani Haveli from eighty nine, and nineteen ninety's Bond Darwazo, which is said to be quite good, more of a traditional Dracula style film, and after that the
well kind of dries up. One of their last big films, if not their last big film, was a nineteen ninety four movie titled Mahakal, which a number of you might be familiar with because it is, to be kind, it is very inspired by Nightmare on Elm Street. It is at least a strong homage to Nightmare on Elm Street and features a Freddy Krueger esque character on the cover. So I think this one has gotten some amount of traction. If nothing else. You might have seen some clips or the poster art.
It does have a guy with knives for fingers.
Yes, yeah, yeah, And if you're not sure like how to spell that title and you want to look it up. Just do a search for like Bollywood Freddy Krueger and you'll you'll find it, all right. The screenplay on this one was written by another Ramsey, Kumar Ramsey, who lived thirty six through twenty twenty one. He was the screenwriter and a number of their films. This is one of those situations where you know the brothers and the family here,
they'll often draw in some of the same talent. So this Ramsey also wrote Samari three D in a movie called Guest House. There are also three other contributors also credited here, but I couldn't find out much about them. But there's a story credit, there's a dialogue credit, and there's an assistant dialogue writer. All right, let's get into the cast. So we've talked about him already. But Aj Agerwahl I believe AJ is short for Annarrud. He was born in nineteen forty nine. As of this recording is
still out there. I think he's retired now. But yes, he plays our dark wizard of evil who's eventually going to rise from the tomb and get his head back and go on a rampage. He only acted in three Ramsey Brothers films. He played a monster in two of them in Parana Mandir. Of course in the follow up Samari three D or three D Sammary in eighty five.
He also played more of a traditional Dracula in that nineteen ninety film Bandowaza, and he continued to act through twenty He's retired now but mostly just almost exclusively in Hindi films, but he does have a role in Steven Summer's The Jungle Book from nineteen ninety four. I included a picture here for you, Joe. As you can you can see he's playing heavy of some sort in this. He's standing next to the villain holding Lena Hetty by the arms.
Well, that's also Carrie Elwis. I know all three of these actors. I don't think I would have recognized a single one of them in this screenshots. Yeah.
Yeah, they're very young. I mean especially Lena. I wouldn't have recognized her. But anyway, yeah, he's in it. He's very tall. He was like six four six ' five, so especially among a lot of actors, he's pretty towering. Andy has just very pronounced features. I've read this might have been due to like some sort of underlying medical condition as well, that sort of gave him pronounced facial features.
Also yeah, again very tall and based on I read an article about him and I was looking at an interview conducted with him, and basically he made two goes at getting into acting before and after earning like a civil engineering certificate or degree of some sort, but at both times he didn't have any luck. Until he had some sort of ill health or injury while working in Muntumbai,
and he looked even more haggard afterwards. I'm not sure if he had some sort of like facial bruising or whatever the case may be, but someone came up to him and said, hey, you look pretty tough. You should be in movies and he's like, well, that's what I've been trying to do, but nobody will hire me. And they said, say, well, you know what, you need to go talk to the Ramsey brothers because they will give
you a chance. And so he went. He talked to the Ramsey brothers, and the Ramsey brothers at that point were apparently six months into shooting Piranha Mandir, but they hadn't done any of the horror sequences yet. What I
guess they didn't even have a Samari cast. Wow, and they'd leaned heavily on masks and makeup and previous films, but then in walks a man who doesn't need as much makeup, you know, and like he's We've seen this in time and time again in various horror cinema periods and settings, where somebody comes in and they just have that unique look where you don't have to do much to them, you know, just a subtle amount of makeup and right lighting and the right lighting and effects, and
you're already in the horror realm. And that's what he offered to them here.
It's interesting because, as we were saying earlier, this character is in no way likable or sympathetic. They just make him an absolute demon, like pure evil, not like charismatic or anything, except in the opening sequence before he gets transformed into a more Frankenstein type creature. The like human Somary evokes strong rock star charisma. He has kind of a shaggy Keith Richards haircut, and the back of his
shirt sparkles. It's got this like Sequin wolfman motif. It looks kind of like something David Bowie would have worn. And he's just like tall and has a kind of you know, lead guitarist posture. I don't know. He seems very cool.
Yeah, he's at least a head taller than everybody around him. At times, he kind of felt like he had kind of a Boris Karloff kind of a presence to him, you know, and you know, and also reminds me of various other you know, actors with unique appearances. But yeah, very strong screen presence from this guy. And and when he shows back up, he just keeps looking more and more monstrous, and the lighting, the effects are always just really on point whenever he's on screen. So he's very terrifying.
So that's Sounary, that's our monster. But you to have an effective monster, you have to have a bunch of mortals that are in peril or cursed by said monster. And so the next major character of note here is Suman Sing played by Arti Gupta. She's our heroin I guess you know. She's born into a long line along cursed lineage of sings here. It's a very charismatic performance.
She's a lot of fun on the screen. The actor here, Gupta, would come back for three D summary and also apparently produced a few films much later, including two thousand and Seven's a Mighty Heart starring Angelina Jolie.
Yeah, I think Arti Gupta is great. She conveys a lot of emotion, especially in the musical numbers. Though I was wondering, dude, do you know if the actors in this movie sing their own parts in the musical numbers or are they sort of lip singing along to professional singers.
It is my understanding, and again I invite further education on Bollywood by anyone out there listening, but it's my understanding that it's almost it's usually not the actor doing with singing that that's added later. And I think that would make sense given that if you have, if there's no real division between films and musicals, it just makes sense to do that. And of course this is not
unprecedented in Western musicals as well. I mean, I think of Oh Brother, We're Art Thou, which is a tremendous musical, but George Clooney is not doing his own singing in that.
Film, and it works great in both cases. I mean, I know, sometimes for some reason, people talk disparagingly about lip syncing. I think they talk about it like that when it's like a band is faking doing a live performance, just like full on trying to trick people that they're playing live.
But in a movie.
No, there's no problem at all. I like it.
Yeah, And I imagine there are Bollywood films where at least some of the actors are doing their own singing. I mean, it makes sense, but I did not get a sense of that from looking at the credits for this movie. All right, So we have Suman sing She's our heroine. Her father, Thakor Singh, is played by pra Deep Kumar, who lived nineteen twenty five through two thousand
and one. This is Suman's father, a loving but overly protective father, but he's overly protected for reasons that go beyond the norm and get into the realm of supernatural, multi generational curses as we'll discuss. But Kumar hero is a veteran Indian actor with credits going back to the late nineteen forties. Apparently highly regarded, though largely lacking in
like highly successful roles. He often acted in period dramas and seems to have just always boasted a meticulously trimmed mustache, just a real, real, gorgeous and stylish mustache on this man and.
It's a mustache of the thin style, which I feel like is hard to pull off, but it looks good on him.
Yeah, kind of like a swashbuckling old Hollywood kind of a mustache.
Yeah.
All right, so we have the daughter, we have the father, but now it's time to talk about the daughter's secret boyfriend, Sanjay, played by Manish Bell, who was born in nineteen sixty one. He's a he plays a low born photographer, but he's handsome, he's a good lad. You know, he's our lover boy. This was only his fifth credit, but he went on to act in more than one hundred pictures.
I think it's interesting that they try to what seemed to me to like fit in a very standard forbidden love dynamic, even though it's only like a red herring. So like, for the first bit of the movie, Suman and Sanjay understand that Suman's father disapproves of their relationship because she is a rich girl. She's from a you know, a high class family, and he's middle class. He's not rich like them. So that seems like a very standard
kind of romance obstacle. But then there's a twist which is like, oh no, actually he's opposed to their romance because there's a curse on the family and if you know, she gets married, she may one day have a child, and that means she will die. Well, actually she will turn into like a witch and then die. Yeah, but it's seemed interesting that it's almost like they were trying to fit like a second, like short romance movie into the beginning of this movie.
Well, he lets viewers know where they stand. It's kind of like Sons of Anarchy, Right, you jump into watching Sons of Anarchy, and it's like, oh, it's like Shakespeare bikers. That doesn't really hold on to the Shakespeare aspect of the thing for the most part. I guess it comes back towards the end, but a little bit, but it's still it gives you sort of an initial footing on
which to proceed with the picture. Or in the case of Sons of Anarchy the TV series, all right, we've got the monster, we've got the father, the daughter, the daughter's boyfriend. Now it's time for the boyfriend's best friend. This is the character Anand played by Plunette Isar born nineteen fifty nine. Yeah, he plays a best friend. Martial
arts and personal fitness enthusiast. The actor here outside of this is apparently well known in India for his role in the Mahabarat TV show that ran eighty eight through nineteen ninety. He played Duri o'hanna, eldest of the Carava's, one of the two feuding houses in that epic. He's also written, directed, and produced, and is especially known for his negative roles. This is terminology I was not familiar
with until I started reading about different Bollywood actors. But apparently, like when you talk about somebody being like a great villain or being great at villain roles, you talk about how they're great at playing negative roles, which I thought was an interesting turn of phrase there.
So I thought Punitasar was one of the highlights of the film. Actually, my favorite stuff about this movie is sort of like the tall, macho guys in it. So I like the villain. I love Anon a nod Is, so he's yeah, he's the main dude's best friend. But in a way, it's a movie where the side the
so called sidekick, actually does most of the heroism. It's like Big Trouble in Little China, and every time Anon shows up to save the day, it is it's increasingly HILARI there's like an amazing scene where Sanjay is getting beaten up by twelve guys or something. You know, they're all like these guys in fancy red footman's uniforms, these red jackets, and they're all ganging up on Sanjay, and then suddenly a Nod appears sort of over the top
of a mountain. He's like, comes up on this ridge overlooking the whole scene, and he's like, oh, my friend, and then charges down into the fracas to just slam me, just like beat beat all these guys up, which he can do pretty much single handedly. He is the center of a number of martial arts scenes that I think are actually quite good. And there's also a really funny scene where they have a they're on a road trip
and they have a car. They have a flat tire, and it's clear that they staged this just so a Nod it could be like, hey, it's no problem that we don't have a car jack, I'll just lift the car while you fix the tire.
Yeah, and he's yeah. He's he's basically the the the the action star of the film, while Sonja is the romantic star of the film. And Annan, Yeah, he's a lot of fun. These martial arts sequences are cool. He's got these really long legs, so he's one of these guys. When he's throwing kicks, it's like he he manages to kick around you and then kick you on the other side of your face, kind of a thing. And he's also able to somehow pull off the leather vest over
a bare chest look. He also wears a lot of fun T shirts, but sometimes no T shirt, just the vest.
In the scene where he where he intervenes to save Sanjay and beats all the guys up, I think he's wearing a sleeveless polo shirt tucked into jeans.
Somehow he makes it work all right. Now, Anon, his character has a wife, and the wife is Sapna played by and I'm mostly sure on this. This character in this actor was not listed in some of the databases I was looking at, so like not on IMDb. I had to go to another database. But pretty sap rou Wallya born nineteen fifty seven, I believe is the actor
playing his wife. She wishes he was a little less into martial arts and personal fitness and more into love making, which makes for at least one amusing sequence in the film. You know, it's a fun performance. I think she has only a couple of scenes to really shine in, but she does shine.
Oh yeah, she's good. It's a real bummer when the evil Wizard throws her off the top of a building.
Yeah, so in a way, it's like, you know, she's she's I guess she was dimmed, you know, from the start, like this, somebody's got to be killed by the monster. We've got to give, you know, the certain plot elements have to be put in place.
The two main lovers go on a road trip with their two friends to go stop the evil Wizard. What do you think is going to happen to the two friends? Yeah?
Now, do we have a creepy groundskeeper in the film? Yeah, we kind of have two of them, because we also have a creepy, creepy woodcutter. The creepy woodcutter, I'll mention really quickly is Sanga played by Satis Sha born nineteen fifty one. Basically, he's just a scarred woodcutter who really would like a bit of that treasure. But the main grounds keeper at the haunted mansion where everyone ends up is this character Durjon played by Sadashev a'm Rapokur who
lived nineteen fifty through twenty fourteen. There's something about his performance. At first, I didn't I didn't pick up on it, but you know, it's kind of like a nice haunted vibe. He has kind of haunted eyes. And when I looked him up, apparently he made a name for himself playing villains or negative ones or negative roles in various films. In fact, I saw a twenty fourteen Indian Express article that called him quote Bollywood's most memorable villain.
So oh interesting. Yeah, not a villain in this though, no, just more.
Of he's the local, that is, the haunted local who knows more about goings on than the main characters in the film.
At one point, he quite crucially hides a trident in a chandelier and I did not understand why he did that, but it comes in later.
He just knew that it would come in handy later. Somebody's going to need to drop this chandelier. Sometimes. Yeah, sometimes, I guess it's just the film logic of the thing. Now, there are a lot of other actors in this, and I'm not going to go through all of them here, I will say that we do have a bandit character named Machar, I believe, and he is played by this
actor who went by the moniker Jack Deep. This is an Indian actor and comedian who appeared in more than four hundred films, including I think some various Ramsey Brothers films. This is our sort of I don't know, Benny Hill esque misogynistic slapstick specialist that is brought in for at least two, maybe three long segments of the film that are concerned only with comedy that do not really connect much at all with the rest of the film and are really difficult to watch.
Agreed. I had read in multiple commentaries that the comedy segments are by far the low point of the film, and they are for the most part, extremely unpleasant, not funny and just like a lot of jokes about sex crimes.
Yeah yeah, so's it goes beyond like, oh, this is out of keeping with the main vibe of the picture. Is just like content wise, it's gross. So I would advise if you're just casually watching this movie, you know, feel free to get up and get a snack during the comedy segments. Don't necessarily bother reading the subtitles during these segments and feel free to skip them all right. Finally,
the music for Piranha mandir Ajit Singh. I don't think I was able to find any dates for him, but he worked on subsequent Ramsey pictures as well, including Takana in eighty six, Perani Haveli in eighty nine, and a friendly Yetti movie that came out in ninety one that looked pretty interesting as well. But the music in this
picture is I guess at times I loved it. It's a little abrasive, like at times the synths come on really strong, but I still can't fault it too much, Like it definitely gets in there and it comes at you with its clause.
Oh yeah, I really liked a lot of the music. There's one theme that really stuck in my head that was not especially complex melodically, but it was just like a real rubbery synth tone as the characters were like exploring a secret passageway and I was grooving on it really hard.
Samri has a pretty strong theme as well that I think Omar Khan. I think it was Omar Khan compared it to the main theme from the Omen, not that it's directly that or reuse of that, but maybe has hit similar notes of that score.
All right, so you wanted to talk about the plot, now, yeah, let's do it. Okay. So one thing is we absolutely cannot do the kind of granular commentary we do with some movies, especially like seventy minute drive in movies, or this episode would be six hours long. And I want to say this is not only because this is the
longest movie we've ever done. I'd also argue, I wonder if you'd agree with this, that it's in the running for the dnsesst movie we've done, meaning that the amount of plot or stuff happening per minute of run time is unusually high.
Yeah. Yeah, everybody gets their stuff in on this film. And again it's it's having to deliver all of the various spices. So yeah, there's a lot that happens in this movie, and to just cover every bit of it we just wouldn't have time for. And certainly we're going to skip over stuff like the comedic segments, which you know, the less said the better.
Okay, First of all, I like a film that begins by showing you its papers. The first thing we see here is a is scan of the certificate from the Central Board of Film Certification of the Indian government. Seem to recall seeing similar paperwork at the beginning of like British movies from the thirties, like those old Alfred Hitchcock movies that show you the certificate from the British Board of Film Censors.
Yeah, I agree, I really like this makes it feel kind of like more like a cultural artifact, you know.
Yeah, yeah. So the narration begins two hundred years ago. Bijapor Sultanate was ruled by Raja Hariman Singh. In those days, the fear of ghosts and demons prevailed in the hearts of people. The most feared demon of all was called Somri. And as they mentioned these different people, we see like painted portraits of them. Samri's portrait has a kind of purple glow, so he is emitting rays of evil magic
even in painted likeness. The action begins with a historical flashback where Hariman Singh is traveling with his daughter Rupali and his retainers when his chariot breaks down. Unfortunately, it breaks down in the middle of Samri's land, and even worse than that, his daughter wanders away while the carriage is being fixed and fearing for her life, the rajah sends his men out looking for her. They are of course attacked and picked off by the Evil Sorcerer. And
I just want to say this again. One thing I noticed immediately about the opening segment is the extremely high energy editing and pacing of each shot. So the cuts between shots are frequent, and the action in each shot develops very quickly, so it's this kind of near frantic pace for the first couple of minutes. But it's not just fast. It's also loud, full of like screaming and blasts of music, like slamming the audio into the red It's just a lot.
Yeah. Yeah, I've seen Sam Rainey's Evil Dead for maybe one mentioned as an influence on the Ramsey Brothers as well as the films of Wes Craven, so I don't know if maybe we see a little bit of those influences in this editing style.
It's not going to keep up at quite this pace and level of intensity for the rest of the movie, but overall for this film, the Ramsey Brothers do stick to a pretty fast moving and intense editing style. It always feels energetic. Things are always happening really quickly. There's not a lot of establishing or waiting around.
Yeah. Yeah, and you don't have to wait to see Samri. He's there. He's going to disappear for a while for reasons that will that makes sense. But yeah, he's there from the get go, and you get to you get a good look at him, and and boy, it's he's just a great sight to take in.
As I said earlier, strong evocations of rock stardom. He's like he is singing devil music. But okay, Samary is running around. He kills all of Harryman Singh's men, and then he vamps through Paully Harry Mun Singh's daughter. How are we supposed to understand what happened to her? I don't know exactly. Like he leans over her as if he's biting her, and then there's blood on her face
and her eyes look different. There's sort of like her eyes have turned white, as if she's in a kind of magical trance.
One thing I loved about Samre just throughout the picture is I never really know what the rules are with him. He's just overpoweringly evil, like he yeah, he can drink your blood but it's just he just looks at you. If you just think about him too much, you may just lose your soul. And then in terms of like what he is, yeah, there's the basic Kahara rises from
the tomb undead sorcerer aspect of the whole thing. But like, especially when he starts showing up later, I mean, he already has things at this point, and then later on in the movie, his body becomes even more monstrous in ways that don't line up with just pure like decay and resurrection. Like his body becomes just increasingly like just materially evil.
Yeah, his later form is part Frankenstein, part decaying zombie, and part pro wrestler.
Yeah, with like some Bigfoot thrown in there.
Yeah yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, Harry Munsingh comes back with his full forces and they capture the demon. They capture Sammary, taming him with holy things like there is a priest chasing him with a trisula, the trident of Shiva, and there is an altar with the statue of Shiva, et cetera. And he's ultimately held in chains. They stand him up for a kind of trial while the accusations against him are read
before the crowd. Basically, he did everything bad. He did murder, rape, cannibalism, all of it, all in service of his evil, demonic masters.
I liked how the priest is reading these charges out and finally stumbles a bit, reading the charge of digging up graves and eating corpses.
That doesn't seem like the word of them.
No, But at that point he's this is too far. We're not used to this one. We don't even have this one on the books. I'm not sure this is technically illegal. It's just bad manners. Now.
There was a cultural and language question here that interested me. In the English subtitles of this scene, it says that Samri is accused of using his Satanic powers to create terror among the people. It says that he slaked his satanic thirst by drinking the blood of children, and it says he is so vile that even Satan would shun him.
So given the Hindu context here, and it seems very much in a Hindu context, like there are other scenes where, you know, there are temples of the temples of Shiva, people offering prayers to Shiva in order to help them. I kind of wonder whether they actually said satanic and Satan in these scenes. I guess they could have because I kept hearing a word in the audio that sounded like shatan. So I was just curious, what's going on here,
Like what is the most direct translation of what they're saying. Because, of course, in the context of like a Christian culture horror movie, it's very normal, like the evil sorcerer is understood to get his powers from Satan or some kind of demonic force. In the Hindu context, where does the evil sorcerer's power, where's it understood to come from?
Yeah, I had the same thought here. I thought, well, maybe they're just referring to mentions of Satan and Western films, which would have obviously been an influence here. And then I was thinking, well, maybe it's there's an Arabic loanword at play here. I looked up to some basic stuff
in translation. Again, I do not know what I'm doing with the Hindi language at all, but it does seem like we do have this term chatan, which means devil, satan, freaks, beasts, or demons, So I guess that's what we're talking about.
Interesting. Okay, again, Hindi speaking listeners, please write in let us.
Know at any rate, he's done all the bad things and something's got to be done about it, right.
Right, So harry Mon Sing's advisors all they argue about the best way to punish this evil sorcerer. The priest says, you know, why don't we burn him to ashes, that'll purify him with flame. Harryman Sing says, no, I've got a better idea. We're gonna cut his head off and keep it in a different building than his body, and that way we'll know that his head and body can never possibly be reunited.
There you go. Sounds like a winning plan.
And then the holy man suggests using the trident the trisula to guard his head. I think they're going to like lay it over the top of the box.
Okay, again, sounds sounds good. That's a good way to secure it.
Then the prologue ends, suddenly lightning strikes and there are more credits. After these credits, we get the story picks up, but it's still in the historical prologue. See them leading Samri off to his fate, and then they're sort of leading him in procession in chains, and then he stops to rage at everyone like he rages at Hariman Singh, and he issues a curse upon his household, which is he says that all of his female heirs will die in childbirth until Samri's head and body are joined again.
Note that in the scene they haven't been separated yet. Also, he says, on the day that his head and body are joined again, that will be the end of Hariman Singh's dynasty, I guess, meaning he will destroy them all. Then they do it. They cut his head off and they bury the body in the ruins of a temple. They say it's Shunkar's polygot temple. And they take his head to throw it in a trunk wrapped with chains, and then they hide that in the dungeon of the
Raja's palace. And then they of course put the Trishulas she was holy trident on top of the trunk and they wall it up like Fortunado.
All in all, a pretty great historical prologue that then leads us into modern day Aka in an early eighties Bombay.
Right, so we meet our modern day characters. There is Takur Ranbier Singh. He is the descendant of the Raja from the prologue. So the curse has passed down through his family. He's a rich man. He loves his family, but he is preoccupied with fears about the ancestral curse. There is Ranbier's daughter, Suman, who is a college student. She's got a kind of sunny disposition, and her father laments her growing up because that means that she may marry and try to have children and then the curse
of Samri will kill her. Then there is Suman's boyfriend Sanjay. Again, he is not rich, but he is handsome and brave, loyal and scrappy. And then there is Sanjay's friend Anand who this is a buff guy who cuts the sleeves off of all of his shirts. Not all of them, He's got some sleeves.
Yeah, some slaves are cap but most of them they just get in the way.
San and Sonjay being in love, they go out on dates. They like go to a pool party. They go out to a nightclub where there's a dancer dressed in gold, and here we get our first musical number.
Yeah, this is kind of a cabaret number. The dancer is Lena Doas and it's a it's a pretty fun Indian disco type musical performance. I guess I really enjoyed it. I turned the volume up a little bit on this one.
I was thinking though about this night club here. It's a strange mix of inside it seems cool but also claustrophobic. I think maybe the claustrophobic aspect comes from like the solid black walls and what felt like a sort of low ceiling. But it's got these cool like red bench seats and then posters on the wall for movies and stuff like there's a poster for Superman up on the walls.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And we also we get a little bit of Sonjay is looking at the dancer, maybe a little bit too much, and Suman is so it was a little bit jealous.
This is a curring motif.
Yes, whole songs will be sung about this later on.
So Suman and Sonjay are in love, but Suman has to lie to her father about where she's going when she heads out on dates with him. However, her father finds out Ron Beer is not pleased and he forbids her to see Sanjay again. But of course she's in love. There's no stopping her. So she's not going to just leave her boyfriend hanging. And so this is an ongoing conflict at the beginning of the movie, and again, as I mentioned earlier, there's a misunderstanding about the reason her
father forbids the romance. She and like the young people think it is a class thing, that she's rich and he's not. Actually it's a demonic curse thing, but they don't know that yet.
Yeah, he won't tell her about that, he's keeping that secret. Instead, he just says things like like, hey, our family name is not so deluded that our blood can just flow directly into the gutter and things like that, and of course that just pushes her further away. He won't tell her the real demonic curse rationale that is behind his fear.
But then we get like a love song on a beach or it's on rocks near the shore, where Sanjay is singing about his love for Suman.
Yeah, and it's nice, you know, it's like just a nice music video. Break.
Somewhere in here we get the first martial arts scene, and this is with Okay, So the basic situation is ron Bier. Again, he forbids Sanjay and Suman to date, but then he catches them together. So he sends his men who are all dressed up in these cool red jackets to beat up Sanjay and then on on to like comes over the mountain top. It comes over like a ridge looking down on them and runs into the rescue and then together they beat up all of the all of the bad guys. I guess they're not bad guys.
I don't know. The guy's working for her dad.
They're just Dad's goon squad that's to beat up Sanjay.
But we see a lot of signs of Ron Beer's worries, like he has a freak out dream sequence with a giant beast samary head. And this is where we start getting signs of what Samri will look like in his in his sort of undead form, which is again less rock star and more kind of I don't yeah, like bigfoot, pro wrestler zombie.
Yeah, just seething in darkness. Just these great eyes, just in this in this pronounced brow. It's just a tremendous look. And I can just imagine moviegoers screaming when they see this on the screen.
But eventually the curse is revealed to Suman and Sanjay and they have a bunch more you know, back and forth about how Ronberd disapproves of them, but eventually, like there's one scene where he's repeatedly getting a gun off the wall, but eventually he breaks down and confesses to them what's really going on. He explains the curse, and there are exchanges like one that was funny was he's like, you know, it's a secret, and they say what's the secret and he says, it's one I can't reveal, and
they're like, but you must reveal it. But then when he does, it's horrifying. It's there's a horrifying flashback to when Ronbier reveals that after Suman was born, her mother was transformed into some kind of devil creature with these long fingernails, these claws and like barnacles on her face, and then she died.
Yeah, there's nothing. It turns out there's nothing ambiguous about it. I thought they were more setting up a situation where it's like, oh, you're you know your mom died in childbirth and there is this ancient curse thing. So I put one and two together. No, no, no, she like straight up practically explodes in some sort of like just awful, you know, cursed flesh type of death, and it's it's it's a lot to watch.
Like all the doctors and nurses run out of the room. There's no end.
They're like, it's out of our hands. This is straight up wizardry going on in here.
So ron Bier explains to Sanjay, you know, if you really love Suman, you will leave her alone, right, And so Sanjay does because he really does love her. But then very next scene it cuts straight to Anon is lounging on a bed or something. He's wearing a sweatshirt, and he says, so you left her, you lose her. What'll she think of you?
Now?
Should we do a sidebar on Anon's shirts? He wears a lot of interesting shirts. Some of them have English writing on them and interesting logos and pictures and stuff. He wears one shirt that just says styles, and he wears another shirt that says Golden Rule. He who has the gold makes the rules very cool. And it's weird because Anon in many ways does have a heart of gold, as we will see. But also he is I don't know,
he is indifferent. Scenes shown to be vain and highly covetous of money, even doing very shady criminal things to get money.
Yeah, though those occur either within or within close proximity to the comedic segments, and I'm never sure how much of that I should actually pay attention to, Like does that count? Is that real Anon? Or is that like some different version of a noon just for the comedic segments of the movie. I don't know.
Well anyway, Suman shows up and she's got a better idea than Sanjay just leaving her. He convinces Sanjay that they should break the curse. Hey, great idea. So it's now a road trip to Bijapur, driving down the highway in a red convertible. The road trip buddies are the four of them, Suman, Sanjay, Anon, and his wife Sapna.
So at this point it's kind of a Scooby Doo road trip kind of a movie, which is.
Yeah, and all you know on the trip we see Anon is such a good friend. Sanjay is like, why would you risk your life to help us? And an On I think, threatens to beat him up for saying this. He's like, Hey, what are friends for? A friend has to help you break the curse on your family, even if that means laying down his own life. Yeah, Meanwhile, this is funny. Sapna is happy to come along because she is confident that the curse is just Suman's father
having a delusion. So I guess it's just a regular road trip for her.
Yeah, it has to get out of town.
This married couple. They have extremely different ideas of the stakes of this this road trip.
Yeah, He's like, I am ready to die and she's like, I am ready to see the countryside. Yeah.
Meanwhile, Ron beerre back at home. He has visions of samary As in his kind of altered beast form and has a heart attack. He survives, but the doctors say he must rest, and I think they use this to explain why he doesn't chase after the youths to stop them on their quest. Yeah, but then we go into a part of the movie where basically the four friends are investigating the different settings. So they go to an
old temple. They noticed that the statue in the temple, which I believe is of Shiva or maybe of Shivshankar maybe they say later, is missing its trident. And then you know, so they look around there, they have some
visions of scary things. They drive around and just have encounters with scary people, like they meet a woodcutter who just freaks them out by smiling at them and holding an asp X. And then finally they reach the palace and they explore that and meet Dirjen, the watchman, who shows them around and tells them sort of the family history, and they start having repeated freaky reactions to portraits or
I guess mainly it's just Suman that does. Like she sees a portrait of her ancestor and it zooms in on her eyes and it's knowing.
Whoa whoa whoah whah. Is this the scene where the eyes follow her? And they do it by having clearly two separate paintings, one with eyes looking straight ahead and one with eyes looking off to the side.
Yeah, I loved it. I really like these scenes.
Because we know the viewer knows that behind that painting, behind the bricked up wall is going to be the head of Samari sealed up in a box with Trishula leaned against it to keep it from coming out and wreaking havoc.
The next day, there's a funny scene where Sopna is annoyed because Anon won't stop doing workouts and martial arts, Like he's doing one handed push ups and practicing martial arts and she's just like, Wow, really really great romantic vacation you took me on.
Yeah. This is a fun sequence though, because then she kind of she has the scene where she fantasizes about him being more into romance and less into personal fitness, which I thought was pretty fun.
Then oh my, here things start taking a left turn. Well, first, a bunch of guys from the forest attacks Sopna from out of nowhere, and then Anon gets to come to the rescue and beat them all up. And then we go and meet this bandit commander who's I think giving the guys in the forest orders. It starts with a lot of over the top slapstick comedy and then descends into this rivalry between the bandit and a local official
in the village. This is the barely related comedic side plot that we were discussing earlier, and to be frank, as many reviewers have mentioned, I found it extremely unpleasant. I'm not going to make much effort to recount it. But it's a lot of jokes about like a guy not having armed and another guy who does sex crimes.
Yeah, that's basically it. And they just keep driving home these plot points and and it's it's very skippable. I highly recommend you skip it if you watch this movie. But but it is. It really throws you off when you first hit it because when the Bandit's men show up, they have like like dime store Halloween mask on the back of their head, and you're just like, what are what is happening? Did I switch channels somehow? This this is an error on the disk. No, you've just you've
just descended into the comedic subplot. But don't worry. You will eventually rise out of it. But then you're gonna fall into it at least one more time, and then you'll fall out of it again without anything in the comedic plot ever really impacting the A plot or getting resolved.
Yeah, I mean there's a little bit of interaction like it does develop to where the Bandit and Anon have a have a twoco and Blondie plot from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, where like a Noon repeatedly turns the Bandit in for a bounty and then freeze him before execution and then does it again to keep collecting money.
Yeah, and then the whole time you're just like a non stay out of this subplot. You don't need to be here to stay in plot A with the rest of us.
So in this middle section we get some some delivery of lore from the watchman Dirgin at the palace. He tells some backstory about the connection between the palace and the temple.
Uh.
There are also sections here where it seems like maybe the heroes kind of lose track of what the road trip was for, Like instead of furiously hunting down the body of the evil sorcerer, like Sanjay is fishing for food and Suman is doing like a couple's photoshoot of Ann and Sopna.
Mm hmm. Yeah. It's like there's a curse. There's a deadline here, guys, got we gotta stay on this. Oh.
But in this scene, it starts with a thing where there's a woman in the water, and at first I thought, oh, is she a mermaid? But she's like biting fish with her teeth and then trying to give them to Sanjay. Uh and I and Suman gets jealous of this woman because she clearly is into Sanjay and she's like a beautiful local woman.
I guess, yeah, beautiful local woman that maybe I think maybe we're supposed to assume that she's kind of a bad Girl definitely a threat to their romance, but ultimately we're gonna find out she has a heart of gold, even if she's kind of like doomed to die. Like like like other characters in the.
Film, general spooky do ins are afoot. There's Suman has more freak outs when looking at the portraits. And then there is the blood shower scene.
Yes, I love this because, first of all, it's the middle of the night time to take a shower, but Suman also is gonna take that shower in a swimsuit, and you just know the way that the cameras zooming in on the showerhead. I'm like that that water's turned into blood. There's no way that water's not turned into blood. And of course the water turns to blood.
I knew exactly what was coming, but it's it's a pretty fun scene nonetheless. So yeah, she's like then in the tub, screaming, covered in blood in the swimsuit, and then Anan and Sanjay run into the rescue and they like lift her out of the blood tub by her arms and legs and then put her directly on the bed and I was thinking, oh, no, you're getting blood all over the blanket.
That's a white blanket, y'all. Come on.
But then Dirgen comes in to explain that the blood tub incident proves the curse is real. You know, you've got to take it seriously now, and I think he says, you've got to talk to the locals to find out more about the curse. And then intermission.
Yeah, so setting up basically, like if the story game of Arkham Harr or something, the research portion of the adventure where you just got to go around talking to people and find out how the ancient evil works.
So that comes into play right after the intermission. But it leads to a lover's quarrel between Suman and Sanjay because Sanjay goes to talk to one of the local villagers and who does he pick to talk to, Well, it just happens to be what's her name Beaeshley, the beautiful woman who was bathing in the river earlier, and she's bathing in the river again and he's like, hey, I need to, you know, talk to you about a curse and she's like, Sanjay, I love you Mary me.
He dead knows no his way around. You're supposed to go talk to the haunted drunk guy old drunk guy in the village. He's the one who has the secret knowledge to share. But now he goes to the attractive lady from the water that is also offering him drinks.
Yeah, so she takes him back to her house, gives him some kind of alcoholic beverage, and then he watches her dance in front of a fire. He's clearly being romantically tempted. Suman is jealous and heartbroken, and she sings there's another musical number. She sings a forlorn song. I was wondering, did you detect this song? Maybe cutting off before the song was finished or I don't know. It seemed like something was missing. It ended rather abruptly.
I didn't notice that I'd have to go back and the look.
Maybe I'm wrong, But anyway, after Sanjay finds out some more lore from the villagers, he returns to Suman and they reconcile.
Their love is tested, but remain strong.
Yes. Now, later that night, Suman is sleeping and then there's a cat scare, Like literally, somebody throws a cat at her, just jumps on her bed, and she like screams and wakes up, and she's in a kind of oh, kind of a daze wandering around, and then she ends up stabbing the portrait of Hariman Singh that's on the wall, and after this, Anon realizes he looks up at the wall and realizes she stabbed through the wall behind the portrait as well. And then Anon and Sanjay bust down
the wall. They investigate the secret passageway within. This is the scene where I mentioned there's some really cool kind of rubbery synth music. There's some cool bits, like Anon gets a snake attack to the neck. A snake wraps itself around his neck and they have to fight it off. But then they find the trishula. They find the trident of Shiva on top of the trunk, wrapped in chains.
They bust it open. Inside they find the severed head, and Sanjay concludes that it must be the head of some brave soldier and it must be there out of respect.
Oh, Sanjay couldn't be more wrong.
Bad decision. Yeah, But then there's like, so the woodcutter from earlier is looking on and he decides he sees the box and he thinks it's full of treasure and he wants treasure. So he comes back in the middle of the night to get treasure, and instead the head hypnotizes him and turns his eyes into ping pong balls and makes him attack people.
The ping pong bong eyes were pretty hilarious, and I don't think they were meant to be hilarious, but they're also out of keeping with what they did with other people's possessed eyes, Like they did some sort of like contact effect I guess with everyone else, but this guy got ping pong eyes. Yeah, and it's a questionable choice.
Like Rupauli's eyes were creepy looking, they like they turned white, but they were you know, yeah, so those were different. He just has like they're like bulging and they look like plastic.
Yeah, they're like, we couldn't get a hold of our contact guy for today. What else we got? What's the backup effect? It's ping pong balls.
This leads to a great chase scene that I loved. So it's the It's like a horse drawn carriage with driven by the woodcutter carrying the wizard head in the carriage, riding through the forest at night, and then Sanjay in an ond in a red convertible chasing after it. So it's machine versus horse.
It's great. But then they are also supernatural environmental effects that come into play as well.
That's all right, So like the Sorcerer's head I think causes a tree to fall down and block their path as they pursue the head, so they can't keep up with it. Meanwhile, something happens in here where Dershon hangs the trisula up on the chandelier.
Yeah, unsure why. He's kind of like, I got to hide this away for later so that it can play a dynamic role in the showdown or something. Yeah, it's the only logic that makes sense.
So the hypnotized woodcutter like digs up Samri's body. I guess he knows where it is because the head has hypnotized him. Then he grabs the head. He puts the head on the body. He poked himself with a dagger and bleeds on the next stump, and this kind of glues the head back on and then Sammary wakes up and now it's it's clubber and time.
That's right, it is on. Body and head are back together again. His body. At this point, like I alluded to earlier, it's the evil is just completely manifest. It's it's now this hairy demonic sasquatch Frankenstein creature that that ultimately really works. Like the way I'm describing it makes it sound like it's kind of patchwork and and maybe you know, can't decide what it wants to be. But no, whatever it is, it is, it totally succeeds as being that. It's just this, This is evil incarnate.
Samary is wickedness and malevol I'd say he's bad. Hey, everybody, we just had to take a quick break. But we we're back now. So if we sound different, that's why. But we we're finishing the episode. So uh yeah, the plot is kind of in monster mode right now. This is when the Frankenstein starts shambling around, grunting, looming and killing people.
Yeah, Samri has returned, has full body again, has great lights and effects and scynth backing him up. So it's just terrifying anytime he's on the screen. He's not interested in reasoning with anybody or negotiating. He is here too in dynasties. He doesn't care what has happened in the world over the past few centuries. He has a pretty straightforward agenda.
Oh I didn't even think about that, Like he hasn't been around, so he doesn't know about the moon landing or anything. Okay, so yeah, he's killing people. Unfortunately, he makes Sopna jump off the roof of the palace to her death. Bummer. I like Sopna. And then Anon is obviously very upset about this, so he like runs up to the roof of the palace to fight him, but Samri is gone. And from here there is a blood
sacrifice subplot. The villagers decide they want to do a human sack refice of Sanjay and Suman in order to appease the monster and save themselves. And here we get a human sacrifice musical number, which I liked quite a lot.
Yeah, this one is good. I believe they're they're looking to sacrifice to Klie and it looks it looks like our heroes might be might be doomed once more. But someone comes to save them right in the naked time.
Right, so they're like tied up awaiting death, and you know, the drums kick in and then suddenly here's this lady from earlier. The one is her name Beachley, I think the one who was in love with Sanjay, like he went to her house earlier. And she's dancing around singing this very jolly, upbeat song about how the man she loved is unfortunately going to have his blood spilled and she doesn't want that. And then there's a string of reversals.
So first of all, she comes to save the day because she cuts Sonjay free and says she loves him and tries to let him free, but then he gets caught by the mind. But then her brother, who is sort of the guy leading the mob, says that he will still kill Suman unless Sanjay beats him in a sword fight. And then they get out there they're fencing swords and they fence for a bit. The sword fight is okay, it's not really on the level of an
On's martial arts scenes. And then at the end of the sword fight, Sanjay sort of wins, but the brother tries to throw a dagger at Sanjay's back to kill him, but yet again, the sister who loves Sanjay intervenes. She steps in front of the dagger and takes it for him and dies.
Oh no, yeah, bad girl with a good heart redeems herself through death. I also like that the sword fight, like you say, is very different from anything we've seen in the film up to that point, and it feels like, once again, this is the little something for everybody going on where it's like we need to have a traditional swashbuckling act in the picture, and this is the place to situate it.
Yeah, it makes sense. So anyway, Sanjay and Suman run away, the mob searches after them. You know, there's kind of a lot of running around and hiding and chasing in the woods, and then here comes another Anon fight. He is Anon is captured by the leader of the mob and then they there's some fighting and On lets out some really weird martial arts moves in this fight, Like there's one where I think he steps on a guy's head. It's kind of gross.
Well, he's just completely powered up with vengeance at this point, like he's more lethal.
Than ever, right, and so he's yeah, he's angered by the death of his wife. He is motivated by defending his friends. So he's fighting super hard and there's there's a really awesome moment where the leader of the mob tries to stab him with a dagger, but Anon grabs the dagger by the blade and disarms him.
Excellent. He just cannot be stopped at this point.
But unfortunately, even though Anon prevails in this fight, there is immediately more peril. So Sanjay and Suman are chased in the dark by some the demon, and Anon comes to rescue them. He ends up giving his life so that they can escape, just like he said he would earlier. So a true friend to the end. SAMRII kind of strangles him, I think, and then his eyes turn white.
So now it's just our two lovers pursued by the demon Somri.
But an earlier character returns, so Suman's dad is back on the scene and he shows up. He's like better from my heart attack. Now there is only one person who can beat Samri, and that is Lord Shiva. So cut to another musical number. Now Ron Deer is singing to an altar of Shiva, or I think they were also calling this god Shiv Shankar, which I'm not sure, but maybe like a manifestation of Shiva, maybe like Shiva the destroyer of evil. Perhaps I'm not sure.
At any rate, this seems like the right call. Get Shiva and on this that then we're dealing with a pretty powerful supernatural evil force here. We're going to need just a little bit of help.
Right, praying for the God's help, and we get cutaways to the surviving characters, but then also cutaways to like a bloody sheet which is presumably covering up the dead body of an odd Yeah.
Yeah, and I have to say on paper, are just us describing this. You might question whether it makes sense to throw in a religious musical number this late in the film, building up to the final showdown with the monster.
But I thought it it would work. I thought it really worked because the musical number itself has this way of kind of revving up and has this kind of rhythmic quality to it kind of works the people in the scene into a frenzy, you know, to unleash our would be monster slayers, and you feel a little pumped up. You're like, let's do this, let's let's finish this up, Let's let's get somri.
Absolutely, I mean as I said again, I mean this unironically. I fully encourage more filmmakers to make horror movies that are seriously scary but also have musical numbers. I think that's a great idea.
Also, it's probably a good way to overpower some of our traditional Western movie villains like Jason vorhees how he can react to full blown musical numbers. He's not going to know it's him. This is better than like psychic powers.
I would love that. Yeah, fully, like a religious musical number before somebody goes up against Jason, where they're they're like invoking the power of Christ.
You know, we had something kind of similar without the music in the Devil Rides out right. They basically have a Sunday school lesson before the big confrontation, just to set everything right.
We should mention by the way that the lyrics of the song point out the like remind the audience that the statue of Shiva is missing its trident, and this gives Sonjay the idea that the way to destroy the monster is to use the trisula, which is which again was hidden. It was in the hidden passage behind the painting on top of the trunk that had the head in it. And so Sanjay and Suman go looking for
the trident. So there's a bunch of more scares. They're like looking around in the palace and they are screamed at by taxidermied animals and Samar appears. He chases them around. He is about to in the very last moment, hypnotize and vamp Souman. But then Sanjay sees that the trisula is hidden in the chandelier and he wields it. He drives Samri into his coffin and they trap him inside with the power of the trident, and then the villagers come collect the coffin, take it to the village square.
Then they tie Samary to the steak and burn him huge burning fire and the demon is vanquished.
Yeah, they just they burn him up, and Dad's there pumping his fist in the air. The monster burns. Yeah.
In the end, Rondvier accepts Sanjay because now the threat to his daughter's life has passed. So he says, I'm proud of you, son. You destroyed the curse that haunted my family for two hundred years. And then this is one of those cases where he says something that he just said again but in English, so he says in English, I'm really proud of you, my son.
Such it's not such a sweet ending, you know. Granted, a lot of people died to get us here, but it's getting back into like just the straight family melodrama aspect of it. It's a nice place to end things.
Yeah, so Sonjay and Suman, we see them married and then it ends very abruptly. I was kind of thinking there would be an ending music number, you know, but there was not, or am I remembering right? Was there? I don't think there was.
I don't think there was a full on musical number to end it out. It was just kind of like we end on more of a traditional note where Good is victorious and they kind of get a nice snapshot of everyone together and then we close it out.
So all in all, I greatly enjoyed Piranhamunder Again. A great love story, great evil wizard, good good family, melodrama and stuff. Love the musical numbers, comedy segments awful, martial arts awesome.
Yeah, and then of course the monster is amazing. So all in all, I feel like this was a pretty solid entry into Bollywood horror. So who knows, May I have to do some more research. Maybe at some point in the future we'll come back and do another Ramsey Brothers film. There's also blinking on his name at the moment. But there was another like top tier competitor to them that put out a number of movies as well, and some of those looked interesting, so who knows it's either way.
I'm glad we got to dive in to the cinema of India here on Weird House Cinema. And once again, if you want to get into into some of this, I have to point out there's an Instagram account for Bollywood crypt and that was one of the first places I started looking around. I found that account, and I was seeing what this account was sharing related to Bollywood horror and kind of getting a taste for what seemed
to be important. And then from there I found out about this awesome Blu ray set that's out from Mondo Macabro. I recommend checking that out. And if you're in Atlanta, like I said, you can go to videodrom and rent some of these bad boys. They just got them on the shelf. All right, we're going to close the book here, but we'd love to hear from you out there again.
If you have experience with Bollywood cinema in general, Bollywood horror specifically, or you know particular memories or things to share about Piranha Mandir, let us know we would love to hear from you. In the meantime, we'll also remind you that stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On
Mondays we do listener mail. On Wednesdays we do short form artifactor or monster Fact episode, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. You can look us up on letterbox best L E T T E R box d dot com. We have an account there called weird House and we have a nice list of all the movies we've covered over the years. You can pull
them up and you can also organize them anyway. This is how I was able to really quickly see what is the longest film we've ever covered and what is the shortest? Without a doubt, Piranha Mandir is the longest, but only beats out Blade by twenty minutes.
All right, huge thanks to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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