I found myself thinking that I hadn't watched any found
footage movies this thread. It seemed like every other movie last year was
found-footage (it wasn't). After Kwaidan
I was also thinking that I'd seen a few Japanese horror movies, plenty of
Italian horror movies, Spanish, British, Korean, Swedish, Australian, French -
even a Venezuelan horror movie. I hadn't seen an Indian horror movie, though.
So when Amazon offered up a found footage Indian horror
movie it seemed like exactly what I was looking for. Which is how I ended up
watching:
Unfortunately, it's not very good. It has all the bad tropes
of the found-footage genre without adding much in the way of fresh angles -
other than the beautiful landscape. A group of young people - four guys and two
girls - head out into the mountainous rural landscape of southern India. One of
them is training to be a cinematographer (A DOP, or Director of Photography, as
he often says), which explains the camera. Spooky things happen. Some of them
die. One makes it back alive and the film is supposedly built around the
footage from the camera guy, showing what happened to the rest.
The problems start off right away. For one thing, the whole movie is dubbed. It's still in Hindi
- they just redid everyone's dialogue. That immediately removes the feeling
that this is the actual footage. It's also often flat in inflection, which you
often get when people are having to redo lines in the studio. The
cinematography is also far too good for a found footage film. That's okay at
first, but as things get worse and worse the footage should also start being...
I dunno, less centered, less in focus, less professional.
And it's slow - god it's slow. It takes nearly 45 minutes before anything
really interesting happens (a spooky tree hung with skulls and dolls) and
another 20-30 before it really starts to get going.
The actors are okay - in the sense that they each have a
distinct character that is consistently portrayed - and some of the early
scenes are quite funny in a 'young people giving each other a hard time' sort
of way. However there's just too much of them goofing off and ragging on each
other. They just talk and talk and don't say much. It seems like a third of
their dialogue is in English - but it doesn't always match the terrible
subtitles. I almost wished I could have turned the subtitles off - I think I
could have figured out 90% of what they were saying without it. (And, like I
said, it didn't always seem to go with what was being said.)
The actual horror movie bits are a combination of Blair
Witch Project noises and weird things in trees added to some Paranormal
Activity poltergeist action and actors making weird motions as the camera
watches everyone sleep. Very little of it is scary (a moving doll, a suddenly
violent character, some distant noises) and it doesn't all fit together. Is it
a ghost, a demon, a forest spirit? They could all fit, or none. I'm going with
demon - there's a weird claw-print that shows up on someone's back and some
possession-related shenanigans.
I went looking for the cast list and found that the version
I watched is actually the Bollywood remake. The original film was made even
more cheaply made in the Kannada language. I wish I'd actually seen that one,
as cheap/raw sometimes enhances the found footage aspect of a film.
I can't really recommend it - though it has a few bright
spots in cinematography and sound design.
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