The Other Side of the Door

Director: Johannes Roberts
Writers: Johannes Roberts, Ernest Riera
Producers: Alexandre Aja, Rory Aitken, Ben Pugh
Cast: Sarah Wayne Callies, Jeremy Sisto, Suchitra Pillai
Country: UK/India
Year of release: 2016
Reviewed from: UK theatrical release

Let’s start this with a brief recap of Johannes Roberts’ career because I have seen (almost) all his films. His first couple of movies were jointly directed with James Eaves. Sanitarium is a medical horror which I actually first saw in its unreleased, longer cut as Diagnosis. It was later re-edited and had a framing story added featuring no less than spoon-bending con artist Uri Geller as a detective (and token name value). Then Jim and Jo made something called Alice which also got chopped up and retitled, seeing release as the unfathomable Hellbreeder.

Roberts' solo debut was Darkhunters, about supernatural detectives hunting a dead man. Then came Forest of the Damned (aka Demonic) in which some teenagers go to the woods and get attacked by fallen angels; this was the feature debut of both Eleanor James and Marysia Kay. And after that came the episodic phone serial When Evil Calls which was turned into a feature with the addition of linking scenes featuring Sir Sean Pertwee. If you want more detail on those five movies, they are discussed at length in my book Urban Terrors.

Jo was at a bit of a low ebb after When Evil Calls. When a reviewer sums up your film as “Fuck this movie” it’s difficult not to feel dispirited. (Although personally I preferred it to the formulaic Forest of the Damned, notwithstanding the latter has Ella and Marysia clambering around in the nude).

That was the first stage of Jo Roberts’ career. A few years later he re-emerged, re-energised, with the absolutely brilliant F which to my mind remains his best film. I love the way it takes the hoodie horror subgenre and does something different with it, balancing on the very edge of the supernatural, literally demonising young people. This was followed by a US cable movie, Roadkill, which is the one Johannes Roberts feature I haven’t seen. (On the other hand I have seen the obscure Dark Secrets, on which he was credited as executive producer. This was produced by Ernest Riera who had worked on Forest of the Damned and When Evil Calls. He has since directed the unreleased Forest of the Damned 2 and indeed is co-writer of this movie.) Then came Storage 24, a generic but fun monster-on-the-loose picture which was written, produced by and starred Noel Clarke.

Which brings us to The Other Side of the Door, a ghost story set in India. This is the big time: produced by Alexandre Aja (Switchblade Romance, Hills Have Eyes remake) and distributed by 20th Century Fox. Not sure what the budget was but this actually looks like a Hollywood movie. It was released on 330 screens in the UK and 550 in the States. The gulf between Other Side and Sanitarium is immeasurably vast but Jo Roberts has straddled it and that’s a huge achievement in itself.

So anyway, the story here is a fairly conventional Monkey’s Paw-style narrative with the Indian setting helping to both distinguish the movie within its subgenre and provide an otherworldly ambience for the characters and plot. Jeremy Sisto from Law and Order is Michael, an American antiques dealer sourcing items in Mumbai. Sarah Wayne Callis from The Walking Dead is his wife Maria. After a prologue, the film jumps ahead six years and it is at this point that Jo does an impressive show-don’t-tell job, letting us work out for ourselves that though they have a daughter now, they also used to have a son.

A little later we get to see how that son, Oliver, died. A road accident, a car in the river filling with water, Maria facing a Sophie’s choice of whether to save Oliver (whose leg is trapped) or his sister Lucy (who is unconscious). She saves Lucy but is understandably distraught at having had to abandon her screaming, terrified little boy and let him drown. This is a really, really harrowing sequence and very well shot, I can’t imagine what the health and safety issues are like when shooting a sequence with two very young actors and a lot of water.

Back in the main narrative, Lucy is fine but Maria is haunted by guilt. The family’s servant Piki (Suchitra Pillai from the Indian version of 24) has a solution. She knows of a temple in a distant part of India where, if you scatter the ashes of a loved one outside and wait for nightfall, they will come to you. Maria will be able to say goodbye to Oliver and tell him how much she loves him. But, Piki stresses, on no account must Maria open the door.

Well, I think we can all guess what’s going to happen…

To be completely fair to Maria, she only opens the door when she thinks that Oliver’s spirit has almost gone, but it’s enough and something has come through from ‘the other side’. Back home, Oliver makes his presence felt. At first Maria is delighted to be able to once again sit and read a bedtime story to her invisible son. Lucy realises that her brother has come back and is young enough to accept this, although her mother swears her to secrecy. Michael is off buying antiques and has no idea what has gone on. This is all very creepy although I can't help feeling that the film has played its hand too early. We're shown pretty much from the off that Oliver's ghost really is present, never getting the chance to experience any of the 'is it all in her head?' speculation that characterises many of the best ghost stories.

Gradually Oliver turns from darling boy to impudent child to evil spirit. Plants and animals start dying as he sucks the life from them. Without going into detail, things get worse and worse, deadlier and deadlier. Jo does a great job of twisting the knife, showing his years of horror film-making experience. The finale is genuinely shocking although the ‘twist’ epilogue seems kind of cheesy.

I certainly enjoyed The Other Side of the Door, as indeed I enjoyed Storage 24 (although I still think F beats them both). The cast are solid, including the kids: Sofia Rosinsky does a sterling job as Lucy, who becomes increasingly involved in the story as the film progresses. Logan Creran doesn’t have much to do as Oliver except appear in a few flashbacks or pop up towards the end with some prosthetic stuff on his face. Most of the time Oliver is a voice, provided by Jax Malcolm.

The production design by David Bryan (who used to design Big Cook, Little Cook!) is terrific. Everything is a set except for the exterior of the couple’s home which is actually the house where Rudyard Kipling was born. Aja provided his regular DP Maxime Alexandre who does a cracking job. This is a good, solid cinematic ghost story. Commendably, the script, design and direction use the Indian setting without patronising or stereotyping. Although this is very much a Western view of India; you couldn't mistake this for a genuine basmati horror like Bhoot or Hawa. (One thing that is a little regrettable: among all the stills released by Fox's publicity people, I can't find a single one of Suchitra Pillai.)

But – and it’s a but I don’t like having to admit – the one thing that the film isn’t… is scary. As a supernatural drama it’s top-notch stuff, but as actual horror, as an example of a film genre defined by the emotion it creates in the audience, I found that emotion curiously absent. I empathised with the characters, I loved the creepy atmosphere, I liked the way that Oliver’s character changes, I enjoyed the special effects thing that has also been unleashed, I really felt involved in the heart-wrenching climax. But I wasn’t actually ever frightened. (Except, a bit I guess, when the car is filling with water.)

And this isn’t because I watch a lot of horror films. I can still be scared. Anyway, who the hell is a film like this aimed at if it’s not people who watch horror films.

The problem lies fairly and squarely with the soundtrack. The film is scored by Joseph Bishara whose other credits include the Night of the Demons remake and all three Insidious films. He is evidently one of those composers who believes that anything scary in a horror film should be emphasised with a big, crashing chord. And this is just a huge bugbear with me.

Because not only is that a massive cliché, it’s actually self-defeating. Bishara’s determination to match every shocking or disturbing image with an orchestral music sting robs those images of their ability to shock and disturb. His music detracts when it should (and thinks it is) be emphasising.

Here’s the nuts and bolts. A sudden noise will always make people jump. That’s an instinctive reaction. Human beings are programmed to jump at a sudden noise, as are most mammals that aren’t apex predators. It’s how our ancestors avoided being eaten. On the cinema screen, it doesn’t matter a wit what you show when that chord crashes. If we’re looking at a film of a spring meadow and a butterfly comes into view, accompanied by a thunderous orchestral blast, we will jump.

In a horror film like this, our instinctive reaction to the sound means that we don’t get a chance to react to the image. And it’s the image that should be scaring us. Effective horror scores counterpoint the imagery or even ignore it – and that’s what make the imagery scary. Music that doesn’t acknowledge the scary image says, “Did you notice this? Whoa, what was that? Did you really see that? Holy cow, what is going on? Now you’re really worried, aren’t you?” But music like Joseph Bishara’s score for The Other Side of the Door just beats us over the head, yelling, “Look! Look at this! See the scary thing! Do you see it? Do you? Do you?!” By the time we’ve recovered our wits, the scary thing has either disappeared off screen or simply isn’t scary any more.

There are a bunch of moments in The Other Side of the Door which could have been really, really terrifying but the lumbering behemoth that is Bushara’s music robs them of their power and that’s a real shame. It neuters the horror and undoes the director’s hard work.

That’s my main beef. Aside from that: yeah, I enjoyed the film and I think you will too. What’s interesting is to compare and contrast this with F, since both deal with a parent/child relationship. In some ways they are opposites: in F the outside force is a wedge pushing the generations apart, in Other Side the outside force binds them together when they should have separated. But in both films a parent is trying desperately to cling on, in defiance of reality, to a lost relationship with a child.

What has happened inbetween, which may have exerted an influence on Roberts’ oeuvre, is that Jo has become a dad himself. His Instagram account is full of photos of Ludwig Roberts (aka ‘Earwig’) who is a little cutie and no mistake. So perhaps F can be read, if one is in a film studies mood, as being about Johannes Roberts’ relationship with his father while Other Side reflects his own newfound status as parent of a small child. Except of course this film was shot in 2014 before Earwig was born. Nevertheless, fatherhood – including impending fatherhood – changes one’s attitude. It can’t have been easy overseeing post-production on a film about a parent losing a child when you’ve suddenly got one yourself. (It’s also interesting to note that the last British horror film made in India, The Dead 2, was also about parenthood. Is there a subtext somewhere that equates post-imperialism with paternalism?)

One final thing. About four years ago, back in May 2012 – when Earwig was just a twinkle in his father’s eye – Jo Roberts was looking for some feedback on a treatment he had knocked together for something called The Door. I’ve met Jo a few times and we’ve corresponded over the years so I offered to take a look, had a read and sent back some detailed notes.

The treatment, which Jo freely admitted was “very off the cuff and rambling and not finished” contains the kernel of what would become The Other Side of the Door. The couple are British not American and they don’t have a daughter. In this first pass at the story the mother saves a little Indian girl from being hit by a car then finds that the same car has knocked down and killed Oliver. It’s the father of the girl, rather than a servant, who tells her about the temple. Once Oliver’s spirit is home, the story develops differently with more emphasis on doors as a motif. The other side of Oliver’s bedroom door becomes as significant as the other side of the temple door. The mum brings Oliver back each night by scattering ashes inside his bedroom and finds footprints in them in the morning. There is also stuff about other spirits trying to trick their way through by pretending to be Oliver, which would have been nice to keep.

Frustratingly, although I have Jo’s treatment and his reply to my feedback (“I think you really hit the nail on the head. I’m going to start to work and reform the treatment over the next few weeks – this has been super helpful!”), I no longer have the actual notes I put together and sent. So I have no idea whether any of my suggestions ended up in the finished film. But until I eventually get my own feature writing credit somewhere, it’s nice to know that I was able to help, in some small way, with the very early stages of this one.

Since completing Other Side, which was all shot in India, Jo has spent a couple of months in the Dominican Republic shooting his underwater epic 47 Metres Down. He and Ernest Riera have also sold a script called The Pool, touted as ‘Cujo in a swimming pool’ which Paul Hyett is attached to direct.

This film was originally announced for a late February release but got bumped by a week to early March so that it could premiere at Glasgow Frightfest (where Paul H showed some early footage from Heretiks). Some Pacific Rim territories retained the earlier date so, if the IMDb is correct (it could happen one day) the first people to see this were audiences in Indonesia and the Philippines.

MJS rating: B+

Robot

Director: Shankar
Writer: Shankar
Producers: Kalanidhi Maran, Hansraj Saxena
Cast: Ashwairya Rai, Rajnikanth, Danny Denzongpa
Country: India
Year of release: 2010
Reviewed from: UK theatrical release

I don’t get out to the cinema much nowadays, what with the family and the job and everything. Most of what I watch is on DVD. So it was pretty unusual this week for me to be at the cinema on two consecutive days.

Given how infrequently I see anything on the big screen, what are the chances that both films would be foreign? Well, pretty good I suppose. I like foreign films. What about the fact that both movies were about robots? Not unbelievable - I like movies about robots. Oh, and they were both two and a half hours long. That is stretching coincidence a little far.

Yes folks, within a 33-hour period I spent five of those hours sat in a cinema watching overseas robot movies. But the above notwithstanding, they couldn’t have been more different. Sunday afternoon was spent watching the restored version of Metropolis; Sunday evening’s viewing was the most expensive Bollywood film ever made - Robot.

Actually, I saw three films that weekend. On Saturday, Mrs S and I watched Made in Dagenham, the story of the machinists’ strike at Ford in 1968 which precipitated a worldwide movement towards equality of pay for women. It was good fun and even featured Marysia Kay in a small, non-speaking role. There are actually parallels between Made in Dagenham and Metropolis (alliteration aside). Both are about a worker’s revolt against injustice, led by a woman, and both manage to be watchable movies without falling into the trap of tedious left-wing polemic which such a scenario suggests. Admittedly, one does this by being a feel-good, lightweight comedy-drama and the other does it by being a powerful, thrilling sci-fi epic - but I never said they were the same film, did I?

Also, obviously, one of them is silent. And black and white. And German.

All the above proves is that you can find similarities between any two films, no matter how different. Well, almost. I’ve tried to work out if Made in Dagenham has any parallels with Robot and I think I can honestly say that it doesn’t, beyond the fact that they’re both in colour, and talkies. Which isn’t saying much, is it?

Metropolis, by the way, is a whole new film with the extra material. It still doesn’t make complete sense but it makes a hell of a lot more sense than it used to.

But anyway, this isn’t a review of Metropolis or Made in Dagenham. This is a review of Robot. And I am here to tell you that this is an awesome film. I enjoyed the other two very much - I enjoy a lot of films - but Robot is one of those movies that takes you to another level. It is both magnificent and magnificently bonkers.

This is pure Bollywood. It’s nearly three hours long, it has lots of singing and dancing, the women are unbelievably beautiful and the men wear jackets that I would swap my entire wardrobe for. Unlike some other Bollywood flicks - and certainly unlike the public perception of Bollywood - it’s not a blatant rip-off of a Hollywood movie (or even two Hollywood movies). Although admittedly some of the imagery is derived from The Terminator, The Matrix and their various sequels. But I think that falls more neatly under the category of ‘homage’.

Rajnikanth (aka Superstar Rajni) pulls double duty as independent scientist Dr Vaseegaran (‘Vasee’) and his robotic creation, initially named Robo but then rechristened Chitti. (The name is suggested by Vaseegaran’s mother because it’s what she would have called her second son, if she had one.) Vaseegaran has a gleaming high-tech lab, a couple of idiot assistants, two smaller humanoid robots wandering around (one of which is referred to as ‘R2’!) and no obvious source of income.

For reasons unexplained he gives his full-size, ‘andro-humanoid’ robot a rubber mask modelled on his own face, giving rise to a marketable situation of Rajnikanth acting opposite himself. Except that, for a lot of the time, he doesn’t. There’s probably a few split-screen shots in here but often, when creator and robot appear on screen together, the latter is a stand-in wearing a mask. It’s a decent enough mask and the fact that the robot has (a) a wig and (b) large, never-removed, wrap-around shades helps to disguise the fact that it’s someone else.

Vaseegaran has a beard - initially long and straggly, later trimmed to a neat goatee - but this doesn’t quite succeed in distracting the audience from noticing that the ‘identical’ robot has a significantly bulkier jaw. Also, in some shots, the robot is clearly a couple of inches taller!

The reason for Vasee’s unkempt appearance is that he has been working solidly on the robot for months(!) and consequently has been completely ignoring his girlfriend Sana. She has sent him 200 texts and e-mails, even tried to get to see him in the lab, but he has been completely out of contact.

Is he mad? His girlfriend is Ashwairya Rai. Aishwairya freaking Rai!

Former Miss World Asjwairya Rai. Bollywood queen Ashwairya Rai. Very probably the most beautiful woman on the planet Ashwairya Rai.

Listen, I’m not one for mooning over sexy film stars. Okay, I wouldn’t exactly fight off Angelina Jolie or Kiera Knightley or Megan Fox or... well, I’m only human. It’s nice to watch attractive, glamorous people, purely on an aesthetic level. But I’m not the sort of fanboy who goes crazy over some actress.

However, like any heterosexual male, I would crawl naked over broken glass to touch the hem of Ashwairya Rai’s sari. She is smoking, simple as that. She’s now 36 (she was Miss World in 1994) and she gets more stunning every year. The fact that she’s evidently very intelligent and successful is, of course, terrific too. (I’m base, but I’m not that base.)

But still: Ashwairya Rai. I know this is a lightweight science fantasy but the idea that even the nerdiest nerd would prefer a robotics lab over Ashwairya Rai just doesn’t hold water. I mean, okay, yes, suspension of disbelief and all that but dude, there’s a limit!

Vasee and Sana are on the verge of breaking up but they decide they love each other really and this is the cue for the first song and dance number, which sees the two actors in some stunning desert locations. This is one of those Bollywood films where the musical sequences are all fantasy sequences rather than everyone on screen suddenly breaking into a big production number (unless they’re actually in a scene at a party or some similar occurence when folk would actually dance).

This is a film of two halves - literally, as there is an intermission about an hour and a half in. But also figuratively as part one is basically a comedy. Chitti has to learn about the world, starting by learning not to take things literally (a bent traffic cop who asks for ‘a cut’ gets a bleeding palm). Everyone is impressed by the robot, including Vasee’s mentor, the shifty Dr Bora whose own robotic prototypes don’t work properly and who would dearly love to get his hands on Chitti’s ‘neural schema’.

When Sana asks to borrow Chitti for a couple of days, she finds that he is the perfect man. Sana lives in - and may actually have set up - a women-only retreat for war widows, young and old. Chitti is only allowed in because, though he appears male, he’s a robot, not a man. He proves himself an excellent cook and superb at tidying and cleaning, using vast amounts of knowledge that were inputted by Vasee.

Sana is studying to be a doctor, possibly a midwife, but her revision is disturbed by noisy yobbos who live in the next house. Chitti goes over there and calmly destroys their stereo. When loud music comes from down the street, he once again is a gallant, using his high-tech powers to eliminate the noise-making equipment. When the street gang threaten him with knives, he simply magnetises his body and all the knives stick to him, along with the youths’ jewellery (which would of course be non-ferrous). In one of many funny and original gags, Chitti arranges all the metal objects around him to make himself look like a particular god whom the locals are busy worshipping.

Chitti helps Sana with her revision but, being naive, he also helps her to cheat in her medical exam, using a high-tech device to see the paper in front of her and pass the answers into her ear or even project them onto the answer sheet for her to trace. This relates to a never-clearly-explained remote viewing/communication wotsit that is part of Chitti which does feature more significantly in some other scenes. A couple of senior doctors come across this man sitting alone on a park bench spouting advanced medical knowledge out loud for no apparent reason and Chitti, being naive in the ways of duplicity, explains that he is helping Sana cheat but she gets away with it by claiming that she doesn’t know the man and he must be a lunatic.

More disturbing than this betrayal is that Sana, the film’s heroine, is prepared to cheat in a medical exam. This isn’t just a qualification, this is recognition that the student actually knows this stuff before she starts treating people. That she would even consider this is deeply worrying and frankly inconsistent with the character who is otherwise a good person.

Later, Sana and Chitti are attacked on a train by the combined yobbos from the revision sequence who have diligently armed themselves with weapons made only of stone and wood. There follows an extended fight scene, presaged by the data input scene in the lab when one of the categories of info uploaded into Chitti is clearly labelled ‘martial arts’.

Thrown from the train because his battery is running low, Chitti recharges himself, gives chase (using wheels in his feet) and reboards the train to finally put paid to the whole hoodlum gang, punching and kicking and generally beating them up. Of course, you know what this makes Robot, don’t you? It’s a late flowering of that quintessential 1990s subgenre, the KCM - or Kickboxing Cyborg Movie.

The one thing which Chitti lacks, it seems, is feelings. So Vasee adds them and Chitti has a whole new set of problems to deal with, not least that he falls in love - predictably - with Sana. After helping to deliver a breach baby when mother and child are both close to death (a well-handled, very emotional scene), Chitti receives a peck on the cheek from Sana and reacts in the same way that any man would if he had the lightest of kisses from Ashwairya Rai: he falls hopelessly head over heels in love with her.

This leads to probably the oddest sequence in the film when he visits Sana in her room and she sets him the challenge of catching a mosquito which has just bitten her. Not only does he chase the mozzie across the city to a smelly sewer outlet where millions of the things live, not only does he identify the insect in question, but he actually has a conversation with the (CGI) mosquitos. This really doesn’t fit in with the rest of the film and, even in a Bollywood fantasy, it stands out as making no sense.

Nevertheless, Chitti loves Sana. He fixes his hair, puts on a really fabulous jacket and cuts a rug with her at a party, making his creator understandably jealous. But Sana makes it clear that she loves Vasee, she is engaged to Vasee and she will not consider a relationship with a machine.

“And so the story begins,” smirks Doctor Bora in a scene designed to close the first half as the curtain descends.

So essentially what we have here is a version of the Pinocchio story: the innocent, artificial man-boy who longs to be human. We’ve seen it many times. It’s Data from Star Trek all over again, it’s Edward Scissorhands without the garden shears. In fact, the film it reminds me of most is the 1987 John Malkovich comedy Making Mr Right, in which a scientist creates an android in his own image who then falls in love with a real woman, creating what might be termed a two-sided triangle.

But if the first half of the film is Pinocchio, the second is Frankenstein as the movie turns into an all-out, action-packed, sci-fi thriller. Where the first half was a comedy with some action elements, this is an action film with a few comic elements, even getting quite horrific at times. This is a movie which, despite its lightweight, light-hearted over-story isn’t afraid to have some quite unpleasant moments, including an attempted rape of Sana in the train sequence (which the surrounding thugs all want to film on their mobiles) and a genuinely shocking road-death.

Vasee has designed Chitti specifically to work as a soldier, with the long-term aim that an army of such robots would help to protect India and would mean that no wife or mother ever had to lose a husband/son. There is even a statement in the dialogue that, for this reason, Chitti does not comply with Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics. (Asimov gets mentioned in the chorus of one of the songs too, along with Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein,)

But adding feelings to Chitti has caused him to fall in love and he now refuses to demonstrate his abilities to army top brass, telling them instead that there should be more love and peace. Furious and embarrassed, Vasee takes Chitti back to the lab and, to quote a famous book, gives him a reprogramming with an axe that he’ll never forget. The pieces of robot are thrown into a skip and taken to one of India’s many biggest rubbish tips.

But... you can’t keep a good robot down and the pieces manage to just about reassemble themselves enough to make contact with Dr Bora, who is still scheming to get his hands on Chitti’s schema (whatever that is). Rebuilt once again in Vasee’s image, but with sharper sideburns and a white streak in the middle of his hair, Chitti is supplied with some sort of red memory chip doodad. And that’s what turns him completely evil...

Chitti goes on a crime spree but, working with the police and army, Vasee manages to destroy the errant android - except it’s not Chitti. At which point the slow-on-the-uptake Indian coppers realise how come Chitti has been stealing vehicles, supplies, jewellery and shoes in multiple places simultaneously.

Yes folks, the original Chitti has built an army of Chittis, all played by stuntmen in Rajnikanth masks, with those same large shades but now a different wig. He has taken over the Indian Robotics Institute and, to top it all, kidnaps Sana in the middle of her wedding to Vasee. This leads into a quite magnificent car-chase (with some deliberate nods to The Blues Brothers, I think) as vast numbers of Indian cops pursue Chitti, with the robot leaping in and out of his convertible to wreak vehicular damage by mashing lorries together and other tricks, while the terrified Sana looks on helplessly

Escaping the police and taking Sana back to his base in the Institute, he installs her as his queen in a palatial suite and offers her all the jewellery and shoes she could want. He also outlines a very creepy plan to create an artificial phoetus and implant it inside her so that she will give birth to the first human-robot hybrid (shades of Demon Seed!).

In a clever and original sequences, Vasee infiltrates Chitti’s base by disguising himself as Chitti - sharp sideburns, two-tone hairstyle and everything - in order to pass as one of the Chitti copies. So he can effectively hide in plain sight because every one of the robots around him is designed to look like him. When the android realises that there’s a human present, he lines up his minions in rows and then walks among them, armed with a sword, trying to work out which one isn’t real (or is real, depending on how you look at it). This is a tense and very effective scene, let down only (and possibly only in the case of this one viewer) by calling to mind the very similar scene when Alex tries to identify Marty among a herd of zebras in Madagascar 2.

Eventually the army move in and everything is set for the big finale in which about a hundred identical Chitti robots, including the original, form themselves into huge geometric shapes through the marvel of (a) CGI effects and (b) the director having watched the Matrix sequels. So actually this is quite effective because it’s all the fun of the big effects sequences from The Matrix 2 and 3 without any of the pretentious bollocks.

So the multi-Chitti forms into a sphere and rolls around, crushing cars and blasting guns. The Chittis stack up into a cylinder or become a carpet and at one point (seen briefly in the trailer) they actually transform into a giant snake which eats up cars. Holy shit, that’s what I’m talking about! Eventually, the multi-Chitti becomes a huge drill and tunnels underground. Then we see one Chitti emerge from a manhole cover and the whole audience starts thinking: ooh, ooh, I know what’s coming next! Is it going to be...?

Yes indeed, it’s a giant Chitti! It’s MegaChitti, formed from lot of individual Chittis. Although once again an unhelpful comparison sprang into this reviewer’s brain. It’s difficult for any fan of Family Guy to watch this and not think: “Men, form a crippletron!” Although one can banish this image to some extent by comparing this with the CyberKing from the Doctor Who Christmas special ‘The Next Doctor’ instead.

Sana and Vasee escape in a truck full of high-tech gubbins and, although the ensuing chase is exciting, there’s a slight let-down in the way that Vasee’s desperate scramble to finally defeat Chitti effectively involves punching lots of calculations into a computer.

But it is all jolly thrilling and a real roller-coaster ride of a movie. This is the sort of film that can be enjoyed by anyone, whatever their level of familiarity with Bollywood cinema. If you like exciting sci-fi action romcom musical thrillers, this is the motion picture experience you’ve been waiting for!

The musical numbers are as spectacular as one might expect (and the music very catchy indeed) although there’s a really odd dance sequence filmed in, of all places (and for no apparent reason) Machu Pichu. The costumes therein are extraordinary (and change every few lines, for both principal artistes and chorus) and there’s an old Peruvian woman who lip-syncs a couple of lines, plus a considerable number of llamas.

More successful (and pertinent) are the two big robotic fantasy numbers, one of which features the two robo-panthers seen briefly in the trailer. These two dance sequences look like they were arranged by someone who had watched a couple of Kylie videos and thought, “Well, it’s okay as far as it goes but it’s really not sci-fi enough...”

As well as being the most expensive Bollywood movie ever (US$35-40 million, which in LA would buy you a medium-sized romcom), Robot had the widest opening of any Bollywood picture, on 2,253 screens worldwide, 300 of them outside India. There was even a red-carpet London premiere with the stars in attendance although curiously most of the western media seem to have ignored this, just like they ignore Bollywood in general.

There are three versions, apparently: one in the original Tamil, entitled Endhiran (which I assume means ‘robot’), one dubbed into Telugu as Robo and one dubbed into Hindi as Robot, which I assume was the one I saw (that would make sense: far more people in the UK speak Hindi than Tamil or Telugu). The on-screen title was Robot although if the dialogue was dubbed it wasn’t noticeable. But then, I was reading subitles rather than checking for lip-sync.

The subtitling was good although occasional words disappeared against a light background. Interestingly, there were brief parenthetical explanations of Indian terms like ‘biryani’ and ‘Diwali’. I realise that some people are unlucky enough to live in places that don’t celebrate Diwali (here in Leicester we have the biggest Diwali celebrations outside India!) but surely everyone knows what a biryani is.

Mmm, biryani...

As is common in Bollywood films, about ten per cent of the dialogue is in English, usually as complete sentences rather than just odd words, occasionally an entire speech. These are faithfully reproduced as subtitles too. Well, I say faithfully but there are several instances of characters saying “Oh shit!” which, according to the subtitles, is Hindi for “Oh no!”

There is one scene that adds a whole new level to subtitling and takes a while to get used to, when Dr Bora meets a couple of German terrorists who want to purchase the killer robots he’s developing. The lead German speaks German, which is subtitled in English, Bora speaks Hindi, again subtitled in English, and inbetween them sits a character who speaks without subtitles. Eventually I worked out that he was a translator so he was just repeating what the other characters have said.

Aishwarya Rai should actually be a fairly visible face and name to western audiences as she has had several non-Bollywood roles in films like The Mistress of Spices, The Last Legion, Bride and Prejudice and The Pink Panther 2. Okay then, I can see why she’s not as well known in the west as she should be. But she was also in Devdas and Dhoom 2 and a whole bunch of other major films which, by rights, should have been global successes rather than global-sized successes among a niche global audience.

Incredibly, Rajnikanth was 58 years old when he made this. I mean, it’s clear he’s older than his co-star and no spring chicken but crikey! His 178 IMDB credits include haunted house comedy Chandramukhi, jungle adventure Bloodstone and a version of Aladdin called Alavuddinum Athbutha Vilakkum.

The slightly oriental-looking Danny Denzongpa, who plays Dr Bora, has almost as many films on his CV as Rajnikanth including western-distributed historial epic Asoka, 1980 horror picture Phir Whi Raat and Brad Pitt starrer Seven Years in Tibet. His distinctive looks - and the number of Himalaya-related films and film roles he has amassed - betray his family’s Tibetan origins. Vasee’s idiot assistants, whose comic-relief clowining is actually quite funny, in defiance of tradition, are played by Santhanam and Karunas.

Visual effects were overseen by Srinvas M Mohan, Frankie Chang and Eddy Wong: Mohan is CEO of Indian Artists Computer Graphics Pvt Ltd and was overall VFX supervisor for the ten companies contributing to the film’s visual effects. Animatronics are credited to Legacy Studios which is parenthetically noted in the credit block and on-screen by its former name of Stan Winston Studios - which makes commercial sense, I suppose. Chung and Wong are Hong Kong VFX guys from Kinomotive Studios and Menfond Electronics and Arts. Another HK contribuior is the legendary Yuen Woo-Ping who arranged some fights although the actual credited stunt co-ordinator is Peter Hein.

Adding another Hollywood link is costume designer Mary E Vogt whose credits include Men in Black I and II, Looney Tunes: Back in Action and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. The composer - a far more important role than in Western cinema - is AR Rahman who also worked on Elizabeth: The Golden Age and Slumdog Millionaire.

Writer-director Shankar is one of the big names in current Bollywood, a hot talent who specialises in films like this, ones that make even the residents of Mumbai and New Delhi says, “My gracious, that’s a bit spectacular and over-the-top.” His company S-Pictures has released at least two interesting genre pictures: supernatural revenge chiller Eeram and ghostly thriller Anandhapurathu Veedu.

It’s a couple of years since I last watched a Bollywood movie on the big screen and Robot reminded me that it’s something I should indulge in more often. Frankly, there are moments in this film when you find yourself wishing you could be Indian. Although I suppose that won’t apply to most audiences as they already are.

MJS rating: A

Review originally posted 12th October 2010

Rise of the Zombie

Directors: Devaki Singh, Luke Kenny
Writers: Devaki Singh
Producers: Devaki Singh, Luke Kenny, Reshma Mehta, Abhijit Mehta, Om Sawant
Cast: Luke Kenny, Kirti Kulhari, Ashwin Mushran
Country: India
Year of release: 2013
Reviewed from: online version

Now here’s something utterly bizarre.

Indian films sometimes copy the plots of western films. I’m not talking about shameless, copyright-busting cheapo clones like the old Turkish stuff. Just a tendency for Bollywood producers to use the plots of successful American (and sometimes European) films with an Indian setting and an Indian spin. There are Indian versions of When Harry Met Sally and My Best Friend’s Wedding and Hitch and Clueless.

Anjaane: The Unknown is an Indian version of The Others. The first half of Koi... Mil Gaya is an Indian version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the second half is an Indian version of ET. Why bother coming up with an original storyline when there are proven plots out there which can be easily reworked to make them attractive to a huge domestic audience?

The thing is: the source material for these films is usually well-known, successful movies – not obscure little British indies. Yet here we have Rise of the Zombie – an unofficial, unacknowledged Indian remake of Andrew Parkinson’s 1998 indie feature I, Zombie: The Chronicles of Pain!

Luke Kenny (Indian born to Irish and Italian parents) stars as wildlife photographer Neil Parker who splits up with his girlfriend Vinny (Kirti Kulhari: Shaitan, Jal) and seeks solace in a trek into the woods. He hires a tent and has a local man bring him hot food every day. He cycles around the mountains and sometimes goes down into a local town for provisions.

Things start to go wrong when he is bitten by a strange bug. The bite on his arm spreads, the flesh rotting away, and his body starts to reject cooked food. Instead he takes to eating bugs, and then lizards and birds, ripping the raw meat from the bones. Unkempt and bloodied, he staggers around the woods, increasingly unaware of what is going on. Eventually he starts attacking people that he meets, ripping into them and eating their flesh. Meanwhile Vinny is worried about Neil and teams up with his best friend Anish (Ashwin Mushran, who was in supernatural comedy Hum Tum Aur Ghost) to try and find what has happened to him. Benjamin Gilani (Alaap, Mirch Masala) plays Neil’s father, a hospital consultant with the very un-Indian name of Dave Parker.

There are a lot of differences from I, Zombie, obviously. A bug bite rather than a crazy lady. The couple split up before he disappears. He’s a wildlife photographer rather than a biology student. The setting is rural rather than urban. And he doesn’t kill himself at the end with chloroform. (Nor does he have a wank over a photo of the girlfriend he can never see again.)

But… I could come up with a similar list of differences between The Others and Anjaane. So what? The derivation is obvious. The basic story here is clearly modelled on I, Zombie. A young man, isolated from his previous life, becoming more and more ill from an infectious bite which rots his flesh and gives him a desperate hunger for human flesh - cannibalistic necrosis – while his family and friends are concerned about, and mystified by, his disappearance. Andy Parkinson’s film is completely distinct and utterly unlike any other zombie picture (even Colin, which shares the basic concept of a zombie as the central character but is otherwise utterly dissimilar). Somehow Luke Kenny - or more likely, writer/co-director Devaki Singh - has seen a copy of Parkinson’s film, or maybe just read a review of it, and decided to make an Indian version.

I’m not criticising. Unofficial remakes happen. Julian Richards took the basic concept of The Wicker Man and turned it into Darklands. Jason Impey took Andreas Schnaas’ Violent Shit and turned it into Sick Bastard. Even if this was a clone, there are enough differences to make it worthwhile: not just the geographical switch but the passage of 20 years (no digital cameras or Blackberries in the 1990s). I bet the budget for Rise of the Zombie was not dissimilar to what Andy P spent on I, Zombie but that much money buys you a lot more nowadays – in India or England – in terms of technology. No grainy 16mm here; just crisp, clean digital video.

Ritu Jhanjani has the main make-up credit and was cited in publicity as responsible for the zombie make-up, although Saved Ismaile gets the actual credit for ‘prosthetic make-up’. Whoever did it, I’d be lying if I said it was particularly good. Pranab Lahkar is credited as ‘Creative VFX Supervisor’; his previous credits include Dhoom-2, Rocket Singh and even 28 Weeks Later.

Luke Kenny, who considers himself thoroughly Indian despite his parentage, came to prominence in the 1990s as a VJ on a video music channel. He now fronts a rock band (called Luke Kenny LIVE) and DJs as well as making films. Since Rise of the Zombie he has shot a short film called Stephen King, I am Your Biggest Fan. Devaki Singh, who was described in publicity as the first woman to direct a zombie film (hmm, possibly...) is an artist whose first exhibition was in 2009.

In 2013 three films vied to be ‘India’s first zombie film’: Kenny and Singh’s angst-ridden drama; Goa Goa Gone (a fun action-horror-comedy which screened in Leicester last year); and Rock the Shaadi, a rom-zom-com set at a Punjabi-zombie wedding(!). Kenny’s film was originally going to just be called Zombie but the makers of Rock the Shaadi had registered that title so he went for Rise… instead and somehow avoided confusion with the contemporary Danny Trejo picture Rise of the Zombies. Ironically, Rock the Shaadi hit problems during post-production and looks unlikely to ever be finished.

Rise of the Zombie was originally announced for release to cinemas on 22nd February 2013, a date which appeared on a number of posters including one that was produced for PETA promoting vegetarianism. Despite having a clear opportunity to steal a march over Goa Goa Gone, Rise… was bumped to 5 April meaning that both films were released on the same day. So theoretically either can claim to be the country’s first zombie picture. What is more Murzy Pagdiwala, who was DP and executive producer on this film, also DP-ed the second unit on Goa Goa Gone!

V One Entertainment picked up the film for international distribution and there is an English-subtitled version on Amazon Prime. The version I watched was on the VOneEnt channel of DailyMotion which is free but has adverts every few minutes. That wasn't subtitled but there's really very little dialogue in the film and half of that is in English anyway.

The end of Rise of the Zombie promises a sequel in 2014, Land of the Zombie, and includes shots of numerous zombies shuffling around, implying that the virus has spread beyond its initial host. Kenny had plans for a trilogy but Land… has not yet appeared.

Truth be told, Rise of the Zombie isn’t a bad movie. Kenny gives a spirited performance and Pagdiwala’s camera-work captures both urban and rural locations well. The film runs 86 minutes and has a few songs on the soundtrack (but no dance numbers). What’s missing is the bleak nihilism of the original, and there’s not really anything to replace it. Instead of cutaway talking heads of the people he left behind, the film simply lurches into Vinny and Anish’s story in the third act, which goes nowhere. Instead of social comment or character development, we’re treated to lots of fast-edited flashbacks and dream sequences which look flashy but don’t give the movie any substance.

Nevertheless, one must grudgingly admire Kenny for taking such a non-commercial tack on his zombie film. It would have been easy to just go for a standard zombie siege and throw in a few culturally specific gags. The story of one man’s lonely descent into a zombie state was radical when Andrew Parkinson made it nearly 20 years ago and it’s still pretty radical now.

In March 2013, when promoting the film, Luke Kenny was interviewed by Bollywood Life. This is what he told them: “If we were telling a zombie survival story, there are 40 years of zombie survival films to see who did what, and what we could try to do differently. ... In this case, there was no precedent; there has been no zombie origin film ever been made. There is no story that has ever been written that tells you the story of this one human being and what happens.” Now, that’s not strictly true, is it?

MJS rating: B-

[Update. Devaki Singh may be the first woman to direct a zombie feature, but Isabelle Defaut directed The Long Night, the 2002 short which inspired Devil's Playground. - MJS] 
[Update 2: I just realised that Kerry Anne Mullaney directed The Dead Outside in March 2008. So Devaki Singh's claim falls to piece. - MJS[

The Dead 2: India

Director: Howard J Ford
Producer: Howard J Ford
Writers: Howard J Ford, Jon Ford
Cast: Joseph Millson, Anand Gopal, Meenu
Country: UK
Year of release: 2014
Reviewed from: screener

I saw The Dead at the Fifth UK Festival of Zombie Culture in Leicester back in November 2011, and it blew me away. I’m not sure why I didn’t review it – sometimes I’m just too busy with other stuff. Nevertheless, since then I’ve been telling anyone who will listen that, as far as I’m concerned, it’s one of the very best zombie films ever made.

Zombie films should be scary – that’s a given.  They can be action-packed, or funny, or intense and broody. Or just bleak and depressing – that’s my favourite sort. The genre’s ur-text, Night of the Living Dead, is bleak and depressing. It is also riven with social and political subtext, and for me that’s the icing on the cake of any zombie film. The Dead has social and political subtext in spades. It can’t help having subtext. I don’t know to what extent the Ford Brothers wanted to explore ideas of racism, colonialism and globalism – but that’s what the film is about. You simply cannot show a white guy shooting a succession of shuffling, blank-eyed black folk without there being some sort of racial subtext.

The Dead also did what most zombie films fail to do, which is take the genre in a new direction. In one sense, that was as high concept as ‘zombies in Africa’ but it was much more than that. It was taking the standard global zombie apocalypse out of its traditional urban environment and placing it in a desolate, empty landscape. The sort of place where you can see the zombies when they’re still a mile away.

These are traditional, shuffling, shambling zombies – killed by existing zombies then reanimating themselves. There’s no running, no moaning for “Bwains!” They’re actually really easy to avoid, provided that you don’t let yourself get surrounded or trapped in a corner. But there’s just so many of them, and they’re everywhere, and all they have to do is get one bite in and you’re doomed. Much like the Terminator, they cannot be reasoned with, they cannot be bargained with and they absolutely will not stop.

Hell, as someone once pointed out, is other people. As a card-carrying misanthropist, I take that as my sermon almost every day. And that’s what a fine zombie picture like The Dead uses as its underlying premise. The zombies are us. Sometimes literally: recognisable friends and family. Sometimes generically. These are not vampires or werewolves or extra-terrestrials or killer robots: not ‘the alien other’. Zombies are people. (Which is not the same as saying that a zombie is a person – though sometimes that’s true also.) It’s the anonymity of the zombie hordes that makes them so powerful and effective in exploring socio-political ideas. A shuffling crowd of zombies is a riot happening in slow motion, but happening nonetheless.

Sometimes a film gets it just right. The Dead got it just right. I remain both puzzled and disappointed that it didn’t receive more acclaim (although 72% on Rotten Tomatoes isn’t bad).

The first film premiered at the 2010 Frightfest; three years later the world premiere of the sequel, which transposed the action to India, was the opening movie at the same event. It has taken a couple of years to subsequently appear on UK DVD but the wait has been worth it because this is another terrific zombie feature. It repeats the success of the first film while also doing something new – always the biggest challenge for a sequel.

British actor Joseph Millson (SNUB, Dead of the Nite, The Sarah Jane Adventures) effects a convincing accent to play American engineer Nicholas Burton, working on wind farm installations in Rajasthan. Meenu Mishra (credited as just ‘Meenu’) is Ishani, the girl he has fallen in love with. She lives with her parents (Sandip Datta Gupta and Poonham Mathur) in Mumbai, 300 miles away. Her father distrusts the American, wants his daughter to marry a good Indian boy, and isn’t likely to react well if/when he finds out she’s pregnant.

A slightly clunky scene at the start in the dockyards of Mumbai justifies the arrival of the zombie infection in the subcontinent. Before too long, violence and fear are working their way through the city streets and into the countryside. US citizens are evacuated but Burton sets off across country to find Ishani.

India is a very different place to Africa. The first film traded on the empty desolation of its locales. The Dead 2 has some open landscapes but more urban and suburban scenes, including Ishani and her family, locked inside their house, trying to stay away from the chaos outside. Where Africa was presented as simple, basic and largely featureless, India is shown to be a complex country: a mix of cultures, politics, industry and tradition. It also has a very large and well-organised army, who are swiftly deployed to deal with the situation. It’s not like there isn’t already civil strife and unrest in Indie. “It’s probably just another Hindus vs Sikhs things,” opines Burton’s voice-on-the-phone colleague Max (Holby City’s Hari Dhillon).

Where the first film dwelt on themes of humanity and understanding, played out against a tapestry of historical and modern colonialism, the principal theme in The Dead 2 is parenthood. Ishani is indeed expecting Burton’s baby, and her relationship with her father has shades and tones. “He is a good man,” her sick (bitten) mother assures Ishani. “He provides for us.” Burton himself becomes an ersatz parent when he teams up with a young orphan named Javed (brilliantly played by Anand Gopal, whom the IMDB thinks is Wall Street Journal correspondent Anand Goyal!). Each needs the other to survive: ‘Mr Nicholas’ can drive, ride a motorbike and fire a gun, but Javed knows the countryside, the routes, the locations which might provide further transport or ammunition.

There are other ways that the parenthood theme emerges, including an agonisingly painful scene near a train track which I won’t spoil for you. There’s even a lovely moment when Javed and Burton’s path is crossed by a troupe of langurs, one of them carrying a baby. That’s almost certainly entirely coincidental, but that doesn’t stop it from being part of the mise-en-scene and thus worthy of critical notice.

Although a journey from Rajasthan to Mumbai could have been a mere picaresque, there is much more to The Dead 2 than that. The relationship between Javed and Burton develops magnificently, both in the action scenes where they fight or escape the undead and in the more talkie bits inbetween where they tell each other about their respective pasts. At the same time, there are the familial relationships between Ishani and her parents. And behind all this we see the outbreak spreading. We don’t really see the breakdown of society as one might expect; rather the establishment of martial law as the army sets up roadblocks, calmly despatching the undead and searching for victims who have been bitten but not yet turned. Beyond a few brief phone conversations with Max, we have no real concept of the bigger picture – as nor do any of our characters.

I’ve never been to India (though I do live in Leicester: largest Indian population in the UK by percentage; biggest Diwali celebrations outside India itself; best damn curries anywhere – and of course I’m not just a fan of Bollywood films, I’ve also been in one). The Dead 2 is a long, long, lo-o-ong way from Bollywood, but my point is that I can only judge its depiction of India – the countryside, the cities, the people – on the basis of what I know at this remove. Although most of the cast and crew were local, this is perforce an outsider’s interpretation of India. But hey, so was Slumdog Millionaire and that won eight Academy Awards.

In fact there’s probably a great degree thesis to be written sometime by someone comparing Danny Boyle’s unavoidably westernised version of India with that of the Ford Brothers (or indeed with other western cinematic depictions of the country such as Sabu the Elephant Boy or – my all-time favourite film ever – The Man Who Would Be King).

There are actual Indian zombie features. Last year’s Leicester zombie fest screened Krishna DK and Raj Nidimoru’s Goa Goa Gone which was tremendous fun. There’s also Devaki Singh and Luke Kenny’s Rise of the Zombie which was an unofficial remake of Andrew Parkinson's 1998 indie I, Zombie! A third movie which attempted to become ‘India’s first zombie film', Navdeep Singh’s zom-com Rock the Shaadi, fell apart during post-production and has disappeared into limbo.

Goa Goa Gone was an Indian spin on the established western zombie genre – and I suspect the other two films are too – but not actually a film about India. In that respect, it’s very, very different to The Dead 2 which is more interested in exploring its characters, its setting, and its relationships – especially the post-colonial relationship that Burton has with the country – than in simply putting new or recycled zombie gags into an Indian setting. You could actually argue that The Dead 2: India is a more Indian film than many actual Indian films. Colonialism and post-colonialism are part of India’s culture and history and the Ford Brothers explore them here in fascinating and powerful ways in this feature.

Howard J Ford is credited as producer and director (also editor), Jon Ford as DoP and co-director, with ‘Screenplay by The Ford Brothers’.  Darkest Day director Dan Rickard provided the ‘special and visual effects’, as he did for the first film, while Stuart Browne (A Day of Violence) and Max Van De Banks (The Dead, Soul Searcher, Harmony’s Requiem, Siren Song) were responsible for the ‘special make-up FX’. All are excellent. The score is once again by Imran Ahmad (whose other credits include the BBC Radio 4 version of The Martian Chronicles). The three executive producers are Brighton-based chartered accountant Amir Moallemi, plus Miles Ketley and Josephine Rose (former Head of Acquisitions and Development at Goldcrest, who recently co-produced In the Dark Half) both of media law firm Wiggin.

After its festival run, The Dead 2: India was released in the States in September 2014 as just The Dead 2. Curiously, the July 2015 UK release carries the variant title The Dead 2: In India on the sleeve, although the original title is on screen. Slightly disappointing is the absence of a Making Of, something which would have been much more interesting for this film than for many of the production-line pictures that do bother with a bland featurette. But no matter: I review films, not DVDs.

Both The Dead films are absolutely top-notch: serious, powerful, thought-provoking, thoughtful movies that really use the zombie genre instead of just playing with it. You should watch both.

MJS rating: A

Toofani Tarzan

Director: Homi Wadia
Writers: JBH Wadia, Pandil Gnyan
Producers: JBH Wadia, Homi Wadia
Cast: John Cawas, Gulshan, Ahmed Dilavar
Year of release: 1937
Country: India
Reviewed from: UK TV screening (Channel 4)

It’s amazing the stuff that turns up on late night TV. Buried away in a ‘Bollywood Gold’ season on Channel 4 was this 65-year-old Indian Tarzan movie. And for all that one must make allowances for geographical, cultural and generational differences - this is still pretty crappy. It’s of historical interest certainly, in fact it’s fascinating, and it’s sporadically entertaining - but at 160 minutes you’ve got to be pretty determined to be entertained.

We start by seeing scientist Ramu making the breakthrough in his search for the nectar of immortality. Already we’re in murky territory: it’s not clear if this elixir actually makes people immortal or is just a powerful medicine (Ramu says, “This will save millions of lives.”); also Ramu is referred to later as Ranmick; and quite why he has set up his lab in a hut in a jungle village... who knows?

Ramu is married to Uma (Nazira - a lot of the actors have only one name) and has a young son, Leher, around whose neck he places an amulet containing the formula for the ‘nectar.’ When lions attack the village for no reason, Ramu is killed. Leher is rescued by family servant Dada and they fly off in a balloon, accompanied by their jack russell terrier Moti. Uma is left behind and goes mad.

A word here about Dada: he is the single most amazingly offensive racial stereotype I’ve ever seen on screen, a character who makes Stepin Fetchit look like a sensitive portrayal of the African-American experience. Played by ‘Dare-Devil Bonan Shroff’ (also credited as Assistant Director), Dada is Bollywood’s view of an African - one step up the evolutionary ladder from a chimpanzee. Dada lollops around, bent double, knuckles dragging on the ground, vacant expression on his face, communicating only by simian whoops and grunts. He is presented as completely subhuman and, absolutely incredibly, wears what can only be described as ‘nigger minstrel make-up’ - the full Al Jolson huge white lips and everything. Gobsmacking. He is also, incidentally, massively irritating.

Anyway, we flash forward 15 years and little Leher has grown into hunky, loincloth-clad Tarzan, played by a bodybuilder named John Cawas (credited here as ‘John Cavas [sic] (Indian Eddie Polo)’ whatever that means). He lives in a treehouse accompanied by the faithful Dada (which apparently means ‘brother’) and the Rintintin-like Moti, who is actually fourth-credited as being played by ‘Professor Motee (trainer - Omar)’.

Ramu’s father (who is never actually named) is an old man with a Colonel Sanders beard and glasses. The fact that he is clearly a young man in terrible make-up leads me to think that the same actor (Dalpat) may have played Ramu in the prologue too. He is leading an expedition to search for his lost grandson, both of whose parents died. With him is his adopted daughter Leela (Gulshan); a bounder named Biharilal (Chandrasekhar) who really is only interested in locating the nectar formula; faithful guide Dilavar (Ahmed Dilawar); and comic relief servant Bundle (Bandal) who is even more irritating than Dada. Bandal was clearly a fan of Harold Lloyd and Laurel and Hardy films, playing every scene like a cross between Lloyd and Laurel, even occasionally lifting his straw boater to do that thing with his hair.

The party sets off with a couple of dozen native bearers and are attacked by a tribe of cannibals - the chief is played by ‘Professor Buloch (Sandow)’ - who are driven off by the timely arrival of Tarzan, alerted by Moti and assisted by a herd of stampeding elephants led by Dada on a 'phant named Raja.

Biharilal spots the amulet around Tarzan’s neck, but suddenly the proceedings are interrupted by the arrival of a cackling mad woman. It’s Uma, who didn’t die after all but is still insane. She is still played by Nazira, made to look 15 years older by having heavy lines drawn on her face, and has a really tatty-looking, misshapen ‘human skull’ (papier mache by the looks of it) strapped to each arm. Confused, Tarzan runs off, speeding up even more when Biharilal takes a potshot at him.

Having made camp, and after we have suffered through a ‘comedy’ scene of Moti stealing Bundle’s food, Biharilal spots Dada and shoots at him too. Moti alerts Tarzan to his friend’s plight in true Rintintin/Lassie fashion. Later, when the slimy Biharilal is coming on to Leela in her tent, Tarzan appears, knocks him about and abducts Leela to his tree-top eyrie. Fortunately for Dada, Leela is a trained nurse and removes the bullet from his arm.

Gradually Tarzan and Leela come to understand each other and fall in love yada yada yada, same as in most Tarzan movies. (Let’s face it: Tarzan is a great character, and the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels are fantastic, but most Tarzan movies - like this one - are rubbish.) She’s swiftly decked out in a leopard skin mini-dress, and he’s rescuing her from tigers and crocodiles. The tiger fight is actually pretty exciting; it certainly looks like Cawas wrestling the beast, although Gulshan obviously was more careful and so only looks on in admiration by the miracle of back projection.

Back at camp, Dilavar sings a song, then the cannibals attack and make off with everyone, taking them to their fortified village where they worship - a 30-foot tall gorilla idol! Yes, the film-makers had clearly seen King Kong and decided to throw it into the mix. Fantastic! Meanwhile Leela is bathing ‘naked’ in a lake (her swimming costume is plainly visible), chases Moti when he cheekily runs off with her dress, then both girl and dog are captured by the cannibals. Taken to the village, they’re tied up in the same hut as their five friends.

Who can save them? Why, Professor Moti of course! The dog unties itself, jumps out the window and down a hundred-foot cliff, races off to Tarzan’s treehouse and barks out what has happened. I’ll just repeat that for emphasis: the dog doesn’t bite through the ropes, it actually unties itself!

In the village, a terrified native is picked up by the most extraordinary giant grabber thing and swung out over a pit, wherein lives the sacred gorilla himself. And it’s the worst bloody gorilla costume in the history of cinema. Big circular eyes, strange white whiskers - quite honestly, if we hadn't already seen the statue, we wouldn’t know this was supposed to be a gorilla. The native is dropped in the pit and killed by the beast, then just as Leela is about to suffer the same fate, Tarzan arrives! He fights the natives and helps the explorers all escape, while Dada and Moti are busy rescuing the native bearers tied up elsewhere in the village. A big chase ensues.

I should explain about the chases. For some reason, every chase or fight or any other sort of action scene is undercranked so that all movement is speeded up slightly. This makes the gang of cannibals chasing the explorers along the skyline look like nothing less than a 1930s episode of The Benny Hill Show. Having crossed a gorge with Tarzan’s help, our heroes are finally all safe. Now Biharilal threatens Tarzan with his gun, but Moti knocks it away. Uma appears - and Biharilal shoots her instead. The little dog leaps at the trigger-happy swine - who falls to his death over a handy cliff. The bullet has brought Uma to her senses, and before she dies she explains everything: that Tarzan is Leher, that she was Ramu’s wife, that the amulet has the nectar formula etc.

Tarzan carries his mother’s body away, and Leela elects to stay with Tarzan (and Moti and Dada) in the jungle, much to her father’s alarm. Off they go - man, woman, dog and subhuman stereotype - leaving the three remaining explorers, and their remaining bearers, to head back to civilisation on a dodgy back-projection screen behind Dilavar, singing one final song.

Well, goodness gracious me (to coin a phrase)! What a find. This is a very early Tarzan film, only a few years after Johnny Weissmuller starred in Tarzan the Ape Man, though it seems to have been influenced more by the silent versions starring Elmo Lincoln (Cawas’ appearance is certainly modelled more on Lincoln’s than Weissmuller’s). It is also completely unauthorised - there is no mention of Edgar Rice Burroughs anywhere and it is debatable whether the Wadia Brothers didn’t know about him or simply didn’t care. Maybe they thought Tarzan was a public domain legend. The sepia-tinted print shown on Channel Four was a brand new one, supposedly digitally remastered, though there were still plenty of scratches and crackles.

Jamshed Boman Homi Wadia (1901-1986) and his brother Homi Boman Wadia (b.1911) were born in Surat, Gujarat. Jamshed wrote and co-produced his first film (Vasant Leela) in 1928 and established Young United Players with his brother in 1931. Sound films took a while to make it to India and they made five silents between 1931 and 1933 starring Boman Shroff, all inspired to some extent by Douglas Fairbanks’ 1920 classic The Mark of Zorro, including Diler Daku (aka Thunderbolt, 1931) which was a straightforward (unauthorised) remake.

The Wadias were populist film-makers through and through, beloved of stunts and action. They founded Wadia Movietone in 1933 and Jamshed directed Lal-e-Yaman (aka Parviz Parizad, 1933, also with Shroff) which features a magic ring, an ape-man and a genie. In the chorus was a girl called Nadia who as ‘Fearless Nadia’ became the Wadia’s biggest star and India’s top action actress, starring in the classic Hunterwali (aka The Lady with the Whip, 1935, also starring Gulshan, Shroff and Cawas) and many other films, usually with Cawas or Shroff as the leading man. Astoundingly, Nadia wasn’t actually Indian - she was born Mary Evans in Perth, Australia in 1910 to a Welsh father and a Greek mother!

By 1942, Jamshed (who was a supporter of Communist reformer MN Roy) wanted to put more social relevance into the Wadia Movietone films, so Homi left to continue making action epics under the Basant Pictures banner. Homi married Nadia in 1961 (making her Nadia Wadia!), made his last film - his fourth version of the Ali Baba story - in 1978 and retired in 1981. Nadia died in 1996.

Any other Indian Tarzan films? Why, yes. Tarzan ki Beti (Roop K Shorey) was made in 1938, then John Guillerman’s Tarzan Goes to India/Tarzan Mera Saathi (1962) kicked off a whole subgenre: Toofani Tarzan (AR Zamindar, 1962 - I don’t know whether this was a remake of the 1937 film), Tarzan and Gorilla (Pyarelal, 1963), Tarzan aur Jadugar (Radhakant, 1963), Tarzan and Delilah (A Shamsheer, 1964), Tarzan and Captain Kishore (Jal, 1964), Tarzan aur Jalpari (Radhakant, 1964), Tarzan and King Kong (A Shamsheer, 1965 - I believe this ‘King Kong’ was actually a popular wrestler).

Then there's Tarzan and the Circus (Shiv Kumar, 1965), Tarzan Comes to Delhi/Tarzan Delhi Mein (Kedar Kapoor, 1965), Tarzan and Hercules (Mehmood, 1966), Tarzan aur Jadui Chirag (Babubhai Banjhi, 1966), Tarzan ki Mehbooba (Ram Rasila, 1966), Tarzan in Fairyland/Tarzan Paristan Mein (Sushil Gupta, 1968), and Tarzan 303 (Chandrakant, 1970). More recently there was The Adventures of Tarzan (B Subhash, 1985) and Tarzan and Cobra (Bhagwant Choudhury, 1987)

If and when Toofani Tarzan is repeated, I urge you to set the video because it's a true oddity. As a final note, the film features what may well be my favourite movie credit of all time: ‘Matte effects in co-operation with Mino the Mystic’!

MJS rating: C