Akshay Kumar inherits a haunted mansion and he has to make things right if his sister is to get married. The comedy is downright terrible, but the horror part of the film is somewhat okay. Overall, this is something that needed a lot more effort in the writing. That’s the short take. A longer, detailed review follows, and be warned – it may contain spoilers.
For a horror-comedy, the biggest jolt of horror comes when the censor certificate appears and says that the running time is 5 minutes short of three hours. It’s not that I do not welcome long movies, but what on earth could Priyardshan and Akshay Kumar have cooked up that needed to be this long? As it turns out, not much. The loosely constructed story revolves around Arjun (Akshay Kumar), who inherits a mansion. It turns out that he is in London and the inheritance is in India, but these details are of no consequence. Arjun could have been in Delhi and the mansion could have been in Mumbai, and the story would not play out any differently. If you are now wondering about how Mumbai real-estate developers could have left an uninhabited piece of land untouched, you are looking for logic. This is not that kind of movie. It’s about a demon that’s believed to abduct newly married women. It’s the reverse of Stree.
Bhooth Bangla has a decent story, something about the marriage between a deva and an asura – this is rendered beautifully through a series of animated visuals. But to get to the full meat of this story, which makes up the horror part, we have to slog through the comedy part until the interval point. And this first half is truly unbearable. I mean, the idea of Paresh Rawal getting his buttocks burnt in a number of ways is not bad in itself. Nicely done physical comedy that tickles your inner five-year-old is hard to come by these days. But the problem is that there’s nothing to this running gag beyond the idea. Each iteration of this idea is written and staged so indifferently that your buttocks may begin to feel the pain of having to sit through some three hours of this. The wordplay makes it worse. Someone says “anaconda” instead of “taekwondo”. Someone else hears “pishaach” as “peshaab”. Is that all it takes to get a screenplay greenlit these days?
But the second half does become somewhat better. Bhooth Bangla is actually a proper, old-school horror story about good versus evil, and I have no idea why they transformed it into a horror-comedy. The forces of darkness are unleashed as we get closer to the marriage of Arjun’s sister (Mithila Palkar), and the family flashback (with Tabu) explains everything. But by then, I was too exhausted by the first half to truly care about a monster that comes with swarms of bats. I wished they’d invested more in showing how Arjun developed monster-bashing powers and how the mysterious Wamiqa Gabbi character is important to this story. I wished they had devoted more screen space to the occult, which has always been an interesting place to look for horror stories. But clear, focused narration doesn’t seem to have been the priority here. For what it is, Bhooth Bangla is not downright unwatchable, but is that really a compliment?
