Deewana (1964)

Deewana can probably lay claim to being Lollywood’s first-ever horror film. The film was produced in 1964 in the wake of the worldwide success of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which suddenly had audiences craving for more cinematic horrors of the psycho-killer kind.

This opening sequence from Deewana takes inspiration from The Invisible Man, and astoundingly the special effects aren’t a complete embarrassment even if Habib’s acting as a police inspector is. Deewana starts mysteriously with the writhing body of a woman who appears to be in severe pain. We then switch to the present, where we are shown a series of crimes being carried out by a man who is utterly baffling the cops because they can’t see him. With his poker-faced, utterly serious Marlowe impersonation (including a private eye style raincoat), Habib is ludicrous and probably the most hopeless cop ever to grace any film. He remains stoic if utterly clueless in his attempts at solving the case of the invisible psycho who is preying on innocent young women who have birthmarks or beauty spots on them. This bit is borrowed from The Spiral Staircase, in which the killer is offing women he views as being imperfect in some way and, therefore, disgusting.

The audience is introduced to a stern professor at an institute of psychiatry. He oversees a small group of students: the dashing if relatively thick Ejaz, the pretty nymph Deeba and a very odd loner, the very obvious red herring. Deeba persuades her best friend to join the institute, and thus, the siren Nasreen arrives even if she seems to be an utterly hopeless student. It seems a miracle that she could have passed an entrance examination of any worth!

Nonetheless, her arrival spices things up at the institute as she organizes outings and frolics away from the dull environs of the lab. Unknown to her, she is in enormous danger as she bears a beauty spot high on her cheek, thus making her a prime target for the invisible psycho killer who has inspector Habib Clouseau spinning around in circles.

Ejaz becomes the police’s prime suspect as he seems to spend many a night away from the dorm of the institute and arrives mysteriously in the wee hours of the morning. However, we discover that his primary aim is to snag fading beauty Sabiha (no doubt for her fortune as she appears considerably older than he is) so that he won’t have to worry about working ever again. Thus, his evenings are spent frolicking with Sabiha and visiting the local park for a sing-song session whenever the mood takes them.

Sabiha’s dad Ilyas Kashmiri is dead against Ejaz. Therefore, a subplot develops into the film’s main thrust, leaving horror elements as a secondary thread.

Nasreen provides a saucy number or two in her trendsetting pedal pushers (for which the stern professor scolds her) before the killer brutally murders her by having her face plucked and pinched by a leopard-skin-gloved invisible psycho! Meanwhile, the director builds up his red herrings so that the audience can be delivered a massive twist when we finally discover who the killer is.

Despite starting with a certain amount of promise, the film soon deteriorates into an insufferable bore. The plot’s intriguing aspect involving the marauding psychotic invisible man is wholly neglected. At the same time, the audience is tortured by a series of long and utterly dull song-and-dance situations, as well as the completely uninteresting romantic plot involving Sabiha, Ejaz and Ilyas Kashmiri.

The five minutes of attempted horror provide the film with a few moments of fun, and of course, Nasreen’s antics are bewitching, if a touch deranged. However, on the whole, the film is a massive disappointment, and one has to conclude that Zinda Laash, made three years after Deewana, remains Lollywood’s premier horror film by a mile with little or no competition to date.

Deewana surprisingly managed a good run at the Box Office without quite qualifying as a genuine hit, no doubt due to its novelty value as being the first of its kind.