Weirdhouse Cinema: Purana Mandir

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe dive into the Bollywood horror films of the Ramsay brothers with 1984's “Purana Mandir.” Can Suman and Sanjay overcome an evil curse and a monstrous warlock to save their relationship? Find out…

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
Today. This is an exciting intrigue in the Weird House
Cinema catalog because we are going to be covering our
first film from India. It's always fun when we can
dive into a new film culture, a new national film tradition.
And I know, for me personally Indian cinema Bollywood in particular,

(00:40):
this is a whole area of film that I really
don't have much of any exposure to. So I was
excited to watch this movie research it a bit because
not only is it is it Bollywood, it is Bollywood horror.
We're going to be talking about Purana mandir A not
only a horror movie, but like the horror movie from

(01:03):
India from nineteen eighty four.

Speaker 3 (01:04):
This is also my first full viewing of a Bollywood movie.
I've watched a lot of clips from them before. Often,
like people will clip out really great musical numbers from
them and put them online, so I've seen plenty of those,
but yeah, this was the first time I've seen the
whole thing. But man, this movie was mostly great, at
some points awful and really got my mind cranking about

(01:28):
the what it means to have musical numbers in a film.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
Yes, because one of the if you don't know anything,
or you don't know much about Indian cinema and Bollywood
in particular, you may know that there are musical numbers.
It's a big song and dance numbers. And I think
at times this can be like knowing this can be
kind of like a barrier to entry. You might think, well,
I don't know if I'm up for that. I mean,
I'm not a musical fan. Or even if you decide, oh,

(01:53):
well there's a horror genre I want to get into that,
but then you realize there are musical numbers, maybe you're
going to hold back, but yeah, it's to sort of
break that down, like, well, how different is that from
anything we watch over here? You know, we have this
a genre of musical obviously that goes in various directions,
but also we have strong musical segments in various pictures

(02:16):
where you'll feature a particular track. It just maybe you
don't have characters actually singing that song.

Speaker 3 (02:23):
Yes, I agree with all of that. I mean It
really got me thinking, why don't American horror movies tend
to have musical numbers in them? And if they did,
why would we say, well, actually, this is just a
totally different genre now it is a musical. Why couldn't
all genres have musical numbers, because, as you say, music
features in other movies, diagetic and non diegetic music features

(02:46):
in as long as the characters aren't singing, it's not
a musical. But there's no particular reason I think of
why the fact that characters do sing in a movie
should make that a separate genre from whatever the narrative
content is. So yeah, I think we should have more fantasy,
sci fi movies, whatever, horror movies that have characters singing songs,

(03:07):
because songs are great. Now that I've experienced a Bollywood film,
it in no way takes away from my enjoyment of
this as a cheesy horror movie. And I don't really
see why you would resist. I think maybe there's one
impulse that says like musical numbers could take away from
the seriousness of the film. There's another that says it

(03:28):
could take away from the quote realism. I'd say, if
you're overly concerned with either of those, maybe you shouldn't
be making a horror movie.

Speaker 2 (03:38):
I think another sort of barrier to entry or sort
of expectation is that might be for many and it
was kind of this way for me. Is I expected
going into a musical number to be clunkier and take
me out of the picture more. And there are sections
of the film that do manage to take me out
of the picture and are clunky, but the musical numbers,

(03:58):
like you get the impressional like this, this is down
to like an art just in Indian cinema in general,
And so if a movie's going into a musical number,
they know what they're doing. They like it's you're gonna
have a smooth takeoff and landing with the emotional arc
of whatever that particular song happens to be.

Speaker 3 (04:16):
Every time a song kicked in, I was like, okay,
now we're cooking. Even the kind of sad, slower paced songs.

Speaker 2 (04:23):
Yeah, yeah, because it's it's it's not coming out of nowhere,
it's coming out of what's going on emotionally with the characters,
or especially towards the end of this picture, with like
the driving nature of the plot.

Speaker 3 (04:34):
Oh yes, the human sacrifice song I think was my
favorite song in the movie.

Speaker 2 (04:40):
All right, So again, this was my first Bollywood film.
I'd never watched one in its entirety, like you had
seen some clips, so I had to I had to
do a little extra reading about everything. There's a lot
of things about Bollywood cinema that I was not familiar
with and just did not know about. So, for instance,
bear with me if you already knew all of this.
But when we talk about Bollywood cinema, we're talking about

(05:02):
films specifically coming out of the Mumbai film industry. Mumbai
formerly known as Bombay. You get it, like Bombay plus
Hollywood equals Bollywood. And while it's perhaps the most well
known internationally of the various Indian film centers, Indian cinema
is not a monolith like India itself. India cinema consists

(05:24):
of various languages and cultures and in the different cinematic
traditions and centers have like different strengths, different histories and
so forth. So with some of the various extras on
the disc or discs that we looked at for this
as well as some articles, it was a real learning
experience for me to familiarize myself somewhat with this. I

(05:48):
mean it goes beyond genre with this, just whole realm
of cinema.

Speaker 3 (05:51):
By the way, just as one example of other film
subcultures of India, I know there is also the so
called Tollywood, which refers to Tollywood with a tea, referring
to films made in the Telugu language, which is one
of the many languages of India.

Speaker 2 (06:08):
Yeah. Yeah, And then likewise you have in Pakistan you
have Lollywood that is centered in Lahore. I didn't know
anything about Lollywood either until I started absorbing some of
these extras on these discs. But this film Purana Mandha
from eighty four is very much Bollywood. It is a
Bollywood film, it is a Bollywood horror film. And it's

(06:31):
going to be interesting to discuss exactly what all of
that means because to a very large degree, the filmmakers
the other here, the Ramsey brothers, are pushing into an
area that had traditionally been less successful and more of
fringe within Bollywood cinema. But still it's going to have
things in it that are very much part of the

(06:52):
Bollywood blueprint, and that includes a compelling story of starcrossed lovers,
a fair amount of family melodrama, multiple music numbers, Now
this was interesting. I was looking at an excer where
it was an interview with a critic Omar Khan, and
he pointed out that eight or so musical numbers per

(07:12):
movie is pretty standard.

Speaker 3 (07:14):
Oh so this seems under the average, right, I think
there were maybe five in this movie.

Speaker 2 (07:20):
Is that right? I lost count after a little while,
just because I'm not used to seeing any in my heart,
but I saw something where he was talking about a
later Ramsey Brothers film where he's like, well, there are
only four musical numbers in this, which may seem like
a lot too Outsiders, but like really it's like a
half load. But on top of the music, on top
of the horror, which we'll get to, we also have

(07:41):
martial arts action, you got a little dancing. You've got
some comedic segments which we're probably not going to talk
about too much other than to say they are are
they are awful. But all of this comes together into
what felt to me it's kind of like a circus. Right.
It's like you go to a circus, They're going to
be a number of acts. You may not be there

(08:03):
primarily to see the clowns. You may be there to
see the trapeze act, but the clowns are going to
be there because somebody came with the expectation of clowns.
Within talk of Bollywood film in particular, i've seen this
described as Massala film that is a reference to the
spice blend. You know, you're going to the theater to

(08:25):
see this show, and by golly, it needs to deliver
a little something for everyone. A little of this spice,
a little of that, all under the big top of cinema.

Speaker 3 (08:34):
Now, if it sounds like that's a lot to fit
into one movie, it is. This is a long movie.
This is definitely the longest movie we've covered on Weird House, right.

Speaker 2 (08:43):
Yeah, it beats out Blade by twenty minutes, which I
think is it's important to keep that in mind because
it's not absurdly long, like they are longer. Plenty of
longer Bollywood films, and there are plenty of longer Western
films as well. Avatar two is longer than Piranhamundi, so
you know, don't necessarily let the linth, you know, keep

(09:04):
you away from these films. And there's an intermission too,
so you got that going for you love an intermission
now the disc we watched this on, and I'll give
a full mention of that and just a bit here
has an introduction from Indian horror expert Tim Paxton. He
provides the intro and he points out that Parana Mandir

(09:25):
is one of the most important films in Bollywood history
and probably the most important film in the history of
Indian horror cinema specifically in one of the interesting things
here is produced on a very modest budget, but it
was a colossal hit. I was looking at some of
the numbers and if I was doing my math correctly,

(09:46):
it like multiplied its budget in revenue on the scale
of something like Rocky or Blair Witch Project. Like that
level of success. Just did amazing business.

Speaker 3 (09:57):
Have you read anything from somebody who knows it was
about the Bollywood market, like what audience has responded to
so much about this movie in particular? Like why was
it so popular? Well?

Speaker 2 (10:07):
Omar Con gets into this a little bit on some
of the extras from this blue ray set, and a
lot of it kind of comes down to luck, you know,
like the Ramsays at this point had been pumping out
horror content since seventy two, I believe, and none of
those films had certainly had anything like the success, but
they were out there. It was on the fringes, you know,

(10:28):
And so I mean, I guess part of it is
like by this point they definitely knew what they were
doing with a number of these elements. They knew how
to put together things, they knew how to do them
a sola film offering. So they did have a little
bit for everybody. And I don't know, it was just
like the right time, Like audience has just really responded
to it. And he described it as being like a

(10:48):
generational date movie, like if you were going to cinemas
in India during this time period, you saw this movie
and it was also he points out, you know, probably
going to be especially for for how mainstream it became.
It was offering things people just hadn't seen before because
Western horror films could only really enter into like the

(11:14):
the general zeitgeist there so much because they weren't coming
in on like satellite TV or anything. They were they
were coming in on it. They weren't being shown in
the theater for the most part. They were coming in
on VHS tapes and those were in rare, you know,
and there were those were hard to get. Only certain
people had access to those. And so this is a
film that has some really scary stuff in it, and

(11:35):
you can just imagine how much more scary it is
if you didn't have direct exposure to say The Exorcist
or the first Evil Dead movie or something like that.

Speaker 3 (11:45):
I can also see how it would be such a
great date movie since it has you know, it's like,
it's like scary, so the classical cliches. It gets you
hugging clothes because you know, because the same reason out
here are about to do something evil. But it's also
got a great love story.

Speaker 2 (11:59):
Yeah, yeah, you got again. You've got a romance of
the heart of it. You've got family melodrama the heart
of it. You've got the music, You've got the comedy,
you've got the dancing girl. You've got all these things
that any given viewer is going to be wanting to
see out of a Bollywood film. But it's also offering
something that is new, and that the newness ends up
being key because this kicks off a horror boom in India.

(12:22):
The Ramsey Brothers end up coming out a lot of
additional horror films, they have competitors, and also, you know,
other folks just jump in to try and ride that bandwagon,
and it actually they end up writing it out by
something like I want to say, ninety two, so the
boom doesn't last too long. But during that time, everybody
gets in there, and some of the films are supposed

(12:44):
to be quite good, but there's a sort of sameness
to everything, and after a while people seen it and
it loses that new edge that this film seemed to have.

Speaker 3 (12:53):
I think a similar thing happened with some of the
biggest money making horror films in the United States in
the eighties. Also kind of the Slasher for Me got
repeated and played out to death.

Speaker 2 (13:02):
Yeah, or the or later on the speaking of Blair
Witch the found footage formula. Because you know, that's a
case where, for the most part, people hadn't really seen
a film like this. It was produced on a very
low budget, made tremendous money, and lots of folks jumped
in there to try and recreate that success, and God goodness,

(13:24):
off the top of my head, I'm not sure anybody
really did, so, yeah, I think it's a it's a
good comparison though only in terms of like sort of
business and impact, not so much style.

Speaker 3 (13:35):
I think following the blair Witch model, the Paranormal Activity
franchise did pretty good, Okay, I think, hmmm, I'm trying
to think of another one. I don't know. Yeah, I mean,
the found footage style is obviously very appealing because it's
cheap to make. But when people were trying to just make,
you know, cash in on found footage movies with very

(13:56):
uninspired ideas, I think a lot of them missed out
on how creative the original blair Witch project actually was.

Speaker 2 (14:02):
Yeah. Yeah, And I mean that's kind of like written
across the horror genre. Wherever you look, right, a successful
horror movie comes out and somebody's gonna think I can
do that. Horror is easy. Horror films can't be that
hard to do, and there is an art to it.
There is a certain amount of style, and then there's
a certain amount of luck to hitting things just right.

(14:25):
And that's what Perana Mander seems to have done. Let's
see just a couple of other notes. Paxton points out
that this movie, which deals specifically with a resurrected evil
decapitated wizard, does draw heavily on two prior films, One
American in one Spanish nineteen fifty eight is The Thing
that Couldn't Die that stars Robin Hughes as the Wizard

(14:47):
Gideon Drew, and nineteen seventy two's Horror Rises from the
Tomb starring Paul Nashy as the Wizard Alaak Demarnac. This
is a film, of course, we discussed on Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (15:00):
Not expect that. Yeah, Paul Nashy plays the Wizard. He's
actually part of like an evil sorcerer power couple in
Horror Rises from the Tomb. Right, he has a he
has like a wife or a girlfriend who's also a
powerful wizard. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:12):
I mean the thing about Paul Nashy films is Paul
Nashy monsters you're supposed to feel some sort of sympathy for,
you know, that's where he's coming from. He's coming from
that that that love of universal horror and sympathy for
the monster, the wizard. In this film, Samri is unlovable.
He is just a complete monster. Every crime that is

(15:35):
committable he has done. We are not meant to have
any sympathy at all for Samri. And and ultimately have
to say, even though the early stages of the film do,
like the historical opening does kind of mirror the opening
of Horizons from the Tomb, it ultimately goes in its
own direction as opposed to being anything like like a
clone of that movie.

Speaker 3 (15:56):
Well, on one hand, yes, I agree. Samri is not
sympathetic at all in terms of the narrative. He doesn't
have like a tragic love story or anything like that.
There's nothing likable about him except just his physical vibe.
Like the presence of the actor who plays summary in
the opening is so cool.

Speaker 2 (16:13):
Oh, absolutely, Yeah. The performance here by aj Agarwal is
tremendous and this is a role that launched him as
like a true monster actor for Indian horror cinema.

Speaker 3 (16:27):
We'll have to come back to him.

Speaker 2 (16:28):
Yeah, we'll come back to him for sure, because he's
at a light. There are long stretches of the film where
he's not there, but when he is there, he's tremendous. Right.
Just a couple other small points before we get to
the trailer. Basically the film is predominantly in Hindi, though
the characters do throw in a little English here and there,
and the action ventures into a rural setting, so you'll

(16:50):
hear some characters speaking another dialect or language. It's referenced
in the Hindi dialogue as well, but I couldn't find
an indicator of which language this is.

Speaker 3 (16:59):
I noticed something interesting in the movie where a couple
of times somebody would say something in Hindi and then
they would say the same thing again in English, almost
as if for emphasis. And I don't know if that's
like something specific to Bollywood movies or just a quirk
of this movie in particular, or a convention of of

(17:19):
Hindi language in general. I don't know, but I thought
that was interesting.

Speaker 2 (17:23):
Yeah, with that, with that specifically and just generally out there,
we'd love to hear from listeners after this episode. If
you have more experience with Bollywood cinema, if you, if
you speak Hindi, if you certainly, if you, if you
have experience with the theater, experience of going to these films,
all of that is on the table, because I've heard
it pointed out that it's one thing to watch like

(17:46):
a Bollywood film or a Bollywood horror film in your
living room by yourself, But that of course was not
how they intended a film like this to be viewed, No,
this was to be viewed in the theater.

Speaker 3 (17:57):
Can you imagine how much fun it would have been
to like see this in a pact theater of like
young people out on date night?

Speaker 2 (18:03):
Oh yeah? And can you imagine how afraid people were
again if you hadn't seen many horror films and you
had to see Sammary. I mean, he's terrifying almost all
the time on the screen. He's at least unnerving, if
not just outright terrifying. All right, well, I mean the
elevator pitch on this one is basically it's the biggest
Bollywood horror film of them all. It's the it's the

(18:25):
granddaddy of Bollywood horror films. It's your basic evil wizard,
multi generational family curse romance film with added music and comedy.
We have a trailer here. I don't think we're going
to play at all, but we'll play at least a
nice sampling of this so you can get sort of
an audio taste of what's ahead.

Speaker 1 (19:00):
How many another.

Speaker 2 (19:19):
Shaw man? How about rights? Gonna be all right? Well,

(19:51):
before we go any further, if you would like to
watch this movie for yourself, if you'd like to check
out here, go and see it, and then come back
to the rest of the episode. Well, you don't have
to depend on sort of weird stream to view this film,
because there's a wonderful Bollywood Horror limited edition box that
is out from Mondo Macabre, and I checked out a

(20:12):
couple of discs from this, the disc for this film
and then a disc for another movie that had some
extras on it, and we rented these discs from Atlanta's
own videodrome rental store.

Speaker 3 (20:22):
It's a great print, though it does warn you that
there will be some variable quality and different scenes of
the movie due to just like storage issues with the
film over the years, so the restoration is a bit
patchy in places. But for the most part it looks great.

Speaker 2 (20:38):
Yeah, there's one particular I don't even know what to
call it, but there's some sort of an error in
the final print that we have on the disc here
that has almost kind of a psychedelic quality to it,
and I didn't really I don't think i'd seen it
on a film before, this particular kind of noise. So
it's very watchable. Nothing in this gets in the way
of your enjoyment of the movie, all right, well, let's

(21:08):
jump into the people involved here. The main ones to
really highlight here are the Ramsey brothers, the directors. It's
impossible to discuss Indian horror cinema without discussing the Ramsey brothers. Again,
they had been doing this since seventy two, and this
is the movie that kicked off an enormous boom in

(21:30):
Indian cinema for horror. And even like contemporary horror movies,
they still have connections to the work of the Ramsey
brothers here. Now, Ramsey brothers, I think can at times
refer to just different sons and grandsons of f U Ramsey.
But in particular the directors here are Shyam Ramsey and

(21:50):
Tulsi Ramsey. Chyam lived fifty two through twenty nineteen and
Tulci lived nineteen forty four through twenty eighteen. Other Ramsey
brothers would get in on directing game at times, like
Kishu and Kieran. But yeah, these are the main two
we're talking about. They're the ones who directed horror films
in the early seventies, beginning with a nineteen seventy two film.

(22:12):
In the title for this one translates to two yards
under the Ground so already like kind of a grim
beginning there. They followed this up with a string of
horror and creature films. There's one from eighty two Matt Kasaya.
I'm probably mispronouncing that, but it looks interesting to me
because it has some sort of like big creature water
monster in it. I'm not sure this one is available

(22:36):
widely in the West, but I put it on my
radar because it looks interesting. Neat monster anyway. But anyway,
all of these films that they were putting out, these
were outliers. The horror pictures just weren't viewed as culturally viable.
They weren't seen as potentially anything that would make money
at the box office. So it was more fringe stuff.
And you know a lot of these pictures, particularly Ramsey

(22:57):
productions at the time, they were also pushing boundaries of
what was accepted in Hindi cinema at the time. As again,
as Omar Khan points out, most Indian film viewers had
little or no exposure to Western horror films and Indian
horror films were barely a thing. In fact, I saw
an interview with aj Aguah, the main monster actor in

(23:19):
this picture, and he said that he didn't know the
difference between horror films and regular films before being cast
by the Ramses, like that's how little horror was established
in the general audience's mind. But with this movie again,
it hits it just the right time, takes off. Nineteen
eighty four becomes a huge hit, a generational date movie,

(23:43):
as Cohn describes, it sets off this massive boom that
doesn't really subside till ninety two. The Ramsees continue to
apply their trade, tons of competitors and imitators trying to
get in on the craze as well, until overexposure kicks
in and the boom ties out. The Ramses followed this
movie up with nineteen eighty five's Telephone nineteen eighty five's

(24:06):
three D Samary What, which is obviously the Yeah, the
three D sequel of sorts to this movie.

Speaker 3 (24:14):
Well, but I thought the evil Wizard was destroyed at
the end of this movie.

Speaker 2 (24:17):
If an evil wizard makes you enough money, there's no
destroying him. He will come back. There's a nineteen and
I'm not Also, I haven't seen three D Samary. I
assume it's Samar because it's the title is the name
of the character. But you know, sometimes a movie like this,
maybe it's not a direct sequel, maybe it's a spiritual sequel.
I'm not sure. But there are a slew of interesting

(24:40):
looking features that they came out with in the wake
of Parana Mandir, including Takhana from eighty six, Verana from
eighty eight, Pirani Haveli from eighty nine, and nineteen ninety's
Bond Darwazo, which is said to be quite good, more
of a traditional Dracula style film, and after that the

(25:01):
well kind of dries up. One of their last big films,
if not their last big film, was a nineteen ninety
four movie titled Mahakal, which a number of you might
be familiar with because it is, to be kind, it
is very inspired by Nightmare on Elm Street. It is
at least a strong homage to Nightmare on Elm Street

(25:22):
and features a Freddy Krueger esque character on the cover.
So I think this one has gotten some amount of traction.
If nothing else. You might have seen some clips or
the poster art.

Speaker 3 (25:33):
It does have a guy with knives for fingers.

Speaker 2 (25:36):
Yes, yeah, yeah, And if you're not sure like how
to spell that title and you want to look it up.
Just do a search for like Bollywood Freddy Krueger and
you'll you'll find it, all right. The screenplay on this
one was written by another Ramsey, Kumar Ramsey, who lived
thirty six through twenty twenty one. He was the screenwriter
and a number of their films. This is one of
those situations where you know the brothers and the family here,

(25:58):
they'll often draw in some of the same talent. So
this Ramsey also wrote Samari three D in a movie
called Guest House. There are also three other contributors also
credited here, but I couldn't find out much about them.
But there's a story credit, there's a dialogue credit, and
there's an assistant dialogue writer. All right, let's get into

(26:18):
the cast. So we've talked about him already. But Aj
Agerwahl I believe AJ is short for Annarrud. He was
born in nineteen forty nine. As of this recording is
still out there. I think he's retired now. But yes,
he plays our dark wizard of evil who's eventually going
to rise from the tomb and get his head back
and go on a rampage. He only acted in three

(26:42):
Ramsey Brothers films. He played a monster in two of
them in Parana Mandir. Of course in the follow up
Samari three D or three D Sammary in eighty five.
He also played more of a traditional Dracula in that
nineteen ninety film Bandowaza, and he continued to act through
twenty He's retired now but mostly just almost exclusively in

(27:05):
Hindi films, but he does have a role in Steven
Summer's The Jungle Book from nineteen ninety four. I included
a picture here for you, Joe. As you can you
can see he's playing heavy of some sort in this.
He's standing next to the villain holding Lena Hetty by
the arms.

Speaker 3 (27:23):
Well, that's also Carrie Elwis. I know all three of
these actors. I don't think I would have recognized a
single one of them in this screenshots. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:31):
Yeah, they're very young. I mean especially Lena. I wouldn't
have recognized her. But anyway, yeah, he's in it. He's
very tall. He was like six four six ' five,
so especially among a lot of actors, he's pretty towering.
Andy has just very pronounced features. I've read this might
have been due to like some sort of underlying medical
condition as well, that sort of gave him pronounced facial features.

(27:55):
Also yeah, again very tall and based on I read
an article about him and I was looking at an
interview conducted with him, and basically he made two goes
at getting into acting before and after earning like a
civil engineering certificate or degree of some sort, but at
both times he didn't have any luck. Until he had
some sort of ill health or injury while working in Muntumbai,

(28:20):
and he looked even more haggard afterwards. I'm not sure
if he had some sort of like facial bruising or
whatever the case may be, but someone came up to
him and said, hey, you look pretty tough. You should
be in movies and he's like, well, that's what I've
been trying to do, but nobody will hire me. And
they said, say, well, you know what, you need to
go talk to the Ramsey brothers because they will give

(28:41):
you a chance. And so he went. He talked to
the Ramsey brothers, and the Ramsey brothers at that point
were apparently six months into shooting Piranha Mandir, but they
hadn't done any of the horror sequences yet. What I
guess they didn't even have a Samari cast. Wow, and
they'd leaned heavily on masks and makeup and previous films,
but then in walks a man who doesn't need as

(29:04):
much makeup, you know, and like he's We've seen this
in time and time again in various horror cinema periods
and settings, where somebody comes in and they just have
that unique look where you don't have to do much
to them, you know, just a subtle amount of makeup
and right lighting and the right lighting and effects, and

(29:26):
you're already in the horror realm. And that's what he
offered to them here.

Speaker 3 (29:31):
It's interesting because, as we were saying earlier, this character
is in no way likable or sympathetic. They just make
him an absolute demon, like pure evil, not like charismatic
or anything, except in the opening sequence before he gets
transformed into a more Frankenstein type creature. The like human
Somary evokes strong rock star charisma. He has kind of

(29:56):
a shaggy Keith Richards haircut, and the back of his
shirt sparkles. It's got this like Sequin wolfman motif. It
looks kind of like something David Bowie would have worn.
And he's just like tall and has a kind of
you know, lead guitarist posture. I don't know. He seems
very cool.

Speaker 2 (30:15):
Yeah, he's at least a head taller than everybody around him.
At times, he kind of felt like he had kind
of a Boris Karloff kind of a presence to him,
you know, and you know, and also reminds me of
various other you know, actors with unique appearances. But yeah,
very strong screen presence from this guy. And and when
he shows back up, he just keeps looking more and

(30:37):
more monstrous, and the lighting, the effects are always just
really on point whenever he's on screen. So he's very terrifying.
So that's Sounary, that's our monster. But you to have
an effective monster, you have to have a bunch of
mortals that are in peril or cursed by said monster.

(30:57):
And so the next major character of note here is
Suman Sing played by Arti Gupta. She's our heroin I
guess you know. She's born into a long line along
cursed lineage of sings here. It's a very charismatic performance.
She's a lot of fun on the screen. The actor here, Gupta,

(31:20):
would come back for three D summary and also apparently
produced a few films much later, including two thousand and
Seven's a Mighty Heart starring Angelina Jolie.

Speaker 3 (31:28):
Yeah, I think Arti Gupta is great. She conveys a
lot of emotion, especially in the musical numbers. Though I
was wondering, dude, do you know if the actors in
this movie sing their own parts in the musical numbers
or are they sort of lip singing along to professional singers.

Speaker 2 (31:45):
It is my understanding, and again I invite further education
on Bollywood by anyone out there listening, but it's my
understanding that it's almost it's usually not the actor doing
with singing that that's added later. And I think that
would make sense given that if you have, if there's
no real division between films and musicals, it just makes

(32:08):
sense to do that. And of course this is not
unprecedented in Western musicals as well. I mean, I think
of Oh Brother, We're Art Thou, which is a tremendous musical,
but George Clooney is not doing his own singing in that.

Speaker 3 (32:19):
Film, and it works great in both cases. I mean,
I know, sometimes for some reason, people talk disparagingly about
lip syncing. I think they talk about it like that
when it's like a band is faking doing a live performance,
just like full on trying to trick people that they're
playing live.

Speaker 2 (32:36):
But in a movie.

Speaker 3 (32:36):
No, there's no problem at all. I like it.

Speaker 2 (32:38):
Yeah, And I imagine there are Bollywood films where at
least some of the actors are doing their own singing.
I mean, it makes sense, but I did not get
a sense of that from looking at the credits for
this movie. All right, So we have Suman sing She's
our heroine. Her father, Thakor Singh, is played by pra

(32:59):
Deep Kumar, who lived nineteen twenty five through two thousand
and one. This is Suman's father, a loving but overly
protective father, but he's overly protected for reasons that go
beyond the norm and get into the realm of supernatural,
multi generational curses as we'll discuss. But Kumar hero is

(33:19):
a veteran Indian actor with credits going back to the
late nineteen forties. Apparently highly regarded, though largely lacking in
like highly successful roles. He often acted in period dramas
and seems to have just always boasted a meticulously trimmed mustache,
just a real, real, gorgeous and stylish mustache on this
man and.

Speaker 3 (33:39):
It's a mustache of the thin style, which I feel
like is hard to pull off, but it looks good
on him.

Speaker 2 (33:44):
Yeah, kind of like a swashbuckling old Hollywood kind of
a mustache.

Speaker 3 (33:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:49):
All right, so we have the daughter, we have the father,
but now it's time to talk about the daughter's secret boyfriend, Sanjay,
played by Manish Bell, who was born in nineteen sixty one.
He's a he plays a low born photographer, but he's handsome,
he's a good lad. You know, he's our lover boy.
This was only his fifth credit, but he went on

(34:10):
to act in more than one hundred pictures.

Speaker 3 (34:12):
I think it's interesting that they try to what seemed
to me to like fit in a very standard forbidden
love dynamic, even though it's only like a red herring.
So like, for the first bit of the movie, Suman
and Sanjay understand that Suman's father disapproves of their relationship

(34:32):
because she is a rich girl. She's from a you know,
a high class family, and he's middle class. He's not
rich like them. So that seems like a very standard
kind of romance obstacle. But then there's a twist which
is like, oh no, actually he's opposed to their romance
because there's a curse on the family and if you know,
she gets married, she may one day have a child,

(34:53):
and that means she will die. Well, actually she will
turn into like a witch and then die. Yeah, but
it's seemed interesting that it's almost like they were trying
to fit like a second, like short romance movie into
the beginning of this movie.

Speaker 2 (35:07):
Well, he lets viewers know where they stand. It's kind
of like Sons of Anarchy, Right, you jump into watching
Sons of Anarchy, and it's like, oh, it's like Shakespeare bikers.
That doesn't really hold on to the Shakespeare aspect of
the thing for the most part. I guess it comes
back towards the end, but a little bit, but it's
still it gives you sort of an initial footing on

(35:27):
which to proceed with the picture. Or in the case
of Sons of Anarchy the TV series, all right, we've
got the monster, we've got the father, the daughter, the
daughter's boyfriend. Now it's time for the boyfriend's best friend.
This is the character Anand played by Plunette Isar born
nineteen fifty nine. Yeah, he plays a best friend. Martial

(35:48):
arts and personal fitness enthusiast. The actor here outside of
this is apparently well known in India for his role
in the Mahabarat TV show that ran eighty eight through
nineteen ninety. He played Duri o'hanna, eldest of the Carava's,
one of the two feuding houses in that epic. He's
also written, directed, and produced, and is especially known for

(36:11):
his negative roles. This is terminology I was not familiar
with until I started reading about different Bollywood actors. But apparently,
like when you talk about somebody being like a great
villain or being great at villain roles, you talk about
how they're great at playing negative roles, which I thought
was an interesting turn of phrase there.

Speaker 3 (36:29):
So I thought Punitasar was one of the highlights of
the film. Actually, my favorite stuff about this movie is
sort of like the tall, macho guys in it. So
I like the villain. I love Anon a nod Is,
so he's yeah, he's the main dude's best friend. But
in a way, it's a movie where the side the
so called sidekick, actually does most of the heroism. It's

(36:52):
like Big Trouble in Little China, and every time Anon
shows up to save the day, it is it's increasingly
HILARI there's like an amazing scene where Sanjay is getting
beaten up by twelve guys or something. You know, they're
all like these guys in fancy red footman's uniforms, these
red jackets, and they're all ganging up on Sanjay, and

(37:13):
then suddenly a Nod appears sort of over the top
of a mountain. He's like, comes up on this ridge
overlooking the whole scene, and he's like, oh, my friend,
and then charges down into the fracas to just slam me,
just like beat beat all these guys up, which he
can do pretty much single handedly. He is the center
of a number of martial arts scenes that I think

(37:35):
are actually quite good. And there's also a really funny
scene where they have a they're on a road trip
and they have a car. They have a flat tire,
and it's clear that they staged this just so a
Nod it could be like, hey, it's no problem that
we don't have a car jack, I'll just lift the
car while you fix the tire.

Speaker 2 (37:55):
Yeah, and he's yeah. He's he's basically the the the
the action star of the film, while Sonja is the
romantic star of the film. And Annan, Yeah, he's a
lot of fun. These martial arts sequences are cool. He's
got these really long legs, so he's one of these guys.
When he's throwing kicks, it's like he he manages to

(38:16):
kick around you and then kick you on the other
side of your face, kind of a thing. And he's
also able to somehow pull off the leather vest over
a bare chest look. He also wears a lot of
fun T shirts, but sometimes no T shirt, just the vest.

Speaker 3 (38:29):
In the scene where he where he intervenes to save
Sanjay and beats all the guys up, I think he's
wearing a sleeveless polo shirt tucked into jeans.

Speaker 2 (38:40):
Somehow he makes it work all right. Now, Anon, his
character has a wife, and the wife is Sapna played
by and I'm mostly sure on this. This character in
this actor was not listed in some of the databases
I was looking at, so like not on IMDb. I
had to go to another database. But pretty sap rou

(39:00):
Wallya born nineteen fifty seven, I believe is the actor
playing his wife. She wishes he was a little less
into martial arts and personal fitness and more into love making,
which makes for at least one amusing sequence in the film.
You know, it's a fun performance. I think she has
only a couple of scenes to really shine in, but

(39:20):
she does shine.

Speaker 3 (39:21):
Oh yeah, she's good. It's a real bummer when the
evil Wizard throws her off the top of a building.

Speaker 2 (39:26):
Yeah, so in a way, it's like, you know, she's
she's I guess she was dimmed, you know, from the start,
like this, somebody's got to be killed by the monster.
We've got to give, you know, the certain plot elements
have to be put in place.

Speaker 3 (39:39):
The two main lovers go on a road trip with
their two friends to go stop the evil Wizard. What
do you think is going to happen to the two friends? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (39:47):
Now, do we have a creepy groundskeeper in the film? Yeah,
we kind of have two of them, because we also
have a creepy, creepy woodcutter. The creepy woodcutter, I'll mention
really quickly is Sanga played by Satis Sha born nineteen
fifty one. Basically, he's just a scarred woodcutter who really
would like a bit of that treasure. But the main
grounds keeper at the haunted mansion where everyone ends up

(40:11):
is this character Durjon played by Sadashev a'm Rapokur who
lived nineteen fifty through twenty fourteen. There's something about his performance.
At first, I didn't I didn't pick up on it,
but you know, it's kind of like a nice haunted vibe.
He has kind of haunted eyes. And when I looked
him up, apparently he made a name for himself playing

(40:33):
villains or negative ones or negative roles in various films.
In fact, I saw a twenty fourteen Indian Express article
that called him quote Bollywood's most memorable villain.

Speaker 3 (40:45):
So oh interesting. Yeah, not a villain in this though, no,
just more.

Speaker 2 (40:50):
Of he's the local, that is, the haunted local who
knows more about goings on than the main characters in
the film.

Speaker 3 (41:00):
At one point, he quite crucially hides a trident in
a chandelier and I did not understand why he did that,
but it comes in later.

Speaker 2 (41:07):
He just knew that it would come in handy later.
Somebody's going to need to drop this chandelier. Sometimes. Yeah, sometimes,
I guess it's just the film logic of the thing. Now,
there are a lot of other actors in this, and
I'm not going to go through all of them here,
I will say that we do have a bandit character
named Machar, I believe, and he is played by this

(41:28):
actor who went by the moniker Jack Deep. This is
an Indian actor and comedian who appeared in more than
four hundred films, including I think some various Ramsey Brothers films.
This is our sort of I don't know, Benny Hill
esque misogynistic slapstick specialist that is brought in for at

(41:49):
least two, maybe three long segments of the film that
are concerned only with comedy that do not really connect
much at all with the rest of the film and
are really difficult to watch.

Speaker 3 (42:01):
Agreed. I had read in multiple commentaries that the comedy
segments are by far the low point of the film,
and they are for the most part, extremely unpleasant, not
funny and just like a lot of jokes about sex crimes.

Speaker 2 (42:15):
Yeah yeah, so's it goes beyond like, oh, this is
out of keeping with the main vibe of the picture.
Is just like content wise, it's gross. So I would
advise if you're just casually watching this movie, you know,
feel free to get up and get a snack during
the comedy segments. Don't necessarily bother reading the subtitles during

(42:37):
these segments and feel free to skip them all right. Finally,
the music for Piranha mandir Ajit Singh. I don't think
I was able to find any dates for him, but
he worked on subsequent Ramsey pictures as well, including Takana
in eighty six, Perani Haveli in eighty nine, and a
friendly Yetti movie that came out in ninety one that

(43:00):
looked pretty interesting as well. But the music in this
picture is I guess at times I loved it. It's
a little abrasive, like at times the synths come on
really strong, but I still can't fault it too much,
Like it definitely gets in there and it comes at
you with its clause.

Speaker 3 (43:18):
Oh yeah, I really liked a lot of the music.
There's one theme that really stuck in my head that
was not especially complex melodically, but it was just like
a real rubbery synth tone as the characters were like
exploring a secret passageway and I was grooving on it
really hard.

Speaker 2 (43:33):
Samri has a pretty strong theme as well that I
think Omar Khan. I think it was Omar Khan compared
it to the main theme from the Omen, not that
it's directly that or reuse of that, but maybe has
hit similar notes of that score.

Speaker 3 (43:58):
All right, so you wanted to talk about the plot, now, yeah,
let's do it. Okay. So one thing is we absolutely
cannot do the kind of granular commentary we do with
some movies, especially like seventy minute drive in movies, or
this episode would be six hours long. And I want
to say this is not only because this is the
longest movie we've ever done. I'd also argue, I wonder

(44:18):
if you'd agree with this, that it's in the running
for the dnsesst movie we've done, meaning that the amount
of plot or stuff happening per minute of run time
is unusually high.

Speaker 2 (44:33):
Yeah. Yeah, everybody gets their stuff in on this film.
And again it's it's having to deliver all of the
various spices. So yeah, there's a lot that happens in
this movie, and to just cover every bit of it
we just wouldn't have time for. And certainly we're going
to skip over stuff like the comedic segments, which you know,
the less said the better.

Speaker 3 (44:54):
Okay, First of all, I like a film that begins
by showing you its papers. The first thing we see
here is a is scan of the certificate from the
Central Board of Film Certification of the Indian government. Seem
to recall seeing similar paperwork at the beginning of like
British movies from the thirties, like those old Alfred Hitchcock
movies that show you the certificate from the British Board

(45:16):
of Film Censors.

Speaker 2 (45:17):
Yeah, I agree, I really like this makes it feel
kind of like more like a cultural artifact, you know.

Speaker 3 (45:21):
Yeah, yeah. So the narration begins two hundred years ago.
Bijapor Sultanate was ruled by Raja Hariman Singh. In those days,
the fear of ghosts and demons prevailed in the hearts
of people. The most feared demon of all was called Somri.
And as they mentioned these different people, we see like
painted portraits of them. Samri's portrait has a kind of

(45:44):
purple glow, so he is emitting rays of evil magic
even in painted likeness. The action begins with a historical
flashback where Hariman Singh is traveling with his daughter Rupali
and his retainers when his chariot breaks down. Unfortunately, it
breaks down in the middle of Samri's land, and even

(46:07):
worse than that, his daughter wanders away while the carriage
is being fixed and fearing for her life, the rajah
sends his men out looking for her. They are of
course attacked and picked off by the Evil Sorcerer. And
I just want to say this again. One thing I
noticed immediately about the opening segment is the extremely high

(46:28):
energy editing and pacing of each shot. So the cuts
between shots are frequent, and the action in each shot
develops very quickly, so it's this kind of near frantic
pace for the first couple of minutes. But it's not
just fast. It's also loud, full of like screaming and

(46:49):
blasts of music, like slamming the audio into the red
It's just a lot.

Speaker 2 (46:54):
Yeah. Yeah, I've seen Sam Rainey's Evil Dead for maybe
one mentioned as an influence on the Ramsey Brothers as
well as the films of Wes Craven, so I don't
know if maybe we see a little bit of those
influences in this editing style.

Speaker 3 (47:08):
It's not going to keep up at quite this pace
and level of intensity for the rest of the movie,
but overall for this film, the Ramsey Brothers do stick
to a pretty fast moving and intense editing style. It
always feels energetic. Things are always happening really quickly. There's
not a lot of establishing or waiting around.

Speaker 2 (47:31):
Yeah. Yeah, and you don't have to wait to see Samri.
He's there. He's going to disappear for a while for
reasons that will that makes sense. But yeah, he's there
from the get go, and you get to you get
a good look at him, and and boy, it's he's
just a great sight to take in.

Speaker 3 (47:46):
As I said earlier, strong evocations of rock stardom. He's
like he is singing devil music. But okay, Samary is
running around. He kills all of Harryman Singh's men, and
then he vamps through Paully Harry Mun Singh's daughter. How
are we supposed to understand what happened to her? I
don't know exactly. Like he leans over her as if

(48:09):
he's biting her, and then there's blood on her face
and her eyes look different. There's sort of like her
eyes have turned white, as if she's in a kind
of magical trance.

Speaker 2 (48:20):
One thing I loved about Samre just throughout the picture
is I never really know what the rules are with him.
He's just overpoweringly evil, like he yeah, he can drink
your blood but it's just he just looks at you.
If you just think about him too much, you may
just lose your soul. And then in terms of like
what he is, yeah, there's the basic Kahara rises from

(48:42):
the tomb undead sorcerer aspect of the whole thing. But like,
especially when he starts showing up later, I mean, he
already has things at this point, and then later on
in the movie, his body becomes even more monstrous in
ways that don't line up with just pure like decay
and resurrection. Like his body becomes just increasingly like just

(49:03):
materially evil.

Speaker 3 (49:05):
Yeah, his later form is part Frankenstein, part decaying zombie,
and part pro wrestler.

Speaker 2 (49:12):
Yeah, with like some Bigfoot thrown in there.

Speaker 3 (49:15):
Yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (49:17):
Anyway, Harry Munsingh comes back with his full forces and
they capture the demon. They capture Sammary, taming him with
holy things like there is a priest chasing him with
a trisula, the trident of Shiva, and there is an
altar with the statue of Shiva, et cetera. And he's
ultimately held in chains. They stand him up for a

(49:38):
kind of trial while the accusations against him are read
before the crowd. Basically, he did everything bad. He did murder, rape, cannibalism,
all of it, all in service of his evil, demonic masters.

Speaker 2 (49:51):
I liked how the priest is reading these charges out
and finally stumbles a bit, reading the charge of digging
up graves and eating corpses.

Speaker 3 (49:58):
That doesn't seem like the word of them.

Speaker 2 (50:01):
No, But at that point he's this is too far.
We're not used to this one. We don't even have
this one on the books. I'm not sure this is
technically illegal. It's just bad manners. Now.

Speaker 3 (50:11):
There was a cultural and language question here that interested me.
In the English subtitles of this scene, it says that
Samri is accused of using his Satanic powers to create
terror among the people. It says that he slaked his
satanic thirst by drinking the blood of children, and it
says he is so vile that even Satan would shun him.

(50:35):
So given the Hindu context here, and it seems very
much in a Hindu context, like there are other scenes where,
you know, there are temples of the temples of Shiva,
people offering prayers to Shiva in order to help them.
I kind of wonder whether they actually said satanic and
Satan in these scenes. I guess they could have because
I kept hearing a word in the audio that sounded

(50:59):
like shatan. So I was just curious, what's going on here,
Like what is the most direct translation of what they're saying. Because,
of course, in the context of like a Christian culture
horror movie, it's very normal, like the evil sorcerer is
understood to get his powers from Satan or some kind
of demonic force. In the Hindu context, where does the

(51:21):
evil sorcerer's power, where's it understood to come from?

Speaker 2 (51:25):
Yeah, I had the same thought here. I thought, well,
maybe they're just referring to mentions of Satan and Western films,
which would have obviously been an influence here. And then
I was thinking, well, maybe it's there's an Arabic loanword
at play here. I looked up to some basic stuff
in translation. Again, I do not know what I'm doing
with the Hindi language at all, but it does seem

(51:48):
like we do have this term chatan, which means devil, satan, freaks, beasts,
or demons, So I guess that's what we're talking about.

Speaker 3 (52:00):
Interesting. Okay, again, Hindi speaking listeners, please write in let us.

Speaker 2 (52:04):
Know at any rate, he's done all the bad things
and something's got to be done about it, right.

Speaker 3 (52:09):
Right, So harry Mon Sing's advisors all they argue about
the best way to punish this evil sorcerer. The priest says,
you know, why don't we burn him to ashes, that'll
purify him with flame. Harryman Sing says, no, I've got
a better idea. We're gonna cut his head off and
keep it in a different building than his body, and
that way we'll know that his head and body can

(52:30):
never possibly be reunited.

Speaker 2 (52:33):
There you go. Sounds like a winning plan.

Speaker 3 (52:35):
And then the holy man suggests using the trident the
trisula to guard his head. I think they're going to
like lay it over the top of the box.

Speaker 2 (52:44):
Okay, again, sounds sounds good. That's a good way to
secure it.

Speaker 3 (52:47):
Then the prologue ends, suddenly lightning strikes and there are
more credits. After these credits, we get the story picks up,
but it's still in the historical prologue. See them leading
Samri off to his fate, and then they're sort of
leading him in procession in chains, and then he stops
to rage at everyone like he rages at Hariman Singh,

(53:10):
and he issues a curse upon his household, which is
he says that all of his female heirs will die
in childbirth until Samri's head and body are joined again.
Note that in the scene they haven't been separated yet. Also,
he says, on the day that his head and body
are joined again, that will be the end of Hariman
Singh's dynasty, I guess, meaning he will destroy them all.

(53:34):
Then they do it. They cut his head off and
they bury the body in the ruins of a temple.
They say it's Shunkar's polygot temple. And they take his
head to throw it in a trunk wrapped with chains,
and then they hide that in the dungeon of the
Raja's palace. And then they of course put the Trishulas
she was holy trident on top of the trunk and

(53:54):
they wall it up like Fortunado.

Speaker 2 (53:57):
All in all, a pretty great historical prologue that then
leads us into modern day Aka in an early eighties Bombay.

Speaker 3 (54:06):
Right, so we meet our modern day characters. There is
Takur Ranbier Singh. He is the descendant of the Raja
from the prologue. So the curse has passed down through
his family. He's a rich man. He loves his family,
but he is preoccupied with fears about the ancestral curse.
There is Ranbier's daughter, Suman, who is a college student.

(54:28):
She's got a kind of sunny disposition, and her father
laments her growing up because that means that she may
marry and try to have children and then the curse
of Samri will kill her. Then there is Suman's boyfriend Sanjay. Again,
he is not rich, but he is handsome and brave,
loyal and scrappy. And then there is Sanjay's friend Anand

(54:50):
who this is a buff guy who cuts the sleeves
off of all of his shirts. Not all of them,
He's got some sleeves.

Speaker 2 (54:56):
Yeah, some slaves are cap but most of them they
just get in the way.

Speaker 3 (55:00):
San and Sonjay being in love, they go out on dates.
They like go to a pool party. They go out
to a nightclub where there's a dancer dressed in gold,
and here we get our first musical number.

Speaker 2 (55:12):
Yeah, this is kind of a cabaret number. The dancer
is Lena Doas and it's a it's a pretty fun
Indian disco type musical performance. I guess I really enjoyed it.
I turned the volume up a little bit on this one.

Speaker 3 (55:26):
I was thinking though about this night club here. It's
a strange mix of inside it seems cool but also claustrophobic.
I think maybe the claustrophobic aspect comes from like the
solid black walls and what felt like a sort of
low ceiling. But it's got these cool like red bench
seats and then posters on the wall for movies and

(55:46):
stuff like there's a poster for Superman up on the walls.

Speaker 2 (55:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (55:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (55:50):
And we also we get a little bit of Sonjay
is looking at the dancer, maybe a little bit too much,
and Suman is so it was a little bit jealous.

Speaker 3 (55:59):
This is a curring motif.

Speaker 2 (56:01):
Yes, whole songs will be sung about this later on.

Speaker 3 (56:03):
So Suman and Sonjay are in love, but Suman has
to lie to her father about where she's going when
she heads out on dates with him. However, her father
finds out Ron Beer is not pleased and he forbids
her to see Sanjay again. But of course she's in love.
There's no stopping her. So she's not going to just
leave her boyfriend hanging. And so this is an ongoing

(56:26):
conflict at the beginning of the movie, and again, as
I mentioned earlier, there's a misunderstanding about the reason her
father forbids the romance. She and like the young people
think it is a class thing, that she's rich and
he's not. Actually it's a demonic curse thing, but they
don't know that yet.

Speaker 2 (56:43):
Yeah, he won't tell her about that, he's keeping that secret. Instead,
he just says things like like, hey, our family name
is not so deluded that our blood can just flow
directly into the gutter and things like that, and of
course that just pushes her further away. He won't tell
her the real demonic curse rationale that is behind his fear.

Speaker 3 (57:03):
But then we get like a love song on a
beach or it's on rocks near the shore, where Sanjay
is singing about his love for Suman.

Speaker 2 (57:11):
Yeah, and it's nice, you know, it's like just a
nice music video. Break.

Speaker 3 (57:14):
Somewhere in here we get the first martial arts scene,
and this is with Okay, So the basic situation is
ron Bier. Again, he forbids Sanjay and Suman to date,
but then he catches them together. So he sends his
men who are all dressed up in these cool red
jackets to beat up Sanjay and then on on to
like comes over the mountain top. It comes over like

(57:35):
a ridge looking down on them and runs into the
rescue and then together they beat up all of the
all of the bad guys. I guess they're not bad guys.
I don't know. The guy's working for her dad.

Speaker 2 (57:46):
They're just Dad's goon squad that's to beat up Sanjay.

Speaker 3 (57:50):
But we see a lot of signs of Ron Beer's worries,
like he has a freak out dream sequence with a
giant beast samary head. And this is where we start
getting signs of what Samri will look like in his
in his sort of undead form, which is again less
rock star and more kind of I don't yeah, like bigfoot,
pro wrestler zombie.

Speaker 2 (58:10):
Yeah, just seething in darkness. Just these great eyes, just
in this in this pronounced brow. It's just a tremendous look.
And I can just imagine moviegoers screaming when they see
this on the screen.

Speaker 3 (58:24):
But eventually the curse is revealed to Suman and Sanjay
and they have a bunch more you know, back and
forth about how Ronberd disapproves of them, but eventually, like
there's one scene where he's repeatedly getting a gun off
the wall, but eventually he breaks down and confesses to
them what's really going on. He explains the curse, and
there are exchanges like one that was funny was he's like,

(58:46):
you know, it's a secret, and they say what's the
secret and he says, it's one I can't reveal, and
they're like, but you must reveal it. But then when
he does, it's horrifying. It's there's a horrifying flashback to
when Ronbier reveals that after Suman was born, her mother
was transformed into some kind of devil creature with these
long fingernails, these claws and like barnacles on her face,

(59:10):
and then she died.

Speaker 2 (59:11):
Yeah, there's nothing. It turns out there's nothing ambiguous about it.
I thought they were more setting up a situation where
it's like, oh, you're you know your mom died in
childbirth and there is this ancient curse thing. So I
put one and two together. No, no, no, she like
straight up practically explodes in some sort of like just awful,
you know, cursed flesh type of death, and it's it's

(59:32):
it's a lot to watch.

Speaker 3 (59:34):
Like all the doctors and nurses run out of the room.
There's no end.

Speaker 2 (59:38):
They're like, it's out of our hands. This is straight
up wizardry going on in here.

Speaker 3 (59:42):
So ron Bier explains to Sanjay, you know, if you
really love Suman, you will leave her alone, right, And
so Sanjay does because he really does love her. But
then very next scene it cuts straight to Anon is
lounging on a bed or something. He's wearing a sweatshirt,
and he says, so you left her, you lose her.
What'll she think of you?

Speaker 2 (01:00:01):
Now?

Speaker 3 (01:00:02):
Should we do a sidebar on Anon's shirts? He wears
a lot of interesting shirts. Some of them have English
writing on them and interesting logos and pictures and stuff.
He wears one shirt that just says styles, and he
wears another shirt that says Golden Rule. He who has
the gold makes the rules very cool. And it's weird

(01:00:23):
because Anon in many ways does have a heart of gold,
as we will see. But also he is I don't know,
he is indifferent. Scenes shown to be vain and highly
covetous of money, even doing very shady criminal things to
get money.

Speaker 2 (01:00:38):
Yeah, though those occur either within or within close proximity
to the comedic segments, and I'm never sure how much
of that I should actually pay attention to, Like does
that count? Is that real Anon? Or is that like
some different version of a noon just for the comedic
segments of the movie. I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:00:55):
Well anyway, Suman shows up and she's got a better
idea than Sanjay just leaving her. He convinces Sanjay that
they should break the curse. Hey, great idea. So it's
now a road trip to Bijapur, driving down the highway
in a red convertible. The road trip buddies are the
four of them, Suman, Sanjay, Anon, and his wife Sapna.

Speaker 2 (01:01:15):
So at this point it's kind of a Scooby Doo
road trip kind of a movie, which is.

Speaker 3 (01:01:19):
Yeah, and all you know on the trip we see
Anon is such a good friend. Sanjay is like, why
would you risk your life to help us? And an
On I think, threatens to beat him up for saying this.
He's like, Hey, what are friends for? A friend has
to help you break the curse on your family, even
if that means laying down his own life. Yeah, Meanwhile,
this is funny. Sapna is happy to come along because

(01:01:41):
she is confident that the curse is just Suman's father
having a delusion. So I guess it's just a regular
road trip for her.

Speaker 2 (01:01:47):
Yeah, it has to get out of town.

Speaker 3 (01:01:49):
This married couple. They have extremely different ideas of the
stakes of this this road trip.

Speaker 2 (01:01:54):
Yeah, He's like, I am ready to die and she's like,
I am ready to see the countryside. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:02:09):
Meanwhile, Ron beerre back at home. He has visions of
samary As in his kind of altered beast form and
has a heart attack. He survives, but the doctors say
he must rest, and I think they use this to
explain why he doesn't chase after the youths to stop
them on their quest. Yeah, but then we go into
a part of the movie where basically the four friends
are investigating the different settings. So they go to an

(01:02:32):
old temple. They noticed that the statue in the temple,
which I believe is of Shiva or maybe of Shivshankar
maybe they say later, is missing its trident. And then
you know, so they look around there, they have some
visions of scary things. They drive around and just have

(01:02:53):
encounters with scary people, like they meet a woodcutter who
just freaks them out by smiling at them and holding
an asp X. And then finally they reach the palace
and they explore that and meet Dirjen, the watchman, who
shows them around and tells them sort of the family history,
and they start having repeated freaky reactions to portraits or

(01:03:14):
I guess mainly it's just Suman that does. Like she
sees a portrait of her ancestor and it zooms in
on her eyes and it's knowing.

Speaker 2 (01:03:20):
Whoa whoa whoah whah. Is this the scene where the
eyes follow her? And they do it by having clearly
two separate paintings, one with eyes looking straight ahead and
one with eyes looking off to the side.

Speaker 3 (01:03:31):
Yeah, I loved it. I really like these scenes.

Speaker 2 (01:03:34):
Because we know the viewer knows that behind that painting,
behind the bricked up wall is going to be the
head of Samari sealed up in a box with Trishula
leaned against it to keep it from coming out and
wreaking havoc.

Speaker 3 (01:03:49):
The next day, there's a funny scene where Sopna is
annoyed because Anon won't stop doing workouts and martial arts,
Like he's doing one handed push ups and practicing martial
arts and she's just like, Wow, really really great romantic
vacation you took me on.

Speaker 2 (01:04:06):
Yeah. This is a fun sequence though, because then she
kind of she has the scene where she fantasizes about
him being more into romance and less into personal fitness,
which I thought was pretty fun.

Speaker 3 (01:04:18):
Then oh my, here things start taking a left turn. Well, first,
a bunch of guys from the forest attacks Sopna from
out of nowhere, and then Anon gets to come to
the rescue and beat them all up. And then we
go and meet this bandit commander who's I think giving
the guys in the forest orders. It starts with a
lot of over the top slapstick comedy and then descends

(01:04:40):
into this rivalry between the bandit and a local official
in the village. This is the barely related comedic side
plot that we were discussing earlier, and to be frank,
as many reviewers have mentioned, I found it extremely unpleasant.
I'm not going to make much effort to recount it.
But it's a lot of jokes about like a guy
not having armed and another guy who does sex crimes.

Speaker 2 (01:05:03):
Yeah, that's basically it. And they just keep driving home
these plot points and and it's it's very skippable. I
highly recommend you skip it if you watch this movie.
But but it is. It really throws you off when
you first hit it because when the Bandit's men show up,
they have like like dime store Halloween mask on the
back of their head, and you're just like, what are

(01:05:25):
what is happening? Did I switch channels somehow? This this
is an error on the disk. No, you've just you've
just descended into the comedic subplot. But don't worry. You
will eventually rise out of it. But then you're gonna
fall into it at least one more time, and then
you'll fall out of it again without anything in the
comedic plot ever really impacting the A plot or getting resolved.

Speaker 3 (01:05:46):
Yeah, I mean there's a little bit of interaction like
it does develop to where the Bandit and Anon have
a have a twoco and Blondie plot from The Good,
the Bad, and the Ugly, where like a Noon repeatedly
turns the Bandit in for a bounty and then freeze
him before execution and then does it again to keep
collecting money.

Speaker 2 (01:06:05):
Yeah, and then the whole time you're just like a
non stay out of this subplot. You don't need to
be here to stay in plot A with the rest
of us.

Speaker 3 (01:06:12):
So in this middle section we get some some delivery
of lore from the watchman Dirgin at the palace. He
tells some backstory about the connection between the palace and
the temple.

Speaker 2 (01:06:23):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:06:23):
There are also sections here where it seems like maybe
the heroes kind of lose track of what the road
trip was for, Like instead of furiously hunting down the
body of the evil sorcerer, like Sanjay is fishing for
food and Suman is doing like a couple's photoshoot of
Ann and Sopna.

Speaker 2 (01:06:39):
Mm hmm. Yeah. It's like there's a curse. There's a
deadline here, guys, got we gotta stay on this. Oh.

Speaker 3 (01:06:45):
But in this scene, it starts with a thing where
there's a woman in the water, and at first I thought, oh,
is she a mermaid? But she's like biting fish with
her teeth and then trying to give them to Sanjay.
Uh and I and Suman gets jealous of this woman
because she clearly is into Sanjay and she's like a
beautiful local woman.

Speaker 2 (01:07:03):
I guess, yeah, beautiful local woman that maybe I think
maybe we're supposed to assume that she's kind of a
bad Girl definitely a threat to their romance, but ultimately
we're gonna find out she has a heart of gold,
even if she's kind of like doomed to die. Like
like like other characters in the.

Speaker 3 (01:07:21):
Film, general spooky do ins are afoot. There's Suman has
more freak outs when looking at the portraits. And then
there is the blood shower scene.

Speaker 2 (01:07:29):
Yes, I love this because, first of all, it's the
middle of the night time to take a shower, but
Suman also is gonna take that shower in a swimsuit,
and you just know the way that the cameras zooming
in on the showerhead. I'm like that that water's turned
into blood. There's no way that water's not turned into blood.
And of course the water turns to blood.

Speaker 3 (01:07:48):
I knew exactly what was coming, but it's it's a
pretty fun scene nonetheless. So yeah, she's like then in
the tub, screaming, covered in blood in the swimsuit, and
then Anan and Sanjay run into the rescue and they
like lift her out of the blood tub by her
arms and legs and then put her directly on the
bed and I was thinking, oh, no, you're getting blood
all over the blanket.

Speaker 2 (01:08:10):
That's a white blanket, y'all. Come on.

Speaker 3 (01:08:12):
But then Dirgen comes in to explain that the blood
tub incident proves the curse is real. You know, you've
got to take it seriously now, and I think he says,
you've got to talk to the locals to find out
more about the curse. And then intermission.

Speaker 2 (01:08:26):
Yeah, so setting up basically, like if the story game
of Arkham Harr or something, the research portion of the
adventure where you just got to go around talking to
people and find out how the ancient evil works.

Speaker 3 (01:08:37):
So that comes into play right after the intermission. But
it leads to a lover's quarrel between Suman and Sanjay
because Sanjay goes to talk to one of the local
villagers and who does he pick to talk to, Well,
it just happens to be what's her name Beaeshley, the
beautiful woman who was bathing in the river earlier, and
she's bathing in the river again and he's like, hey,
I need to, you know, talk to you about a

(01:08:57):
curse and she's like, Sanjay, I love you Mary me.

Speaker 2 (01:09:01):
He dead knows no his way around. You're supposed to
go talk to the haunted drunk guy old drunk guy
in the village. He's the one who has the secret
knowledge to share. But now he goes to the attractive
lady from the water that is also offering him drinks.

Speaker 3 (01:09:17):
Yeah, so she takes him back to her house, gives
him some kind of alcoholic beverage, and then he watches
her dance in front of a fire. He's clearly being
romantically tempted. Suman is jealous and heartbroken, and she sings
there's another musical number. She sings a forlorn song. I
was wondering, did you detect this song? Maybe cutting off
before the song was finished or I don't know. It

(01:09:39):
seemed like something was missing. It ended rather abruptly.

Speaker 2 (01:09:43):
I didn't notice that I'd have to go back and
the look.

Speaker 3 (01:09:45):
Maybe I'm wrong, But anyway, after Sanjay finds out some
more lore from the villagers, he returns to Suman and
they reconcile.

Speaker 2 (01:09:53):
Their love is tested, but remain strong.

Speaker 3 (01:09:55):
Yes. Now, later that night, Suman is sleeping and then
there's a cat scare, Like literally, somebody throws a cat
at her, just jumps on her bed, and she like
screams and wakes up, and she's in a kind of oh,
kind of a daze wandering around, and then she ends
up stabbing the portrait of Hariman Singh that's on the wall,

(01:10:16):
and after this, Anon realizes he looks up at the
wall and realizes she stabbed through the wall behind the
portrait as well. And then Anon and Sanjay bust down
the wall. They investigate the secret passageway within. This is
the scene where I mentioned there's some really cool kind
of rubbery synth music. There's some cool bits, like Anon
gets a snake attack to the neck. A snake wraps

(01:10:38):
itself around his neck and they have to fight it off.
But then they find the trishula. They find the trident
of Shiva on top of the trunk, wrapped in chains.
They bust it open. Inside they find the severed head,
and Sanjay concludes that it must be the head of
some brave soldier and it must be there out of respect.

Speaker 2 (01:10:58):
Oh, Sanjay couldn't be more wrong.

Speaker 3 (01:11:00):
Bad decision. Yeah, But then there's like, so the woodcutter
from earlier is looking on and he decides he sees
the box and he thinks it's full of treasure and
he wants treasure. So he comes back in the middle
of the night to get treasure, and instead the head
hypnotizes him and turns his eyes into ping pong balls
and makes him attack people.

Speaker 2 (01:11:21):
The ping pong bong eyes were pretty hilarious, and I
don't think they were meant to be hilarious, but they're
also out of keeping with what they did with other
people's possessed eyes, Like they did some sort of like
contact effect I guess with everyone else, but this guy
got ping pong eyes. Yeah, and it's a questionable choice.

Speaker 3 (01:11:40):
Like Rupauli's eyes were creepy looking, they like they turned white,
but they were you know, yeah, so those were different.
He just has like they're like bulging and they look
like plastic.

Speaker 2 (01:11:51):
Yeah, they're like, we couldn't get a hold of our
contact guy for today. What else we got? What's the
backup effect? It's ping pong balls.

Speaker 3 (01:11:59):
This leads to a great chase scene that I loved.
So it's the It's like a horse drawn carriage with
driven by the woodcutter carrying the wizard head in the carriage,
riding through the forest at night, and then Sanjay in
an ond in a red convertible chasing after it. So
it's machine versus horse.

Speaker 2 (01:12:19):
It's great. But then they are also supernatural environmental effects
that come into play as well.

Speaker 3 (01:12:25):
That's all right, So like the Sorcerer's head I think
causes a tree to fall down and block their path
as they pursue the head, so they can't keep up
with it. Meanwhile, something happens in here where Dershon hangs
the trisula up on the chandelier.

Speaker 2 (01:12:39):
Yeah, unsure why. He's kind of like, I got to
hide this away for later so that it can play
a dynamic role in the showdown or something. Yeah, it's
the only logic that makes sense.

Speaker 3 (01:12:50):
So the hypnotized woodcutter like digs up Samri's body. I
guess he knows where it is because the head has
hypnotized him. Then he grabs the head. He puts the
head on the body. He poked himself with a dagger
and bleeds on the next stump, and this kind of
glues the head back on and then Sammary wakes up
and now it's it's clubber and time.

Speaker 2 (01:13:09):
That's right, it is on. Body and head are back
together again. His body. At this point, like I alluded
to earlier, it's the evil is just completely manifest. It's
it's now this hairy demonic sasquatch Frankenstein creature that that
ultimately really works. Like the way I'm describing it makes

(01:13:30):
it sound like it's kind of patchwork and and maybe
you know, can't decide what it wants to be. But no,
whatever it is, it is, it totally succeeds as being that.
It's just this, This is evil incarnate.

Speaker 3 (01:13:42):
Samary is wickedness and malevol I'd say he's bad. Hey, everybody,
we just had to take a quick break. But we
we're back now. So if we sound different, that's why.
But we we're finishing the episode. So uh yeah, the
plot is kind of in monster mode right now. This
is when the Frankenstein starts shambling around, grunting, looming and

(01:14:04):
killing people.

Speaker 2 (01:14:06):
Yeah, Samri has returned, has full body again, has great
lights and effects and scynth backing him up. So it's
just terrifying anytime he's on the screen. He's not interested
in reasoning with anybody or negotiating. He is here too
in dynasties. He doesn't care what has happened in the
world over the past few centuries. He has a pretty

(01:14:27):
straightforward agenda.

Speaker 3 (01:14:28):
Oh I didn't even think about that, Like he hasn't
been around, so he doesn't know about the moon landing
or anything. Okay, so yeah, he's killing people. Unfortunately, he
makes Sopna jump off the roof of the palace to
her death. Bummer. I like Sopna. And then Anon is
obviously very upset about this, so he like runs up

(01:14:49):
to the roof of the palace to fight him, but
Samri is gone. And from here there is a blood
sacrifice subplot. The villagers decide they want to do a
human sack refice of Sanjay and Suman in order to
appease the monster and save themselves. And here we get
a human sacrifice musical number, which I liked quite a lot.

Speaker 2 (01:15:10):
Yeah, this one is good. I believe they're they're looking
to sacrifice to Klie and it looks it looks like
our heroes might be might be doomed once more. But
someone comes to save them right in the naked time.

Speaker 3 (01:15:23):
Right, so they're like tied up awaiting death, and you know,
the drums kick in and then suddenly here's this lady
from earlier. The one is her name Beachley, I think
the one who was in love with Sanjay, like he
went to her house earlier. And she's dancing around singing
this very jolly, upbeat song about how the man she
loved is unfortunately going to have his blood spilled and

(01:15:46):
she doesn't want that. And then there's a string of reversals.
So first of all, she comes to save the day
because she cuts Sonjay free and says she loves him
and tries to let him free, but then he gets
caught by the mind. But then her brother, who is
sort of the guy leading the mob, says that he
will still kill Suman unless Sanjay beats him in a

(01:16:08):
sword fight. And then they get out there they're fencing
swords and they fence for a bit. The sword fight
is okay, it's not really on the level of an
On's martial arts scenes. And then at the end of
the sword fight, Sanjay sort of wins, but the brother
tries to throw a dagger at Sanjay's back to kill him,

(01:16:28):
but yet again, the sister who loves Sanjay intervenes. She
steps in front of the dagger and takes it for
him and dies.

Speaker 2 (01:16:36):
Oh no, yeah, bad girl with a good heart redeems
herself through death. I also like that the sword fight,
like you say, is very different from anything we've seen
in the film up to that point, and it feels like,
once again, this is the little something for everybody going
on where it's like we need to have a traditional
swashbuckling act in the picture, and this is the place
to situate it.

Speaker 3 (01:16:56):
Yeah, it makes sense. So anyway, Sanjay and Suman run away,
the mob searches after them. You know, there's kind of
a lot of running around and hiding and chasing in
the woods, and then here comes another Anon fight. He
is Anon is captured by the leader of the mob
and then they there's some fighting and On lets out

(01:17:17):
some really weird martial arts moves in this fight, Like
there's one where I think he steps on a guy's head.
It's kind of gross.

Speaker 2 (01:17:24):
Well, he's just completely powered up with vengeance at this point,
like he's more lethal.

Speaker 3 (01:17:28):
Than ever, right, and so he's yeah, he's angered by
the death of his wife. He is motivated by defending
his friends. So he's fighting super hard and there's there's
a really awesome moment where the leader of the mob
tries to stab him with a dagger, but Anon grabs
the dagger by the blade and disarms him.

Speaker 2 (01:17:48):
Excellent. He just cannot be stopped at this point.

Speaker 3 (01:17:51):
But unfortunately, even though Anon prevails in this fight, there
is immediately more peril. So Sanjay and Suman are chased
in the dark by some the demon, and Anon comes
to rescue them. He ends up giving his life so
that they can escape, just like he said he would earlier.
So a true friend to the end. SAMRII kind of

(01:18:11):
strangles him, I think, and then his eyes turn white.

Speaker 2 (01:18:15):
So now it's just our two lovers pursued by the
demon Somri.

Speaker 3 (01:18:19):
But an earlier character returns, so Suman's dad is back
on the scene and he shows up. He's like better
from my heart attack. Now there is only one person
who can beat Samri, and that is Lord Shiva. So
cut to another musical number. Now Ron Deer is singing
to an altar of Shiva, or I think they were

(01:18:40):
also calling this god Shiv Shankar, which I'm not sure,
but maybe like a manifestation of Shiva, maybe like Shiva
the destroyer of evil. Perhaps I'm not sure.

Speaker 2 (01:18:50):
At any rate, this seems like the right call. Get
Shiva and on this that then we're dealing with a
pretty powerful supernatural evil force here. We're going to need
just a little bit of help.

Speaker 3 (01:19:00):
Right, praying for the God's help, and we get cutaways
to the surviving characters, but then also cutaways to like
a bloody sheet which is presumably covering up the dead
body of an odd Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:19:10):
Yeah, and I have to say on paper, are just
us describing this. You might question whether it makes sense
to throw in a religious musical number this late in
the film, building up to the final showdown with the monster.
But I thought it it would work. I thought it
really worked because the musical number itself has this way
of kind of revving up and has this kind of
rhythmic quality to it kind of works the people in

(01:19:33):
the scene into a frenzy, you know, to unleash our
would be monster slayers, and you feel a little pumped up.
You're like, let's do this, let's let's finish this up,
Let's let's get somri.

Speaker 3 (01:19:43):
Absolutely, I mean as I said again, I mean this unironically.
I fully encourage more filmmakers to make horror movies that
are seriously scary but also have musical numbers. I think
that's a great idea.

Speaker 2 (01:19:54):
Also, it's probably a good way to overpower some of
our traditional Western movie villains like Jason vorhees how he
can react to full blown musical numbers. He's not going
to know it's him. This is better than like psychic powers.

Speaker 3 (01:20:06):
I would love that. Yeah, fully, like a religious musical
number before somebody goes up against Jason, where they're they're
like invoking the power of Christ.

Speaker 2 (01:20:18):
You know, we had something kind of similar without the
music in the Devil Rides out right. They basically have
a Sunday school lesson before the big confrontation, just to
set everything right.

Speaker 3 (01:20:30):
We should mention by the way that the lyrics of
the song point out the like remind the audience that
the statue of Shiva is missing its trident, and this
gives Sonjay the idea that the way to destroy the
monster is to use the trisula, which is which again
was hidden. It was in the hidden passage behind the
painting on top of the trunk that had the head

(01:20:51):
in it. And so Sanjay and Suman go looking for
the trident. So there's a bunch of more scares. They're
like looking around in the palace and they are screamed
at by taxidermied animals and Samar appears. He chases them around.
He is about to in the very last moment, hypnotize
and vamp Souman. But then Sanjay sees that the trisula

(01:21:14):
is hidden in the chandelier and he wields it. He
drives Samri into his coffin and they trap him inside
with the power of the trident, and then the villagers
come collect the coffin, take it to the village square.
Then they tie Samary to the steak and burn him
huge burning fire and the demon is vanquished.

Speaker 2 (01:21:33):
Yeah, they just they burn him up, and Dad's there
pumping his fist in the air. The monster burns. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:21:40):
In the end, Rondvier accepts Sanjay because now the threat
to his daughter's life has passed. So he says, I'm
proud of you, son. You destroyed the curse that haunted
my family for two hundred years. And then this is
one of those cases where he says something that he
just said again but in English, so he says in English,
I'm really proud of you, my son.

Speaker 2 (01:22:00):
Such it's not such a sweet ending, you know. Granted,
a lot of people died to get us here, but
it's getting back into like just the straight family melodrama
aspect of it. It's a nice place to end things.

Speaker 3 (01:22:13):
Yeah, so Sonjay and Suman, we see them married and
then it ends very abruptly. I was kind of thinking
there would be an ending music number, you know, but
there was not, or am I remembering right? Was there?
I don't think there was.

Speaker 2 (01:22:26):
I don't think there was a full on musical number
to end it out. It was just kind of like
we end on more of a traditional note where Good
is victorious and they kind of get a nice snapshot
of everyone together and then we close it out.

Speaker 3 (01:22:39):
So all in all, I greatly enjoyed Piranhamunder Again. A
great love story, great evil wizard, good good family, melodrama
and stuff. Love the musical numbers, comedy segments awful, martial
arts awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:22:55):
Yeah, and then of course the monster is amazing. So
all in all, I feel like this was a pretty
solid entry into Bollywood horror. So who knows, May I
have to do some more research. Maybe at some point
in the future we'll come back and do another Ramsey
Brothers film. There's also blinking on his name at the moment.
But there was another like top tier competitor to them

(01:23:17):
that put out a number of movies as well, and
some of those looked interesting, so who knows it's either way.
I'm glad we got to dive in to the cinema
of India here on Weird House Cinema. And once again,
if you want to get into into some of this,
I have to point out there's an Instagram account for
Bollywood crypt and that was one of the first places
I started looking around. I found that account, and I

(01:23:39):
was seeing what this account was sharing related to Bollywood
horror and kind of getting a taste for what seemed
to be important. And then from there I found out
about this awesome Blu ray set that's out from Mondo Macabro.
I recommend checking that out. And if you're in Atlanta,
like I said, you can go to videodrom and rent
some of these bad boys. They just got them on

(01:24:01):
the shelf. All right, we're going to close the book here,
but we'd love to hear from you out there again.
If you have experience with Bollywood cinema in general, Bollywood
horror specifically, or you know particular memories or things to
share about Piranha Mandir, let us know we would love
to hear from you. In the meantime, we'll also remind

(01:24:22):
you that stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a
science podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On
Mondays we do listener mail. On Wednesdays we do short
form artifactor or monster Fact episode, and on Fridays we
set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a
weird film on Weird House Cinema. You can look us
up on letterbox best L E T T E R
box d dot com. We have an account there called

(01:24:42):
weird House and we have a nice list of all
the movies we've covered over the years. You can pull
them up and you can also organize them anyway. This
is how I was able to really quickly see what
is the longest film we've ever covered and what is
the shortest? Without a doubt, Piranha Mandir is the longest,
but only beats out Blade by twenty minutes.

Speaker 3 (01:25:01):
All right, huge thanks to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:25:23):
Stuff to Blow your Mind is production of iHeartRadio for
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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