Cinemaah

Ghoul On The Prowl

This film labelled by the makers as a horror-comedy, is set in the quaint town of Chanderi (in Madhya Pradesh), which immediately gives it the right look and atmosphere in which to play out the story of Stree, a female spook, that terrorizes the town for four days each year, during an annual pooja.

The spirit calls out to men walking down dark streets, and if they turn, they vanish, leaving just a pile of their clothes behind. But if they have painted “O Stree kal aana” on their walls with bat’s blood (or some such), they are spared.  Vicky (Rajkummar Rao), the cool dude of Chanderi, thinks he is too rational to bother about these superstitions, till he is confronted with the existence of Stree.

Meanwhile, Vicky (pronounced Bicky in the MP dialect) is the most popular tailor in town (“Chanderi ka Manish Malhotra”), when he gets besotted by a strange woman (Shraddha Kapoor), who appears and disappears suddenly, does not have a cell phone and won’t enter the town’s temple. 

When she asks him to get her some odd things like a white cat’s hair and lizard’s tail, Vicky’s friends, Bittu (Aparshakti Khurana) and Jana (Abhishek Banerjee) are convinced this nameless girlfriend is a witch. Men start disappearing, but when Jana does too, friends have to put aside their fear and hunt for him and the chudail, with the town’s know-all bookseller, Rudra (Pankaj Tripathi) to guide them.

The screenplay by filmmakers Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK, builds up the humour well, and pokes fun of a town of sex-starved men terrified of stepping out of their homes to escape the ghoul on the prowl. But when it gets into its horror mode, Stree gets problematic. In spite of the disclaimer at the beginning that the film does not endorse superstition, it ends up doing just that.

The idea may have been to mock the myths surrounding vengeful female spirits out to punish men,  but what it ends up doing it respectfully ticking all the ‘how-to-catch-a-chudail’ boxes.  The talk about a woman’s consent and “yes means yes” is just a glib cover for pretending there is more to the supernatural mumbo-jumbo on screen than what horror films (remember the Ramsay Brothers?) used to dish out.

Its confused messaging aside, the film has Rajkummar Rao leading the exuberant male cast—Shraddha Kapoor is just the catalyst for what happens—all of whom catch the ridiculous tone intended and play it for laughs with all their might. Stree could have been a real woman power film, peppered with ghost-busting wit, pity it falls short.

There was really no reason to make a sequel to two really bad films that may have done well because of the fan following the Deols have, but did them no credit.  Certainly not to Dharmendra, who ought not to tarnish that legend status he has achieved, just because the gossip mags once labelled him Garam Dharam and he thinks it's cool to play an old Romeo.

Yamla Pagla Deewana Phir Se, directed by Navaniat Singh, scrapes the bottom of the barrel for laughs, and after making fun of Sumo wrestlers and getting an orangutan to paint in the earlier film, that barrel is wearing thin.

In the third film, Deol father and sons play characters different from the last two YPD installments, but stay strictly within the chalk circle they have drawn for themselves. So Sunny Deol playing Puran, a vaid, gets to halt trucks with his bare hands, and beat up hoods (“ek vaid se avaidh kaam karwa rahe ho?” he quips), Bobby Deol plays his good-for-nothing brother Kaala, who gets to do a drunken scene like his father did in Sholay (the self-referencing is beyond vain), while senior Deol plays a wise-cracking lawyer and tenant  of the brothers, paying a pittance as rent.

A crooked pharmaceutical manufacturer, Marfatia (Mohan Kapoor) offers Puran tons of money for a traditional, cure-all panacea (vajrakavach) that he has, but is turned down. So he uses Kaala to steal the formula. Marfatia then patents it and sues Puran. So who would come to the rescue but the tenant?

 A plot with some potential for comedy, but the writers and director get just plain lazy, complacent in the knowledge that fans (North Indian, mostly, so a lot of Punjabi bragging and some Gujarati dissing) of the stars will watch the film regardless of its puerile content. To provide the glamour, such as it is, is a Gujarati doctor Cheeku played by Kriti Kharbanda. Stars like  Rekha, Shatrughan Sinha, Salman Khan, Sonakshi Sinha, make friendly appearances, which just underlines the goodwill the Deols have in the film industry, so why can’t they just make better films?