Film Review: Ragini MMS 2

Sunny Leone is as bad at acting in Hindi films as she is at fucking in porn movies, and the rest of the cast is worse

Look, you can’t possibly hold anything against sexy porn actresses except a throbbing cock. It takes a lot of courage to have sex with strangers before a whirring camera, and it’s admirable that a hardcore-porno star is doing something about her Bollywood aspirations. It shouldn’t bother us that Sunny Leone hasn’t yet learned to act; we have male superstars who haven’t acted in years. What we should care about is the horror genre, even if we can only helplessly watch it slowly being pulled inside an open grave by hands that want to count money.

Ragini MMS is, by all standards, a perfectly alright scary movie. It has a relatively unknown cast which drags you into its terrifying setting. A couple gearing up for kinky sex in an isolated house haunted by a Maharashtrian ghost. Funny as that may sound, you can’t laugh, because the Marathi-speaking spirit is pissed-off and effectively scary. Ragini MMS 2, the sequel to the sleeper hit, has Sunny Leone, who is as bad at acting in Hindi films as she is at fucking in porn movies, and the rest of the cast is even worse.

The hot babe looks extremely fuck-able in Ragini MMS 2 but watching the film is a bumpy ride. You’ve seen her suck dicks and get banged and take cocks up her ass, so how can you pretend for even a nanosecond that she’s got the lead role in a horror movie?

The makers of Ragini MMS 2 understand this very well, so this is the clever plot they came up with: A filmmaker wants to make a movie based on the true story of Ragini and Uday, the couple who went away for a sex-packed weekend. The director, exactly like some of us, knows that movie stars ruin horror movies and make them seem fake, so he’s roped in… Sunny Leone – the famous porn star! That’s right, Sunny Leone plays herself: an adult-movie actress who wants to make it big in Bollywood. Now, isn’t that clever?

The Marathi-speaking ghost’s backstory is solid as hell, and whoever thought that up should have scripted all of Ragini MMS 2, because the movie itself is a mess. The film unit goes to the haunted house, and people start hamming it up and getting killed. You can imagine how lousy the acting is if I’m telling you Sunny Leone’s the finest performer of the lot.

Not scary at all, this movie. Despite its cleverness, you still can’t believe Sunny Leone can be possessed. If you think the movie’s original, nope – the climax of Ragini MMS 2 is a ripoff of the climax of The Conjuring, which was pretty shitty anyway. Director Bhushan Patel and producer Ekta Kapoor know the kind of thrills the audience wants from Sunny Leone’s “Ragini MMS 2” and deliver them by the bucketful. Alas, the audience wants to be entertained and titillated but not scared.

RATING: 2/5 

Beer Review: White Zen

It couldn’t have been more perfectly timed. The Bombay summer had just arrived, I was flat broke and trying to get drunk on cheap liquor very unsuccessfully. I wasn’t too keen on getting wasted on bhang because I’ve had some unfortunate life-changing experiences on it that I just cannot forget, but it was Holi (Dhuleti, actually) and I would’ve had it, but I couldn’t procure any. Fresh, unadulterated toddy (taa-dee!) is meant to be consumed at room temperature, and is disgustingly pungent. The fermented alcoholic drink wasn’t doing the trick, and I found myself plonked across a table occupied by two generous souls who have been kind to me on more than one occasion. The last time I was at The Woodside Inn, I had a blast ignoring the women guzzling imported brews. This time Woodside Eatery & Bar was serving their craft beers and the munificent two happened to be lunching there during happy hours. Gateway Brewing Company’s White Zen, as you can see, is a very sexy drink, and is extremely drinkable. Surprisingly, this beer is hoppier than the other hefeweizens I’ve had, but this is hardly a complaint, especially with the clove spiciness making your tongue tingle all over. Not being able to taste the banana flavour at all (probably because of the vile grog I’d had just before), I made the most of White Zen‘s drinkability, enjoying its crispiness and the hints of citrus, and the malts which eventually break through. Say ‘hefeweizen’ aloud and you’ll know how this beer got its name. May Lord Satan bless Ashwin Dutt and Nikita Shah for making a thirsty man very happy.

RATING: 4/5 

The Darkness That Embraces Indian Horror Films

A week from today the sequel to Ragini MMS will be upon us, overhyped because of Sunny Leone in the lead role, the presence of item numbers and the former porn star gyrating to those songs. I’m not sure which is worse, but she looks very hot and one of the songs is catchy. A surefire way to get anybody who watches Hindi movies to jog their memory is to ask them which the last Bollywood horror film that scared them shitless was.

Those who have some understanding of quality in cinema will cite Ramgopal Varma’s Raat as the scariest one, and then they’ll go silent. Raat is brilliant, of course, but not the only horror classic Hindi cinema can brag about. My heart lies buried do gaz zameen ke neeche with the Ramsay Brothers and goes out to you if their films weren’t a part of your growing experience. I won’t even start naming those spook-fests (I already named one, for your information), but even their titles emphatically show their love for horror. Hell, even Zee Horror Show was bone-chilling; you can scare people of all ages in broad daylight just by humming that otherworldly tune.

The last many years of Bollywood horror have been embarrassingly funny because of directors employing half-hearted measures to make scary movies. RGV has himself turned into a joke of sorts, and his own affinity for the genre has not translated into anything eerie. The best thing old boy Ramu did for the style in recent years was getting Milind Gadagkar to not just write but also direct Phoonk 2. I was perhaps the only film critic the movie got a positive review from and you can read it here. Then there’s Vikram Bhatt, another filmmaker who loves horror but always manages to screw it up. Vikram Bhatt suffers from the need to either justify everything or solve the unearthly problems with the help of… wait for it – God. In one of his movies, the ghost kills a Catholic priest but flees when the protagonist chants the Hanuman Chalisa. In another of his films, the demonic force suffers a setback when the hero hides in a dargah. In yet another attempt of his, one that released around Ganesh Chaturthi/ Ganpati Visarjan, the ghost gets killed by a bleeding man who has drawn power from a mangalmurti to kick ass like a leading man. The use of religious angles isn’t a problem (certainly not when crosses are inverted; they look best that way), but you can tell Vikram Bhatt has been doing it on purpose to excite a certain section of people at that time, and that’s no fun.

The Ramsay Brothers’ offerings, deliberately exaggerated as they were, with the bad songs and poor acting, were wholly enjoyable. The Ramsays were masters of their craft great at what they did because they had embraced the genre and were madly in love with it. They wanted to scare the hell out of you and were successful every time, and what’s amazing is their movies terrified everyone who watched them. My guess is that it always worked because those filmmakers weren’t nursing a latent desire to make a wildly commercial film and focused only on petrifying us all.

Sadly, the latest Ramsay horror releases today (You didn’t know that, right? It’s called Neighbours) and is relegated to seedy theatres, while Sunny Leone’s film will open across multiplexes next Friday. Ragini MMS 2 is destined to be a hit. Manufactured in every way that can be thought of to appeal to audiences that don’t even want to be scared and can be pleased with anything that keeps them entertained for two hours, it makes one think of the tapori crowd that attends metal gigs nowadays. Having no idea what Brutal Death Metal/Goregrind is, they’ll still hop to some slam band because it allows them to stop thinking and simply have fun. Not that that’s wrong, but to somebody who does understand the music, it is very absurd. “Samajh mein nahi aata lekin mazaa aata hai na, buntai!”

Haan, bhamai, haan. The future of everything is scary.

Film Review: The Good Road

That it was India’s official entry to the Oscars should make those mad about movies go out of their way to watch The Good Road. If that isn’t motivation enough, think of it as the Gujarati film which upset the makers of The Lunchbox. Having watched both the films, I think it’s a shame that I have to think of Ritesh Batra’s brilliant Hindi movie as ‘offbeat’ only because The Lunchbox happens to be one of those rare Bollywood movies that exhibit a different sensibility.

Gyan Correa’s debut film The Good Road relies heavily on Amitabha Singh’s cinematography. As I have traveled to the remote villages of Rajasthan, views of highways and the interiors of any part of India hold much charm for me. As a fan of everything minimalist, I feel the film breathe through the few dialogues there are. Three stories cross paths in/on The Good Road, and poor acting doesn’t come in the way of gorgeous shots of the Gujarat highway. Shamji Dhana Kerasia, who plays the truck driver Pappu (and happens to be a truck driver in real life) and his companion Priyank Upadhyay are the only two in the cast who effortlessly act.

Moments of despair turn to utter desolation in the Rann of Kutch, and Gyan Correa keeps you engrossed in this surreal piece of cinema. Not a minute from this Gujarati film (my first, by the way) is spent getting melodramatic, and even the harsh realities depicted nudge you subtly. Subtlety, yes. This subtlety is what I crave in Indian cinema. This subtlety is what I found missing in The Lunchbox, despite its delicate story and nuanced performances. This subtlety is what The Good Road has in abundance, despite its grim story and incompetent performances.

It’s the unhurried pace at which the story is told and the breathtaking visuals of the rural landscape and all that the movie says by way of saying very little that do it for me. Here’s to more films down the Gujju road.

RATING: 3.5/5