While I’ve dedicated about half of this blog to reviews of
Asian movies, I’ve yet to really touch on India, or the wide, weird world of
Bollywood and Hindi movies. I guess the reason would be that, comparatively, I
haven’t seem nowhere near as many of them as I have of Japanese, Hong Kong,
Malaysian and South Korean films. Another big aspect would be that a lot of the
Hindi/Bollywood films I have seen have been pretty damn awful. Bollywood is a
huge industry, but it ain’t exactly the most creative. You’d be surprised at
how many Bollywood movies are just direct ripoffs/blatant unlicensed remakes of
other successful movies. Stealing ideas, or outright copying movies plots (and
even posters) is just a thing Bollywood has done for years.
Well it’s time to do a Bollywood movie anyway, and
considering the other half of this blog has been dedicated to horror movies I
might as well do a Bollywood Horror movie, because such a thing does exist. So
we get Darr @ the Mall, an inept ‘horror’ movie that doesn’t know or care about what it’s
doing but instead copies ideas and imagery from dozens of other movies and
shoves them on screen. What joy.
The Amity Mall, the largest shopping mall in India, has just
finished construction and is due to celebrate its inauguration. Despite not yet
opening, it has a horrible reputation due to a series of mysteriously
‘accidental’ deaths of staff and construction workers, causing the locals and
media to consider the place haunted. Vishnu is hired as the mall’s new security chief after the
death of the previous one. The mall’s owners, Mr. Manchanda and Mr. Khan, are
holding a party on the eve of the inauguration to celebrate with their adult
children, including Manchanda’s daughter Ahana, various investors and
associates. As the party goes on and Ahana and her friends explore the empty
mall, Vishnu investigates mysterious apparitions and discovers a vengeful
spirit is haunting the mall, killing those it crosses paths with. It traps
Vishnu, Manchanda, Khan and their family members in the mall and hunts them
down, as the group attempts to escape.
So it’s a pretty standard, familiar shell of a plot all
things considered. It’s actually the plot of a few horror movies shoved
together really – ‘trapped in a shopping mall’ is the premise of a lot, like
Dawn of the Dead of Chopping Mall, but even the far more specific ‘ghost haunts
shopping mall before it opens’ is stolen wholesale from the Japanese
horror-thriller ‘Into the Mirror’, as well as it’s crappy American remake
‘Mirrors’ (which starred Kiefer Sutherland as an alcoholic ex-cop who just
wants his kids). The movie even cribs a few visuals from it. Unoriginality of
the premise aside, this set-up is actually pretty decent for a little horror
movie, provided it has a few things: a good pace, entertaining characters,
creepy atmosphere and great kills. Darr doesn’t have any of these things.
Darr has a horribly languid pace, prone to meandering
detours into nothingness as it lazes around for most of its (unnecessarily long)
two hour length. Two hours is a very long time in horror movie terms, and Darr
uses it in the worst possible way – it takes a full seventy minutes before the
film gets to the ‘trapped in the mall’ part. Those seventy minutes are spent
mostly on characters wandering around, or Ahana and her unlikeable relatives/friends
getting into underwritten relationship drama. When the ghost does turn up
proper, it drags even more since it has another fifty minutes to get through,
so you’re mostly watching characters wander around in the dark until they get
killed off. Speaking of unlikeable, the characters are so thinly written and
boring that I struggle to remember anything about them. They don’t have
personalities and the cast don’t bother to give the poorly written and
laughable script any effort. Darr also has a really distracting and confusing
issue with dialogue. Characters switch from speaking in Hindi to English
randomly, sometimes within the same sentence. It’s baffling, especially when
they’ll start a sentence in English, then trail off into Hindi while
occasionally throwing in an English word or phrase. I have no idea why they did
it – to whose benefit is it?
Vishnu just seems confused for the entire movie, never
really reacting the way that he should but instead standing around looking as
though he doesn’t know where he is or what he’s doing. Which, considering the
rest of the movie, might be closer to reality than one would think. According
to the story Vishnu is meant to be in his late twenties, but the actor
they chose for him is clearly in his forties which is ridiculous (his throat is
so coarse with lines It looks like he survived being hanged several times).
Sure, American horror movies tend to hire twentysomethings to play teens, but
they at least look young. I assume he’s a well-known actor, because otherwise
why the hell would they have chosen him? There’s nothing to his character but
that’s true of everybody else. Nobody has any chemistry or charisma and nobody
interacts in any way that makes sense. Why is Machanda so familiar with Vishnu
when the latter has only been working there overnight? Why does the movie try
and do a weird Vishnu x Ahana thing when they don’t even know each other and
barely even speak?
The party, despite having at least forty people attending,
suddenly disappears when the movie decides it’s finally time to get on with it.
I don’t know what happened to any of those people, including the group of
singers and dancers who do a little music number, but the movie decides that’s
not important anymore even though it’s spent so long dwelling on it. I’d also
like to point out just how confusing the actual geography of the mall is, and
how the party itself seems to exist in some sort of pocket dimension. I’m not
even entirely sure the party is in the mall at all – its interior is a
nightclub, and there’s never a scene showing anybody heading into or out of the
mall. Establishing shots aren’t the films forte, but then again nothing is. In
fact, you never really get a sense of where anything is in the wall and even
the scenes inside show it’s clearly empty and unfinished. It really feels like
they shot the movie in several different places, with the cramped underground
security rooms full of assorted haunted house junk (Creepy mannequins! Old pictures!
Jars!) not fitting in at all with the sleek mall interior, which itself doesn’t
fit right with the mall’s grassy exterior.
When spooky things happen, they’re not interesting. Because
it’s about ghosts, that means we get every ghost cliché possible, and because
it’s Darr it means it’s all scenes taken from other movies. Things move in the
background when characters aren’t looking, people hear voices or sounds or see
things and freak out. When people finally start dying, it’s even more
disappointing. The vast majority of the deaths occur off-screen or are shot in
such a way that you can’t see what is going on. Darr is a big fan of having the
screen turn completely black in place of showing any action. It’s either that
or just showing a shadow or silhouette of a death or the bloodthirsty spectre,
since those are the cheapest, laziest way of doing it.
I haven’t talked yet of the spooky spectre, and that’s
mostly because it’s absolutely pathetic. It’s a poorly animated skeleton lady in a smog cloud.
Sometimes it looks like a creepy ghost lady, specifically the maiden in black
from The Maiden in Black (because Darr will steal from anything). Other times
it’s just a black cloud that’s barely visible in the black void most scenes
tend to inhabit. Other than ghost cloud/lady, there are also ghost children
which look just as bad. Effects work is never great in these sorts of movies,
but it’s just so especially awful. Even worse are the random green screen
effects used occasionally for no apparent reason. One, involving a flashback,
has a characters silhouette against an obviously computer generated inferno,
the flames, looking as though they came from a Playstation 1 game, looping over
and over. The worst is in the finale, where the survivors try and run to safety
towards outside, only the outside is clearly a backdrop that’s been placed
there – you can visibly see that it’s a flat surface. What the hell?
The film is hard to watch, not just because of everything
mentioned above but mostly because the lighting, framing and blocking is
atrocious. From a technical point of view, this is amateur (two) hour(s),
because it’s aggravatingly difficult to see what’s going on in most scenes.
Most scenes are lit poorly, while some aren’t lit at all, so you’re staring at
near pitch-blackness as you struggle to make out what you’re looking at. Sure,
the mall is meant to be dark and spooky and haunted, but when you can’t see
what’s happening then what’s the point of watching? When you can actually see,
the film manages to screw things up anyway, often throwing blinding light
sources in your face (Vishnu constantly points his flashlight directly into the
camera, meaning you can’t see anything anyway), or there’ll be something in the
way of the shot, blocking it. As such, it’s an ugly and cluttered movie. It’s
abundantly clear that the filmmakers don’t actually understand horror movies or
how tension and atmosphere are meant to work. Every attempt made has been
stolen, poorly, from other horror movies. Darr is often embarrassing in the way
it shamelessly steals ideas and imagery from other horror movies and shoves
them on screen. You can often even pick exactly what movie they’re liberally
copying, from the yellow raincoat-clad ghost from Dark Water, to the rusty
nightmare realm of Silent Hill. None of these things mesh well, or even have
any bearing or significance to the plot; they’re just there seemingly because
the filmmakers saw it worked in other horror movies and decided to steal it.
It’s not homage or a reference, it’s just taking bits and pieces form other
films and stapling them onto your own. Even other small details, like how the
mall is called the Amity Mall, are almost painful little references.
Because this is a movie from Bollywood, we get music numbers
thrown in. No, it’s not what you’re thinking – it isn’t a musical and the
characters don’t suddenly burst into song or sing their predicament. That would
have at least been funny. Instead we get the equivalent of an obnoxious music
video spliced into the middle of the film, a glitzy club-music track I assume to be
titled Pina Colada, because that’s what the girl who looked like a pig in
lipstick rolled into latex and fishnet stockings singing it kept repeating over and over again. It
comes out of nowhere, has nothing to do with the story or any of the characters,
fucks up the tone and is gone, never mentioned again. Another scene also has a
music track, complete with lyrics, play for no reason. The scene seems to end
and the song stops as we cut away and the film’s ‘plot’ continues for a few
minutes, but then we cut back and the song resumes from where it’d stopped
mid-lyrics, which is the weirdest thing ever. It’s important to note that these
songs were apparently actually written specifically for this movie, because
that’s how Bollywood works. The other music, from atmospherics to incidental
pieces are often out of place or silly. The building-tension noises sound like
they’re stolen from cheesy 80s cartoons, and any attempts at spooky horror
sounds are almost like parody versions of the music from actual horror movies.
