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Thursday, March 27, 2008Tahalka Release Year: 1992Country: India Starring: Dharmendra, Amrish Puri, Mukesh Khanna, Javed Jaffrey, Ekta Kapoor, Aditya Pancholi, Naseeruddin Shah, Prem Chopra, Sonu Walia, Pallavi Joshi, Shammi Kappor, Shikha Swaroop, Bob Christo Director: Anil Sharma Writers: Bimla Sharma, Shyam Goel Cinematographer: Anil Dhanda Music: Anu Malik Producer: K.C. Sharma The lines between good and evil in Bollywood movies tend to be pretty broadly drawn, but never so broadly, it seems, as when the great Amrish Puri was cast as the villain. Deep of the voice, wild of the eye, and massive of the brow, Puri, though a versatile actor who played many diverse roles in his four decade career, truly made his mark with his portrayals of over-the-top bad guys in countless Bollywood action and masala movies (And yes, yes, I know...as Mola Ram in that Indiana Jones movie. Give it a rest, for chrissakes!). Many of these portrayals were iconic, but, while Puri would star in nearly four hundred films by the time of his death in 2005, there is one film for which he is remembered most of all. Tahalka, however, is not that film. In fact, judging by the paucity of information I encountered when trying to glean such simple facts about the film as the year in which it was made, I get the impression that nobody much remembers Tahalka at all. About an equal number of sites list its release date as either 1982 or 1992, and also spell it's name variably as "Tahalka" or "Tehelka". A couple of filmographies for Puri actually list both a "Tahalka" for 1982 and a "Tehelka" for 1992, though I'm pretty sure that those are both references to the same film. Given this, I think it's safe to say that Tahalka--or whatever it's called--is not held in the same fond regard as certain other of its stars' cinematic vessels.     As for when Tahalka was made, I think it's pretty safe to go with 1992. For one thing, Dharmendra looks really old in this movie. Furthermore, the film's songs--written by Anu Malik--are terrible in that distinctly early 90s Bollywood way, filled with clunky dance rhythms and people shouting out random English phrases like they were Japanese magazine covers with Tourette's Syndrome. (I'm talking Karisma Kapoor terrible, people.) But what nails down Tahalka's vintage most of all is how it so clearly post-dates the 1987 film Mr. India, a fact evidenced by how obviously the filmmakers intended for Puri's character, General Dong, to echo his iconic portrayal of the super villain Mogambo in that earlier film, right down to the endlessly repeated catchphrase. But, this issue aside, what is it about Tahalka that has relegated it to such forgotten status? What could be so wrong with a film--one of a not all that distant vintage and featuring fairly bankable stars--that the record of it could become so murky in the scant intervening years? Perhaps to find out, what we need to do is listen to Tahalka, and by that means let the film itself tell us exactly where the problem lies.     The disclaimers at the beginning of Bollywood movies, which are often in English, are things of beauty in themselves, and they're something that I've only recently learned to pay attention to. Rather than being generic boilerplate drawn up by a team of faceless lawyers, they tend to be a kind of freeform verse that gives us a fascinating window into the psyche of the filmmakers. One of my favorites is the one that precedes Papi Gudia, the 1996 remake of the Hollywood film Child's Play, which states that the movie's intention is to warn children "against blind faith or surrender to alien things be it a doll or computer toys, robots, etc." In the case of Tahalka, the precredits disclaimer reads: "The Story of this feature film 'Tahalka' is imaginary and unfolds in the imaginary environment of imaginary countries. It has nothing to do with India or any other country or their inhabitants, governments, defense forces, or their existing facts and realities." Now, that all seems pretty comprehensive, but apparently out of a feeling that not quite a fine enough point has been put on things, the disclaimer continues: "It is reiterated that all the characters, incidents, places and environments are fictitious and have no relationship what so ever with any person living or dead. If any resemblance to any character or incident appears at any stage, it is just a coincidence."     This conspicuous abundance of caution might alert the canny reader to the possibility that Tahalka's chatty disclaimer might not be entirely on the level. I mean, to paraphrase Shakespeare, could Tahalka hath possibly protested any more? And are we seriously meant to accept that what is depicted in a film made in India by, presumably, inhabitants of India, only bears a resemblance to India and its inhabitants as the result of coincidence, if at all? One gets the sense that Tahalka has something to hide, and perhaps we might get a clue as to what that something might be once the movie proper has started. Tahalka proper starts with a panoramic view of the Himalayas, over which a narrator intones that these are the borders of "the nation that the world calls India". After this a map appears on the screen depicting India, Pakistan and China, with each country clearly labeled, over which the narrator states that beyond these borders lie those countries "whose greed penetrates into ours and crosses its limits", whose inhabitants "wish to color the ground of India red with the blood of Indians themselves and shatter India into a million pieces".     Incendiary talk, for sure. But don't get the wrong idea, because--even though it isn't shown on the map that's being displayed on screen--the country that the narrator is talking about isn't China or Pakistan, but rather the completely made up country of Dongrila. And as we are shown the sights of Dongrila--consisting mostly of crude models of vaguely orientalist structures situated on snowy model train-set peaks, interspersed with footage of a Buddhist monk strolling down a village street--the narrator tells us that Dongrila was once "made prosperous by India itself, nurtured and nourished". Now, however, this remote mountain paradise has fallen into the hands of a brutal dictator, the man known as General Dong. Now, it's not difficult to figure out where all of this is coming from. After all, the late eighties and early nineties were another period during which tensions between China and India were at close to a full boil--fueled in part by the Chinese government's perception of India as interfering in their affairs in Tibet--and the looming potential for renewed clashes along the countries' disputed border region, such as had been seen as recently as 1986, was a daily reality. However, that this is so obviously the scab that Tahalka is trying to pick--and with such rhetorical ferocity, to boot--makes it a little harder to understand the eleventh hour backpedalling that the opening disclaimer seems to be evidence of.     If it was, in fact, the film's director, Anil Sharma, who was reticent about casting stones at China directly, he'd gotten over such circumspection by the time of finally having his first box office success with 2001's Gadar: Ek Prem Katha. That film caused considerable public outcry with its perceived anti-Muslim and anti-Pakistani sentiments--sentiments that were delivered without resort to fanciful pseudonyms or references to imaginary lands. Whatever the case, though, if the makers of Tahalka were trying to exploit what they saw as some deep sense of national injury on the part of their potential audience, they failed miserably, because the inhabitants of India apparently stayed away from the film in droves. Anyway, once Tahalka has established itself as being annoyingly passive-aggressive, it proceeds with an opening sequence that is very similar to Mr. India's, featuring an anxious minion of General Dong's rushing to have an audience with the fearsome general himself. After that minion, Major D'Costa (Sunil Dhawan), is hurried--amid much Hitler saluting and shouting of "Long live Dong!"--through various checkpoints, and down a number of long, heavily guarded corridors, he is finally ushered into Dong's palatial inner sanctum, where. with the portentous striking of a gong, we finally get a look at our already much ballyhooed villain.     And what a villain is our General Dong. Establishing the Mogambo connection right off the bat, Puri is both bethroned and bedecked in a fanciful military uniform, and also comes with a numbingly repeated catchphrase: "Dong is never wrong". But in a departure from his obvious model, Dong also boasts a look in which no signifier of orientalist treachery is spared: the puttied eyelids, the Fu Manchu 'stache and goatee, the long braid, and, just in case you didn't get it, stretching across his bald pate, a tattoo of a Chinese dragon. Though Puri's booming basso profundo was one of his trademarks, when we finally hear him speak as Dong, he does so with a squeaky "ah so" Chinaman voice, peppering his utterances with fits of high pitched giggling. That is, except for those random scenes in which Puri just talks in the deep, threatening tones of Mogambo--indicating that, at some point during filming, a switch was decided upon. Oh, you sloppy, sloppy Tahalka! But we don't actually get to hear Dong speak at first, for it is at this point that the moment which makes Tahalka worth its price of admission occurs. Rather than greeting us, as he normally would, with a richly intoned declaration of villainous intent, Amrish Puri stands... and begins to sing. (And check the playback singers credits; that really is him singing.) And then he dances--not just a half-hearted little jig or two-step, mind you, but honest to God, hip-thrusting, fist-pumping getting down, with an array of swirling, scantily clad back-up dancers to goad him on. To top it all off, Amrish grabs a sitar mid-number and rocks it like Eddie Van Halen.     Of course, the "song" that Dong/Amrish sings can only be called such by the loosest standards, because the lyrics consist only of the word "shom" repeated over and over again. This, completing the odiousness of the portrait that's being painted, is apparently meant as a mockery of the Buddhist chant "om"--assuring us once and for all that Tahalka's makers will stop at nothing, and in turn causing us to anticipate with resignation the moment when Dong will pee in someone's Coke. With the "Shom Shom" song out of the way, Dong gets down to villainy. The unfortunate General D'Costa, we learn, has just returned from leading a failed incursion which resulted in two thousand of Dong's troops dying at the hands of India's defense forces. As punishment, Dong orders D'Costa to perform ritual suicide in the city square in front of all of Dongrila's citizens. But first we get a tour of Dong's suicide bomber farm; this consists of a dank dungeon in which captive young girls, hypnotized into submission by Dong, spend their waking hours walking in dazed circles while chained to a big rock, waiting for the day when they will be called upon to don a bomb belt and die for the greater glory of Dong. Then, with D'Costa dispatched, Dong sets about planning his revenge against India. Not one to delegate a matter of such importance, Dong accomplishes this task personally with the aid of several "duplicate Dongs", who distract security while the real Dong hijacks a tank at an Indian military parade and blows up the general responsible for the Indian counter-attack.     With this, India's defense forces decide that they have had it up to here with General Dong, and it is decided that a commando unit will be sent into Dongrila to eliminate him in a top secret, surgical strike. The bearded and intense Major Rao (Mukesh Khanna) is eager to lead this operation, because he has a quite understandable beef with Dong. A year earlier, while on a fishing trip with his young daughter, he stumbled upon an island that Dong operated as a sort of processing center for the kidnapped Indian schoolgirls destined to become his suicide bombers and sex slaves. Rao managed to aid some of those girls in escaping, but in the process Dong took his daughter captive. To taunt Rao, Dong gave him a year to come back for his daughter, after which he would, um, turn her out--then cut off Rao's leg with a sword and cast him off to sea. Rao is now so eager to go after Dong that he already has a whole plan drawn up, and a hand-picked crew of elite commandos to go with him. But forget elite, what we want to know about those commandos is: are they wacky? And the answer, sickeningly, is yes, with a capital wack. At this point we are introduced to Rao's three male commandos (Aditya Pancholi, Naseeruddin Shah, and Javed Jaffrey) in a series of scenes in which they try to hit on girls by indulging in some of the most spine-chilling instances of male cross-dressing ever committed to film, and then by pretending to be blind. Their dickishness firmly established, we follow the gang as they are introduced to the team's fifth member, Capt. Anju Sinha (Ekta Kapoor). And she's a guh.. a guh.. a girl! Still, the team is not yet complete, for a sixth is needed, despite the fact that everyone keeps referring to the group as "Force Five" (not to be confused with the Americanized Go Nagai cartoon series of the same name--which doesn't really need to be pointed out except to underscore what a complete nerd I am).     Because the territory surrounding Dongrila is dangerous and valley-ridden--and in fact includes a region called "Danger Valley" (which I'm pretty sure is made up)--a veteran with combat experience in the region is needed. Such a man is disgraced former army Major Dharam Singh, who is played by, as I alluded to earlier, a very old and tired-looking Dharmendra. Of course, Dharam Singh was only court marshaled because he was a patriotic super soldier who disobeyed orders in order to save thousands of Indian lives, and he's understandably bitter about it. Getting him to sign on for this mission will take much convincing and passionate appeals to his patriotism, and so the team heads off to Bangkok, where Dharam Singh is living easy--though not so easy that he can't take part in an elaborate night club number where he sings about "Rocking Around the Clock" while shimmying laboriously with a bunch of Thai chorus girls. I won't tell you what happens next, because I don't want to spoil it, but suffice it to say that Dharam Singh eventually agrees to join the mission... Oh, there, I just spoiled it. Anyway, soon the team of six are trekking out across the icy, mountainous landscape, encountering many dangers along the way, including an underground cavern filled with crabs and snakes. (There's a lot that I don't know about zoology, and I'll have to add the Himalayan Cave-Dwelling Snow Crab to that list.) Finally they manage to cross into Dongrila, though not without having to survive many skirmishes with Dong's forces (which include Bob Christo! Yay!). After defending themselves by throwing wasp's nests at the enemy and tricking them into drinking their piss, Force Five finally makes it's way to a safe house operated by a small band of resistance fighters lead by Prince Kao (Prem Chopra, wearing a hat that has little corks dangling from its brim).     Though Major Rau is the leader of the commandos, he also proves to be their greatest liability, thanks to the fact that his prosthetic leg just doesn't want to stay attached to his body. This leads to a scene in which Rau must flee from General Dong's advancing ski troops by skiing on one leg, using his pole with one hand and carrying his prosthetic leg--with the ski still attached to it--in the other. Eventually Rau's stump becomes gangrenous, which means that Force Five must sneak their way into Dongrila's only hospital, located deep within the heavily guarded central city. This may represent the only instance in the history of Bollywood that such an incursion is not accomplished by means of the commandos disguising themselves as a dance troupe. Rather, the soldiers commandeer a truck and costumes belonging to a troupe of Laurel & Hardy impersonators. Now, I have not seen Where Eagles Dare, but I realize that it is a film to which Tahalka owes a considerable debt. Still I'm guessing that there isn't a scene in Where Eagle's Dare in which Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood dress up like Laurel & Hardy and sing a song based on "Old MacDonald". I'm just guessing, of course. Many of Tahalka's exteriors and larger scale action sequences are accomplished by means of some particularly dodgy model work, which means that portions of Tahalka look like an especially half-assed episode of Thunderbirds. In fact, there is a model of a cable car line spanning a mountainous valley that looks suspiciously like the one used in Commando; so if you've seen Commando, you know what I'm talking about. Unfortunately, Tahalka misses the opportunity to have someone have a fight with Amrish Puri while dangling from that cable car, which means that Tahalka loses out to Commando on the awesomeness scale by a wide mark.     One convention of 1980s Hollywood action movies that Bollywood embraced wholeheartedly--and it's one that I think is as much inherited from slasher movies as it is an aspect of action movies' function as an exorcist of national demons--is the idea that vengeance cannot be achieved unless we see the villain completely physically obliterated. It's never enough just to shoot the guy; we also have to see him fall off the top of a skyscraper on fire with a hand grenade in his mouth before we can truly feel that justice has been served. Following this tradition, once our heroes have caught up with Dong, Tahalka serves up a long climactic scene in which all of the remaining cast members take turns kicking him repeatedly in the chest--to the accompaniment of that car door slamming noise that always accompanies people kicking somebody in the chest in Bollywood movies--before Dharmendra lifts Dong's broken body above his head and hurls it into a raging fire. These scenes of brutality in Bollywood movies of this vintage always get to me for some reason--partially because they stand out so much from the affable frivolity of much of what surrounds them, but also because, for all their righteous patriotic rage, they present an image of an India that has a gigantic chip on it's shoulder. I have to believe that this is an inaccurate representation, because, otherwise, everyone in the country would be too busy shouting defiant proclamations and firing rocket launchers across their borders for that whole economic miracle thing to have happened in the first place. In the case of Tahalka, what also strikes me is that--just as with the very similar climax of Mr. India--the somewhat elderly Amrish Puri doesn't seem to be using a stunt double while most of this kicking, beating and tossing is taking place. The man is a consummate professional.     And given that he is such a professional, I can't help being a little miffed on Puri's behalf at Tahalka's makers. It's much like the feeling I get watching Lee Van Cleef in the awful Captain Apache; The filmmakers in that case knew that they were working with an actor who would, out of a disciplined professional ethic, do whatever was asked of him, even if that involved croaking out an awful, psychedelic-tinged theme tune and letting people call him "red ass" all the time. That those filmmakers then went ahead and asked Van Cleef to do just that seems like something on the level of abuse, and the same goes for Anil Sharma and company in Puri's case. Puri once said that the reason he didn't pursue further roles in Hollywood films after his turn as Mola Ram was that he didn't like the way that Indians were portrayed in those films. Given that--in addition to reports that Puri, despite his screen persona, was a kindly and gentle man--I'd like to believe that the portrayal of General Dong was not something that he could entirely get behind, and that he undertook it only out of a humble dedication to the practice of his chosen craft. So, in the final tally, singing and dancing Amrish or no, it's difficult to get past the fact that Tahalka is a furiously awful film. Of course, that's mitigated somewhat by all the hate-mongering-- Oh, wait, that doesn't really mitigate things at all, does it? Nope. Tahalka just sucks from top to bottom. Still, it's nice how a derivative film can make you appreciate anew that from which it steals, and Tahalka definitely spurred me to new levels of admiration for the sure-handed direction and comparably high production values of Mr. India, even though Mr. India is one of the goofiest, cheesiest things I've ever seen.     This is not to say that I don't recommend Tahalka, of course. It certainly contains enough retarded insanity and cheapjack spectacle to keep you moderately engaged for the majority of its three hours, even if it does leave you feeling a little soiled. For that reason I'd suggest that, if you do decide to invest your time in it, you do so as a tribute to the late, great Mr. Puri, because that's an act which would almost make Tahalka seem worthwhile. Labels: Action, Bollywood, Stars: Amrish Puri, Stars: Dharmendra, Year: 1992 posted by Todd at 7:28 PM | 0 Comments Wednesday, March 05, 2008Dharam-Veer Release Year: 1977Country: India Starring: Dharmendra, Zeenat Aman, Jeetendra, Neetu Singh, Pran, Sheroo the Wonder Bird, Jeevan, Indrani Mukherjee, Dev Kumar, Azad, Ranjeet Writers: J.M. Desai, Kader Khan, K.B. Pathak, Prayag Raj, Pushpa Sharma Director: Manmohan Desai Cinematographer: N.V. Srinivas Music: Laxmikant Shantaram Kudalkar, Pyarelal Ramprasad Sharma (Laxmikant-Pyarelal) Producer: Chandan Desai, Subhash Desai, Chandrika G. Shah Once you're done with the knowledge-based cherry picking, there are a wide variety of factors that come into play in deciding which are the potential gems among the selection of five dollar Bollywood dvds at your local Indian grocer or favorite online vendor. Familiar names or faces in the cast or crew of a film are always helpful, but there are also certain thematic or conceptual lures that might serve to tip the scales. In the case of Dharam-Veer, for instance, it certainly didn't hurt that the cast included the stunning Zeenat Aman--and while its male lead, Dharmendra, isn't one of my favorite actors, I do harbor a lot of good will toward him thanks to his co-starring role--with Amitabh Bachchan--in the classic Sholay, as well as his appearance in other highly enjoyable films such as Ankhen and Alibaba aur 40 Chor. But what really closed the deal for me with Dharam-Veer was the fact that its action was described as taking place in a vaguely mediaeval "mythical kingdom". This aroused in me fevered hopes that Dharam-Veer would be some kind of mind-boggling ahistorical period piece--something, in other words, along the lines of Mard, the 1985 classic whose depiction of hero Amitabh Bachchan's battle against the British Raj managed to include MTV-inspired eighties fashions, gladiator battles, and women in frilly Victorian garb strapped to the front of Sherman tanks. These hopes of mine would have been even more fevered had I realized at the time that Dharam-Veer's director, Manmohan Desai, was also Mard's director. And, though my expectations would have no doubt bloated accordingly, I probably still would have come away from Dharam-Veer satisfied. The mythical land of the film's setting is indeed a gumbo of anachronisms--a greedy mash-up of mediaeval Europe, ancient Rome, and the 1001 Arabian nights that also manages to contain, along with its jousting matches and Roman chariots, gypsies, pirates and a climactic battle at sea involving canons--which I'm fairly sure had yet to be invented in the respective eras of King Arthur, Caesar and Scheherazade. This freedom from the constraints of history not only emboldens Dharam-Veer's art direction, but also allows its costumers to follow their muse wherever it may take them, a creative liberation that results in such singular sights as Zeenat Aman's Mediaeval gauchos and black nylons, black leather assemblages that put the "glad" in gladiator, and Jeetendra in some almost indescribably flamboyant flamenco dancer outfits (and, in those instances where the reach of the clothiers' imaginations exceeds that of their budget, baggy white long johns to fill the gaps).     I want to describe Dharam-Veer as a visual feast, but it's actually something less nutritionally balanced than a feast--more like a visual raid on the candy jar, given the candy jar is mostly full of Neco Wafers, Jolly Ranchers and Zots. The costumers render their otherworldly creations in a splashy comic book palette that, combined with the preponderance of brightly painted cardboard in the sets and backdrops, makes Dharam-Veer look like Prince Valiant by way of Flash Gordon by way of the Classics Illustrated version of Ben Hur. And, fittingly, all of this riotous display is in service of the type of over-heated, coincidence-dependent, improbably convoluted and cheerfully chaotic plot that seems to have been the exclusive territory of 1970s masala films. Whatever food metaphor you choose for the experience, you're bound to come away from it engorged - and, if you bring the right attitude to it, you'll be giddily satisfied as well. Dharam-Veer was one of four successful films directed by Manmohan Desai that were released during 1977, all of which dealt with the enduring Bollywood "lost and found"--or "separated at birth"--theme. The most successful of these was the blockbuster Amar Akbar Anthony, which starred Amitabh Bachchan, Vinod Khanna and Rishi Kapoor as brothers who grow up separately, unaware of one another's' existence--one raised as Hindu, another Muslim, and another Christian--ultimately to be united in vengeance against the man responsible for shattering their family. Following this model, Dharam-Veer opens with a complex shuffling of the familial deck. Interestingly, however, thanks to a chain of coincidences, all of these elements manage to fall back into their proper place over the course of the film, and the final dramatic revelation simply reveals that everything is pretty much as it should be, despite it not seeming that way.     As the film opens, a line of young noblemen are presenting the King with marriage offers--as in of jewels and other forms of valuable exchange--for his daughter, the Princess Meenakshi (Indrani Mukherjee) . The Princess, however, is unable to witness this touching spectacle, because she--headstrong, independent girl that she is--is off in the wilds hunting tigers. Unfortunately for Meenakshi, a gang of thugs hired by her brother, Satval Singh (Jeevan), is also on the hunt... for Meenakshi. Satval Singh has been told by a seer that he will die at the hands of his firstborn nephew, and so has decided to cut off the whole nephew-birthing business at its source by having the Princess killed. Fortunately, Jwala Singh (the mighty Pran), a proud hunter who, we later learn, is "well versed in the ways of the Samurai" and who has at his side a super intelligent falcon, Sheroo (played, according to the credits, by Sheroo The Wonder Bird), happens upon the scene and rescues Meenakshi from her attackers. The grateful Meenakshi promises Jwala Singh anything he wants as a reward for saving her life, and Jwala Singh asks that she become his wife. Immediately. Proving that she is truly a woman of her word, she agrees, and the two are married in a ceremony that Jwala Singh performs himself. Sadly, Jwala Singh and Meenakshi's first night of marital bliss is interrupted when one of the tigers Meenakshi had been hunting shows up at their door looking for some payback. Jwala Singh takes off in pursuit of the animal and on his way comes across a local whom the tiger has fatally mauled. Covering the corpse with his own cloak, he continues on and is soon locked in a death struggle with the enraged beastie. Meenakshi, meanwhile, wanders out after Jwala Singh and, seeing the dead body wrapped in his cloak, doesn't bother to go in for a closer look before jumping to conclusions and plunging into a deep state of shock. Meenakshi is eventually discovered and returned to the castle, where she remains in a wordless trance. Even so, the King still needs to get her married off. So when a nobleman with suitably diminished expectations comes courting, the deed is hastily done. This leads to the film's best line of dialogue, when Meenakshi finally awakens from her stupor in the presence of her new husband and he, in explaining the situation she finds herself in, says "You were not conscious when we got married".     Fortunately, Meenakshi's new husband, despite being willing to marry an unconscious woman, is a true gentleman. So when she informs him that not only is she married to the hunter Jwala Singh (whom she now believes to be dead), but also now with child as a result, he stops short of making the demands of marriage upon her. Rather, he agrees that the two of them should live separately under his roof, raising the child as man and wife, while not taking part in any of the carnal activities that such a union might imply. Though in return he asks that she promise to never reveal the true nature of the child's parentage (and we've seen how Meenakshi is about keeping promises). After the required interval, Princess Meenakshi gives birth to twin boys, a circumstance which is of no small concern to the craven Satval Singh, who is still determined to avoid the destiny the seer has laid out for him. Luckily for Satval Singh, his wife has also given birth--at exactly the same time as Meenakshi. Seeing an opportunity to serve two ends at once, Satval Singh switches the second born of the Princess's twins, Veer, with his own child, then takes the first born twin, Dharam, and drops him off a parapet. As the gods would have it, Sheroo The Wonder Bird is flying by at precisely that moment and, unwilling to tolerate infanticide on his watch, scoops Dharam up in his beak and flies off into the sunset. (It must be said here that most of Sheroo's wonders are performed by either a puppet or by Sheroo with a clearly visible tether tied around his midsection.) Meanwhile, Satval Singh's wife has had a crisis of conscience and has, unknown to him, switched her child back with Veer.     Sheroo The Wonder Bird deposits baby Dharam with the kindly blacksmith Lohar and his wife Dhano. As fate according to Dharam-Veer would have it, Lohar and Dhano just happen to be nursing back to health the wounded Hunter Jwala Singh, who has been in a coma for the entire nine months since getting on the wrong end of that tiger, and who awakens from that coma at the precise moment that Sheroo makes his baby delivery. Of course, Jwala Singh has no way of knowing that the baby is his--or even that he has fathered a baby--so all he can say is, basically, "Nice baby you've got there". Twenty or so years go by, during which both the King and Meenakshi's husband somehow manage to die, leaving her Queen of the realm. Because Satval Singh has believed all along that his son, Ranjeet (Ranjeet), is actually the child of Meenakshi, he has beaten and verbally abused him constantly, and so the boy has grown up to become a resentful lout much like his father. Veer (Jeetendra), on the other hand, has grown up to become a somewhat exuberant young man with a taste for big puffy sleeves with frills--and Dharam has grown up to become forty-two year old Dharmendra. Lohar has raised Dharam to be strong like the bull, and in an earlier scene we see him showing a younger version of Dharam how to split wood with one swing--that younger version of Dharam played by Dharmendra's actual son, billed here as "Bobby Junior Dharmendra", but better know today as the Bollywood star Bobby Deol. (For those who don't know, Dharmendra is also the father of the actor Sunny Deol.)     The class boundaries in Queen Meenakshi's kingdom are obviously considerably more porous than those of mediaeval England or ancient Rome (or even modern India, for that matter), because Prince Veer and Dharam, the poor blacksmith's son, have somehow, over these twenty-some years, become inseparable friends. As such, they spend their (by all appearances considerable) leisure time dancing across the kingdom's lush hillsides, proclaiming and demonstrating their love for one another with a homoerotic intensity that almost threatens to eclipse that of even Feroz Khan and Vinod Khanna in Qurbani. Somewhere in the course of their frolicking, they encounter Pallavi, a mean princess played by Zeenat Aman--an occasion which the two men commemorate by singing a charming song about how one must keep one's woman on a short leash in order to prevent her from developing a haughty attitude like Pallavi's. Dharam declares that Pallavi, despite all appearances to the contrary, will ultimately be his, and so begins a strange courtship in which Pallavi shows her affection for Dharam by forcing him to perform in life and death struggles in her personal coliseum, locking him in cages where he is poked with spears by midgets, and having him bound and whipped. Finally Dharam convinces Pallavi to come away with him, and what follows is a jaw dropping musical number in which a singing Dharmendra leads a bound Zeenat Aman around on a rope while forcing her to do menial tasks. It appears that Pallavi is beginning to enjoy this treatment, but then she takes the first opportunity to stab Dharam in the gut, leaving him to bleed to death as she hightails it back to her castle. AS LUCK WOULD HAVE IT, who should come upon Dharam's wasting body but the hunter Jwala Singh himself. Jwala Singh nurses Dharam back to health, and Dharam, impressed by the remarkably out-of-shape looking Jwala Singh's mastery of the Ways of the Samurai, asks to become his pupil. Pallavi, meanwhile, has had an attack of conscience over her gutting Dharam like a stuck pig and returns contritely to his side. Ultimately, she realizes her love for Dharam and, in so doing, becomes virtuous and kind. This is an unhappy development for Sujan, the man to whom Pallavi has been promised in marriage, as well as for Pallavi's brother, Dev Singh (Dev Kumar), and the two quickly become part of the growing list of Dharam and Veer's mortal enemies, which also includes Satval Singh, Ranjeet and, for reasons I won't even go into, Azad, the leader of a band of gypsies. Ultimately this axis of evil will conspire to turn the two BFF's against one another, a plot which will lead to Lohar, Dharam's adoptive father, being framed and punished in the Queen's court for a crime that he didn't commit, and ultimately to the murder of Dharam's adoptive mother in circumstances that place suspicion upon the royal family. Despite the Queen's assurance that the family is innocent of these crimes, Dharam asks that in recompense she leave her castle and come to his hovel to take the place of his mom. As demonstrated before, Meenakshi is honorable to a fault, and so acquiesces to this demand, spending her days from that point on cleaning up around Dharam's hut, feeding him food with her hands and giving him foot rubs.     And so, as mentioned earlier, those familial bonds that fate conspired to break at Dharam-Veer's outset manage to, despite all obstacles, reassert themselves by its final act. It is the purpose of the "lost and found" films to serve as a testament to the strength of these bonds, and dramatize how, as an expression of God's will, they exert a magnetic pull that no barrier of class, character or simple geography can resist. In the case of Dharam-Veer, this means that everyone ends up having the relationship with one another that they're more or less supposed to be having (though admittedly with some markedly creepy overtones), even though they don't know it--until, of course, events lead to a round of startling revelations... and battles at sea involving pirates and lots of swinging back and forth from the masts of long ships. Now, I have spent a lot more time than I normally would summarizing the story of Dharam-Veer (even though, believe it or not, I haven't come close to giving everything away). The reason for this is that the insane convolutions of Dharam-Veer's plot are such a large part of its appeal. As with many of the best masala films, in between marveling at its many visual delights, one can't help sticking with it just to see what preposterous turn of events it will throw at you next. And just when you think you've got a handle on what type of cards the film has up its sleeve, it comes at you from a whole different angle, blindsiding you anew by way of some extremely bizarre primitive special effects or absurd action choreography.     Those above mentioned special effects largely consist of shots--shots that are none too seamlessly integrated into the sequences in which they feature, I must add--in which horses are made to perform leaps that said horses either wouldn't or couldn't do by means of what appears to be animation using cut out photographs against a still background. The result is actually quite arresting visually, in a surreal sort of way, if you disregard that you were actually intended to accept it as reality. As for the fight staging, the defining philosophy appears to have been "You can never have too many back flips". People perform this move in response to even the slightest bit of physical force--and in defiance of all known laws of physics--and also incorporate it into their attacks, forcing their opponents to wait until they have spiked their landing before running them through. Given its vintage, the one thing that really would have put Dharam-Veer over the top for me is a seriously funky score. However, the score by the team of Lamikant-Pyarelal is actually quite conservative, depending a lot on relatively traditional Indian rhythms and instrumentation. This is still not a bad thing, and the songs are pleasant overall, if not exceptionally memorable, and always manage, at their most lively, to get the head doing that little sideways bob that any good Bollywood soundtrack should. Of course, it's often hard with these movies to separate the songs from the production numbers--or "picturizations"--that contain them, and many of those here are top notch. The sequence for "Hum Banjaron Ki Baat Mat", in which a literal army of floridly garbed singing and dancing gypsies overwhelms Princess Pallavi's amphitheater of pain, is without question the moment when the picture is at its most excruciatingly colorful. But it is another gypsy themed number, the climactic campfire rave-up "Band Ho Mutthi To Laakh Ki Khul Gayi To Phir Khaak Ki", that was the clear standout for me--though it was less characteristic of Dharam-Veer in that it is merely dazzling, rather than overwhelming, in its use of color.     On the acting front, Dharam-Veer's cast does a good job within the constraints of the comic book world that the film creates. Dharmendra is a performer who's very good at standing on top of things, puffing out his chest and booming out defiant proclamations - often while pointing - to the corrupt powers that be, and he gets to do a lot of that here. Zeenat Aman, who has shown elsewhere that she is an actress of considerable range, spends the first half of the film pouting and scowling, and the second half winsome and starry eyed. Jeetendra, by far the most abused of the celebrity clothes-horses on display, does perhaps the most admirable job by managing not to be completely eclipsed by his wardrobe. Lastly, Jeevan, thanks to a spirited commitment to shaking his fists and hissing the heroes' names through clenched teeth, makes for a fine two dimensional villain, though he's no Amrish Puri. Dharam-Veer is a movie designed to thrill, and it succeeds on all of the intended levels, as well as on many levels that probably weren't so intentional. In addition to the thrill of watching its spectacular musical numbers and beautiful stars, there is the singular thrill that comes from seeing combinations of color and fabric that will likely never be repeated in human history. Adding to Dharam-Veer's singularity is the fact that it's pretty much guaranteed to be the only place where you can see a special effects shot of a horse jumping over a castle wall that is at once so patently phony and so hauntingly compelling. Even if you could find any of these elements in another film, the chances of that film also starring Sheroo The Wonder Bird are slim to none. Perhaps, then, Dharam-Veer can be said to be a film that exists against the odds--and perhaps even in defiance of reality itself. And given that it comes to you, in spite of all probability, with all these many gifts in store, how can you refuse it? Especially when it's only five bucks. Labels: Bollywood, Fantasy: Sword and Sorcery, Stars: Dharmendra, Stars: Zeenat Aman, Year: 1977 posted by Todd at 9:38 AM | 3 Comments Sunday, November 11, 2007Katilon Ke Kaatil Release Year: 1981Country: India Starring: Dharmendra, Rishi Kapoor, Zeenat Aman, Tina Munim, Amjad Khan, Nirupa Roy, Shakti Kapoor. Writer: Anil and Arjun Hingorani Director: Anil and Arjun Hingorani Producer: Arjun Hingorani Music: Anandji Veerji Shah and Kalyanji Veerji Shah Availability: Buy it from India Weekly Try to imagine that, like me, your life has become a steady parade of disappointments and squandered potential, but then one day, the following happens: having recently been enlightened as to the existence of a Bollywood ninja movie -- a rip-off of American Ninja from the same cast and crew that brought the world Disco Dancer, no less -- you go to your little website forum and theorize that, given the popularity of kungfu films in India and the proliferation of Bruce Lee imitators and crappy "Bruceploitation" films during the 1970s, there was no way Bollywood didn't produce at least one film cashing in on the death and popularity of Bruce Lee. After proffering this notion, however, subsequent searches for Indian Bruce Lee exploitation films yield no results. This does not sway you from your belief, of course, and given how poor the quality and variety of coverage for Indian cult films is, it hardly surprises you. But it does cause you to put your search for such a film on the back burner in favor of tracking down the remaining Kommissar X films or finding a copy of Agente Logan: Missione Ypotron. And then, one day you are emailing back and forth at work with your friend Beth about Mithun Chakraborty's film Dance Dance. You search for, find, and play a clip from the film on YouTube, and then, out of the corner of your eye after the clip has finished and YouTube is displaying those "if you liked this, check this one out" recommendations, you see something titled "Dharmendra vs Bruce Li."
Still your heart young movie fan, you tell yourself as you struggle to click on the clip before it vanishes and is replaced by another recommended clip. But alas! You are too slow, and the clip vanishes. No worries, though. As your trembling fingers fumble at the keyboard, you manage to type "Dharmendra vs Bruce Li" into the search box. Careful, lad! Don't let your giddy excitement get the better of you. This could be nothing more than some lame DJ splicing together disparate clips of the world's premiere Bruce Lee imitator with scenes of Indian action star Dharmendra, all set to some generic techno or hip hop beat out of the German underground. Feeling both fear and elation, you play the clip. And there it is! Dharmendra, with what appears to be a picnic table cloth wrapped around his neck, locked in mortal combat with...no! Not Bruce Li! Not Bruce Li at all! Why that's...no it isn't possible. And yet...yes! Yes it is! That's Dharmendra locked in mortal combat with Bruce Le -- the world's premiere Bruce Li imitator! Finally! After years of disappointment and failure, after watching your dreams crumble and become so many ashes, the world is new and young again, and there is hope yet, you tell yourself. A quick scan of the comments turns up the title of the movie -- Katilon Ke Kaatil, though no one seems able to agree on the number of the letter "a" that goes into each word. Apprehensive, you sneak on over to India Weekly to do a title search, and...argh! No luck! But wait! What if I alter the configuration of a's in the words -- success! And a mere $6.99 and four days later, it is yours.
And then you discover not only does it star Dharmendra -- 70s/80s action icon and father of 80s/90s action Icon Sonny Deol -- it also stars your favorite Bombay bombshell baby, Zeenat Aman. How could this deal get any better, you ask yourself as tears of joy stream from your eyes. And then Dharmendra fights Bigfoot. I've complained, most recently and verbosely in my review of the 1967 espionage film Farz, about the lack of quality information regarding Bollywood films, especially the crazier and older ones. Let me now shift gears and offer up a bit of celebration. I knew nothing about Katilon Ke Kaatil. I had never heard of it, and I had no reason to ever think that I needed to hear of it, let alone see it. And then I found out this Katilon Ke Kaatil featured Bruce Le, apparently getting his ass handed to him by Dharmendra, and I was excited. There were no reviews online anywhere, and as usual, all links led to about a thousand identical webpages that did nothing but list the top two or three actors and the musical composer, surrounded by lots of Flash and Google ads. But no worries. I didn't need to know anything about the film other than Bruce Le was in it, along with Dharmendra. That was more than enough for me. And then I'm sitting there watching the movie and goddamned General Ursus from Planet of the Apes shows up!
That's why I enjoy doing this. After all these years, and after Teleport City has failed to amount to anything other than a tiny niche site that gets no attention from people looking for someone to write liner notes or a book or join their circle of occult-obsessed jaded rich people who retire to country manors for weekend binges of Bacchanalian debauchery and excess, there remains the simple thrill of stumbling across an unbelievably ludicrous movie like Katilon Ke Kaatil. Like many masala films, a simple description of the basic plot hardly does justice to the madness that whirls about it like a raging tornado. If I told you this is a movie about two thieves who pose as the long lost sons of a wealthy woman so they can get their hands on her loot, you'd probably shrug and think to yourself, "Yeah, seen it." And if you know a thing or two about Bollywood films, you'll probably even think, "And I bet in the end, they are redeemed and turn to good when they find out they really are her long lost sons." A plot summary like that hardly leaves room for Dharmendra to fight Bigfoot or punch Bruce Le through a brick wall. But then, if you really know two or three things about Bollywood, you know that they require a simple plot wrapped in fantastically convoluted and outrageous incidents that detour the movie into truly warped territory.
As summarized above, Dharmendra and Rishi Kapoor star as Ajit and Munna, the two sons of a wealthy family in possession of a sacred, jewel-encrusted gold chariot. Evil bearded villain Black Cobra (Amjad Khan -- Qurbani, Jani Dost, Bombay 405 Miles) takes time out from shooting his own men and obsessively stroking his Blofeld brand evil cat in order to attempt to steal the chariot, a plot which involves him dressing up like a police inspector then berating other police inspectors for not questioning his identity thoroughly enough. As part of the demonstration of how crappy the police are, Black Cobra tells them how easy it would be for Black Cobra to waltz in, steal a cop's gun, and hold everyone hostage. Then he does just that, which is pretty cool as far as super villain bravado goes. In the ensuing fracas, however, Cobra and his men are unable to pull off the heist, so they return later than night to pick up where they left off. You'd think if the most notorious criminal in India was after your jewel-encrusted golden chariot, you'd up the security or something. Now this fracas eventually results in young Ajit and Munna getting separated from their family. Munna is discovered, crying on the road, by...oh no! It's that wacky eyebrow guy who annoyed us so in Farz. Over a decade later, he still annoys. Luckily, the movie doesn't let him delve too deeply into his Shemp-quality shenanigans. While Munna is rescued by an aging odious comic relief actor, Ajit has it slightly worse -- but just slightly -- when he witnesses Black Cobra beating his father to death with a studded leather strap. In an attempt to avenge the murder, Ajit winds up falling off a cliff and into a passing train full of hay, where he lands right next to a slumbering woman who thanks the gods for delivering this child to her. This is going to be the least of the movie's improbably events. Meanwhile, Black Cobra's right hand man, Michael...all right! It's Shakti Kapoor! We last saw him as the evil military commander in Commando. He's still trying to get that damn chariot, because despite all the killing and the whipping and the falling off of cliffs into trains full of hay, Black Cobra still didn't manage to get the chariot. And they still don't get it! Geez! I think even I could have stolen it at this point. Michael, on the other hand, gets blown up in a helicopter explosion.
Ajit is afflicted with plot-convenient amnesia, and is raised by the woman as Badshah, a local thug and all-around bully. Munna grows up to become a hustler and con artist. Good thing these guys always grow up to be cops or criminals. What would Bollywood do if the story was, "Two brothers separated at birth. One grows up to be a helpdesk operator at Dell's call center; the other becomes assistant manager at a record store." Hmm, that sounds like a Bollywood vehicle for John Cusack. Anyway, the movie settles in to an incredibly long and often boring middle section here in which Badshah woos a singer named Jamila (Zeenat Aman -- Don, Shalimar, Qurbani) while Munna plays cat and mouse with another charming thief (Tina Munim). The bad news is that the musical numbers are pretty boring, the comedy is unfunny, and the drama is tepid at best. There is no chemistry at all between Zeenat and Dharmendra, and their entire relationship comes out of nowhere. Rishi and Tina fare slightly better, thanks in part to Rishi being the impish one and Tina having a monkey in sultan pants as a criminal accomplice. But still, this lengthy second act is a chore to get through. It's punctuated by a completely out-of-the-blue showdown between Dharmendra in his hot pink kerchief (somehow, he makes it work!) and Bruce Le. In the years immediately following the death of Bruce Lee, sleazy film producers rushed to crank out an endless series of ultra low-budget kungfu crap that featured a guy who looked marginally like Bruce Lee, or had Bruce Lee's haircut, or thumbed his nose like Bruce Lee, or whatever they could think of to trick people who didn't know better into watching what they thought was a Bruce Lee film. The best-known of the Bruce Lee imitators was a Taiwanese actor named Ho Chung Tao. Ho was nothing special and had no notable career to speak of until producers tapped him to be the stand-in for Bruce Lee as they struggled to piece together a finished film from the footage the real Bruce Lee had shot for Game of Death. Ho declined, but shortly after that he hooked up with producer Jimmy Shaw, who came up with the Bruce Li name and kicked off Li's career as Bruce Lee lite. Li starred in a string of Bruce Lee biopics, films in which he was passed off as a true student of Bruce Lee, or as the official successor appointed by Bruce Lee in unofficial sequels to Bruce Lee movies, or as Bruce Lee himself.
Li's success as Lee meant that other producers were looking for their own Bruce Lee, or their own Bruce Li. Among these was Wong Kin Lung, an actor at the Shaw Brothers film studio in Hong Kong. Wong had starred in, among other things, the Shaw Brothers outrageous sci-fi kungfu epic Inframan alongside Danny Lee (best known for his roll in John Woo's The Killer, but also the star of a couple early Bruce Lee exploitation films, one of which -- Bruce Lee I Love You -- starred Bruce's real-life mistress, Betty Ting Pei, and was based on her version of what happened between her and Bruce). Like Bruce Li, Wong was adopted by another studio and redubbed as Bruce Le in order to cash in on his passing resemblance to Bruce Lee. Le never achieved the acclaim of Li, as ridiculous as all this may sound, but he did have a knack for showing up in films from other countries, often with absolutely no connection whatsoever to the plot. This happened in the ridiculous time travel film Future Hunters, where star Robert Patrick is looking for the Spear of Longinus and thinks this monk might have some clues as to its whereabouts. Exactly why a Buddhist monk would have info on a Christian relic I don't know, but whatever. Anyway, he goes to the temple, fights Bruce Le for no reason, and then goes, "Well, they didn't known anything," and that's the last of it. Le's appearance in Katilon Ke Kaatil is no less bizarre. Dharmendra has attempted to win Jamila's heart by pretending to hang himself out of heartache and disguising himself as a famous singer. When both deceptions fail to convince Jamila that Badshah is the man for her, she wanders off into a garden and walks by a table where Bruce Le is sitting. He jumps up to menace her, and Dhamrnedra shows up to fight Bruce Le, and that's the first and last we see of Bruce Le. He's not a henchman of Black Cobra. He has co connection at all to the movie. He just happens to be sitting there for one scene. That said, even though Bruce Le gets little respect for his accomplishments in shoddy Hong Kong productions, his fight with Dharmendra -- or with an anonymous stunt man (probably from Hong Kong) in a Dharmendra wig -- showcases just how advanced even mediocre Hong Kong fight choreography was when compared to choreography from anywhere else in the world. Bollywood has no shortage of kungfu fights, but while they are often energetic and outrageous, they are also terrible. Even the best of them is pretty bad when held up in comparison to the fights in a similarly budgeted Hong Kong movie. This isn't to sling mud at Bollywood -- Hong Kong in the 80s blew everyone away. But that's really made obvious when Bruce Le shows up to thumb his nose and allow Indian film distributors to sell this as a Bruce Lee versus Dharmendra movie. See India's number one action star beat the tar out of the world's number one martial arts legend! Never mind that Bruce had been dead for over a decade. He was the Tupac of kungfu films, making new movies long after his death. Too bad no one ever tried to hire a rapper who looked a lot like Tupac and have him release new albums under the name Tupak Shakir or something.
Although it has nothing to do with the movie in which it is nestled, the Bruce Le scene is pretty great. The fight choreography is suddenly infinitely better as two seasoned vets of the Hong Kong film industry (again, assuming the anonymous Dharmendra stand-in was Chinese) go head to head, with occasional shots of Dharmendra staggering backward or flying through a wall. Katilon Ke Kaatil has its share of problems, but a lack of people flying through walls is not among them. Then we return to the movie itself, which drags on for a while as we maneuver Munna and Badshah/Ajit into meeting one another and ending up both trying to con their actual mother -- who they do not realize is their mother. We also learn than Michael is still alive, having faked his own death to escape the wrath of Black Cobra (who in twenty years has not aged at all) over failing to get that chariot. And even twenty years later, Cobra is still talking about that goddamned chariot. Surely he could have come up with some other scheme by now. Or at least succeeded in stealing a golden chariot from a solitary woman who is still collapsing with grief over the loss of her sons like it happened yesterday. When Black Cobra discovers Michael is still alive (by happening to pull into the one gas station in all of India where Michael happens to work), he sicks Recha on the poor bastard. And that's where Katilon Ke Kaatil really starts to get weird.
Recha is described by Black Cobra as being the hellish offspring of a woman raped by a bear, but for all intents and purposes, he is a gorilla from Planet of the Apes. He's also bullet proof. While people are scared of him based on his size alone, no one seems all that amazed by the fact that this giant, fur-covered sasquatch of a beast exists. Maybe India is crawling with sasquatch men, or maybe the countryside is full of leather-clad gorillas on horseback catching unlucky humans in their nets. Recha manages to shatter Michael's leg and kill Michael's beloved wife, meaning we now have our villain who can be redeemed by teaming up with the good guys. His interest in the chariot revived, Black Cobra devises a plot that relies heavily on the sort of contrivances and coincidences that only happen in a Bollywood film, where the improbability of anything can easily be explained away with a dismissive wave of the hand and a statement about events being guided by the hand of the gods. Black Cobra's plot hinges on the mother randomly wandering up to a temple to pray for the return of her sons, and this temple will just happen to be the one where Black Cobra and his gang have disguised themselves as priests. Predicting that she will know her youngest son by the trident pendant he wears, he then gives one of the henchmen a trident pendant and sends him off to randomly run into the woman. Naturally, after a bit of wackiness, Munna ends up with the pendant.
It all goes on for a while, until Munna and Ajit have their big revelation and team up to kick Black Cobra's ass. If the middle portion of the movie has been somewhat a chore to get through, at least the investment is paid off for in the finale, in which our heroes, teamed up with Michael, battle Recha in a lengthy and hilariously awesome showdown that culminates in them blowing up a huge vat labeled "Highly Inflammable." They then infiltrate Black Cobra's inner sanctum by disguising themselves as members of a dance troupe Black Cobra has hired to entertain his men and celebrate the successful theft of the chariot, which by this point, is an operation that probably cost him more than the actual value of the chariot. This represents...what? Like the ten millionth time the good guys have infiltrated the bad guy's lair via a troupe of dancers? Why do these bad guys keep hiring dance troupes to come in and perform for them in their secret lair? Doesn't bussing in a bunch of dancers sort of spoil the whole "secret" part of the secret lair idea? And, of course, Jamila and whatever Munna's thief girlfriend's name is are part of the troupe, even though neither has ever been associated with the troupe before and Tina (because I don't know if she's ever given a name in this movie) has never been established as a singer or dancer. Making matters sillier, Black Cobra sits the chariot out in the middle of his throne room/dance hall, and the disguised heroes come out and sing a song that is basically a summary of everything Black Cobra has done to their family. I guess this is a variation of Hamlet, where they stage a play that recreates a murder Hamlet thinks has happened, but it doesn't seem like the best way to maintain your cover. Oh well, it all leads to our heroes killing about fifty million guys Arnold Schwarzenegger style, so that's OK.
Katilon Ke Kaatil has its share of awesome action sequences, but ultimately, they are too scarce to make up for the rest of the film, which rarely rises above the point of being mildly interesting and often sinks below the point that things become tedious. The Bruce Le fight is great, as is Dharmendra's showdown with some Steve Reeves looking bodybuilder in hot pants, and of course the finale is wonderful, but there's an awful long road in between these morsels. Dharmendra doesn't exude much charisma in this film, and at times I'm not even sure he's aware of the fact that he's being filmed. Rishi is more energetic, but really, he's often upstaged by the monkey in shiny sultan pants. The biggest disappointment of all, however, is Zeenat Aman, who here contributes absolutely nothing to the movie. For a woman who built her career on challenging the conventional "damsel in distress" uselessness of a woman in Bollywood films, to see her as a conventional damsel in distress who is completely incapable of doing anything is a major let-down. She doesn't whip out any kungfu, she doesn't use her brains to outwit -- she doesn't do anything but stand there. You could have hired any woman to fill this role? Why cast Zeenat Aman unless you want Zeenat Aman? And having Zeenat means she's gonna kick some ass, one way or another. Not so, here. Rishi Kapoor is better in his role, but like everything in this film, he's underdeveloped. Rishi is part of the Kapoor dynasty that seems inescapable in Bollywood. Raj Kapoor is his dad. Rajiv is his brother. Shashi and Shammi are his uncles. Babita was his sister-in-law. Kareena and Karisma are his nieces. It may be physically impossible at this point to watch a Bollywood film that doesn't star one of the Kapoor clan. Katilon Ke Kaatil represents the first time I've seen Rishi in action, and he wasn't half bad. He's not much of an action star, playing second fiddle to an occasionally bored and/or confused looking Dharmendra in much the same way Shashi played second banana to Amitabh in Shaan. The big difference is that, while Amitabh could make an average film above-average, Dharmendra cannot.
Dharmendra -- who we first met in the excellent swingin' 60s espionage adventure Aankhen -- is best known to modern fans for being the father of 90s action superstar Sonny Deol, though when you see Dharmendra in action here, you might wonder if Sonny isn't his son after all, but in fact a clone. Dharmendra was a big deal with a lot of great films under his belt, but Katilon Ke Kaatil isn't one of them. By the 1980s, it looks like he was floundering a bit and trying to find his way in a cinematic landscape that had been changed considerably by the arrival of Amitabh Bachchan. However, even in his mid-forties, he looks convincing in action and makes a credible tough guy, even if whupping Bruce Le is a bit of a stretch (seriously, compare those physiques and the speed of motion -- and dig Dharmendra's numchuck skills). As with his son, the trouble begins when Dharmendra has to do something other than kick someone's ass. While he doesn't do that nearly enough in this movie, when he does, it's pretty great. I think I failed to mention the part where he fights a guy in blackface. And I mean, literally. The guy's make-up is soot black. Shakti Kapoor is his usual self, always dependable. Black Cobra certainly looks imposing, but Amjad Khan could have played him way more over the top, and that would have made this film better. Rounding out the main cast, Tina Munim has a little more to do than Zeenat, owing primarily to the fact that she has a monkey thief for a sidekick. It's bad news when Zeenat isn't the most memorable woman in your movie, but such is the case here. Tina's performance is by no means stand-out, but she and Rishi show all the charisma and chemistry that Dharmendra and Zeenat lack. She started her career as a pet project of Dev Anand's, and the chemistry she shows here with Rishi must have reached beyond this single film, because they were frequently paired together. Still, her career never really took off, and she eventually left India to attend college in America, returning to marry an industrialist and become a charity events coordinator. Also, the woman is seriously cute.
The musical numbers are also pretty dull. Although you get a couple glittery nightclub scenes, they don't make up for the endless scenes of a holy man wandering into the camera to sing summaries of the plot up to that point. And even the nightclub scenes succeed on the merits of psychedelic set design rather than the merits of the singing, dancing, or even the costumes. We do have the scene where Dharmendra and Zeenat get drunk and dance around Mumbai, playing on teeter totters and then, for no reason other than Benny Hill level comedy, dress Dharmendra up in drag, but even this goes on a little too long, and you'll start thinking to yourself, "Man, I wonder what that monkey in the genie pants is up to." As much as I love the outlandish bits, Katilon Ke Kaatil is ultimately kind of a let-down. There is too much uninteresting filler, and Zeenat is completely wasted in a do-nothing role that is beneath her talents. I have plenty of tolerance for slapdash Bollywood action films, but even I was toying with the fast forward button for part of this. And while there are plenty of films of somewhat questionable taste I may foist upon people, often starring Mithun Chakraborty, I can't see myself doing the same with the whole of Katilon Ke Kaatil, though I will absolutely make everyone watch the Bruce Le stuff and the fight scenes with Bigfoot...err, Recha. Those are why I watched this movie, and they were worth the effort even if the rest of it really wasn't. Next quest: I know Bollywood must have ripped off Santo movies at some point... Labels: Action, Bollywood, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Stars: Dharmendra, Stars: Zeenat Aman, Year: 1981 posted by Keith at 4:30 PM | 5 Comments Sunday, November 19, 2006Aankhen Release Year: 1968Country: India Starring: Dharmendra, Mala Sinha, Mehmood, Jeevan, Nasir Hussain, Sujit Kumar, Zeb Rehman, Kumkum, Madan Puri, Sajjan, Dhumal, Lalita Pawar, Madhumati, Daisy Irani, Master Ratan. Writer: Ramanand Sagar Director: Ramanand Sagar Cinematographer: G. Singh Music: Ravi Producer: Ramanand Sagar Availability: Buy it from India Weekly. I try to spend every winter reviewing psychedelic spy films. Unfortunately, almost every year, some weird project pops up that keeps me from writing more than one or two reviews during the entire season. So I thought I'd get a jump on things this year and let you all have an early Thanksgiving treat that tastes of sweet, sweet cranberry sauce. Well, that's for Americans. United States Americans. Not Canadians or Mexicans. Or, you know, South America. The rest of you, I don't know. You can admire the pretty colors of this movie while you sit chained to your shoe-stitching machine with naught but a bowl of watery gruel beside you and a burly, Cockney foreman whipping you mercilessly. Anyway, that's how I imagine the rest of the world outside of the United States is. Well, the rest of the world except for the United States and India, where everything is all vibrantly colored and the sparkling waters of the Ganges and the Mississippi are dotted with Skittles and Chuckles and lazy-accented old riverboat gamblers watching buxom Indian gals staging lavish dance numbers in the saloon. These are things I know about the world. I also know, thanks to the 1968 Bollywood spy thriller Aankhen, that the country of Japan is full of incredibly beautiful Indian/Japanese girls wearing gigantic, floppy green sombreros.
1967 saw the release of You Only Live Twice, a James Bond movie full of hot Japanese chicks, ninjas, hollowed-out volcanoes, egg-shaped monorail pods, and Sean Connery as the world's most convincing Japanese man. The Eurospy trend was still swinging, and even Japan and Hong Kong were getting in on the fun. The result is that, soaked in the psychedelic, pop-art sensibilities of the mid-to-late sixties, the best spy movies ever were being made. Indian cinema, which has always been packed with insane set decoration, candy coloring, and fabulous outfits, would seem tailor-made to pump out more than a few eye-popping entries into the world of psychotronic spyjinks. And they didn't let us down, and 1967 also saw the release of Farz, an Indian espionage thriller that did major business at the box office. A year later, and doubtless under the influence of both Farz and You Only Live Twice, writer-director Ramanand Sagar gave us Aankhen, another great Bollywood spy film, but this time with the budget to trot the globe in classic James Bond style. Well, at least in classic Jimmy Bond style. India is besieged by terrorists. If you are guessing that the terrorists are conniving, villainous Pakistanis, then you've been paying attention. We had our Russians, and India had their Pakistanis, and both sets of stock movie villains were adept at fiendishly twirling the ends of their big Rollie Fingers mustaches whilst wearing monocles. These are the primary traits you need in your villains. If they can't twirl their handlebar mustache and if they don't wear a monocle, then what's the point of fighting them? This is the great and time-tested truism of international conflict. Look at some of our classic villains. The British? Classic handlebar mustache sporters at the time. The Germans? They practically reinvented the monocle. And have you ever seen Kaiser Wilhelm's mustache? The Japanese? Same thing. You saw that guy Bruce Lee punched through the wall and across the courtyard in Fist of Fury. Saddam Hussein? Please. The man had the most famous mustache since Hitler. The Vietnamese, you say? Well, that's right. Not big on monocles, and not big on mustaches...and look what happened!!! The war was a complete disaster. And anyway, Rambo and Strike Commando taught us that we actually spent most of the Vietnam fighting Russians anyway.
Of course, there are scattered exceptions. North Korea eschews the monocle and mustache in favor of a pompadour and senior citizen sunglasses, but don't think for a moment that Kim Jung-il, the most infamous b-movie fan in the world, doesn't have a make-up kit that contains a monocle and handlebar mustache. Where was I? Indian is besieged by terrorists, whose primary mode of operation is to stage acts of violence that will incite the Indian populace into riots against the government, who in turn will think the original violence was perpetrated by dissidents within their own society. Thus, the terrorists can limit themselves to a few surgical strikes that turn India against itself, leaving the terrorists plenty of time to recline in their sprawling underground lairs, laughing menacingly as they put their finishing touches on their spiked-wall torture chambers. But the good and righteous Indian people aren't going to stand by and let their country be torn asunder. Knowing that the government is simply stretched too thin to effectively deal with so insidious an enemy, groups of private citizens have formed their own counter-terrorism and spy rings. One such group is headed up by Major Saab (Nasir Hussain, the police commissioner from the opulent 1967 Dev Anand heist film Jewel Thief), who has a giant global radio system hidden behind a revolving bookcase, which makes marginal sense at best since every time someone calls him on it, the set makes a deafening beeping noise that can be heard seemingly throughout the entire house. The major's star operative is the dashing young Sunil, played by soon-to-be superstar Dharmendra. Since as of this review I'm still very early into my schooling on all things Bollywood from the sixties and seventies, I'd never seen a Dharmendra film before this one. Yet still he looked familiar. I assumed it was because I just saw his picture all the time in other reviews. Then I realized he looks familiar because he looks just like eighties-nineties action star Sonny Deol. And why does he look like Sonny Deol? Probably because he's Sonny's father.
Which is pretty good stuff, since Sonny spent most of the nineties fighting evil, mustache-twirling terrorists from Pakistan. Sunil is the son of India's number one spy and great hero of the war, and as such, he has a lot to live up to. Not that this is a movie about the son trying to emerge from the shadow of a larger-than-life father. I'm sure you can get that in other Indian films, but the tone of this one is basically, "Sunil's dad was a total bad-ass, and so is Sunil." Sunil also spent time in Japan, ostensibly studying to become to a judo master, though we never see anything of his training. I always thought that becoming a master of any martial art demanded that you train twenty hours a day and spend the other four sitting shirtless underneath a waterfall, but Sunil seems to spend most of his training time joyriding around Japan as part of various tourist groups. This gives the movie an opportunity to do two important things: show off lots of travelogue footage of Japanese locations (and I assume Japan was chosen because of You Only Live Twice) and allow for Sunil to meet the unspeakably gorgeous Meenakshi (Mala Sinha, who was actually the top billed star for the film since Dharmendra was still something of an unproven commodity as a leading man). Meenakshi happens to be half-Japanese, half-Indian, with a perfect command of Hindi. It seems pretty unlikely that a suave Indian spy could run into what must be the one Japanese-Indian girl living in Japan, but this is a spy film. Meenakshi falls instantly in love with Sunil, because that's how Bollywood rolls, and in a change of pace, it's she who relentlessly pursues the coy object of her affection through a musical number which showcases one of the worst ensembles any woman in a Bollywood film has ever worn.
Now let's get a few things on the table. First, there is no shortage of mind-blowingly atrocious costuming in Bollywood. However, most of it is so insanely over-the-top that even the absolute worst take on a sort of sublime transcendence and become wonders to behold. And actress Mala Sinha is without a doubt one of the most beautiful and charming women ever to grace an Indian film. She's got a killer smile and a un |
