Ghutan (2007)

Ghutan is a Ramsay’s Next-Gen horror movie, and very much old wine served in a new bottle. The film begins with a hunky husband and his accomplice leaving the wife crying out for help as she is buried alive in a horrifying opening sequence.

It is revealed that the murdered Catherine was the queen of a large and thriving industry of fashion wear where her husband was an employee with a roving eye. Her pretty servant girl Nancy looks after her, but there doesn’t appear to be anyone else in her life other than Uncle Tom from Goa. As Catherine finds her husband’s interest in her on the wane, she berates him and lashes out with her foul abusive language, raving and ranting like the mad harridan she has rapidly turned into.

Seething with rage as he is unable and worse, unwilling to satisfy her, she continues her rants on a daily basis, finding alcohol as a fuel that flares her rage to dangerous levels of madness.

Catherine has taken to getting paralytically drunk out of her mind and playing her heart out on the piano, remarkably not hitting one wrong note considering her inebriated state. Moping around endlessly, the woman would drive anyone to the edge. It isn’t the least bit surprising that her husband Ravi (played by former Mr. India title holder Aryan Vaid) is very reluctant to come home. It is now clear that the only reason he is still married to her is because of his fat salary at work and because she has all the cash that pays for his maintenance and whims.

Ravi now has his eyes set on the girl he has selected as his secretary, but much to his shock, she isn’t about to roll over with some money and attention. Priya is a girl of morals and knows where to draw a line, but sadly her morals are spat on by her greedy mother, who prefers that her daughter bring home the dollar$ with which she can get much-deserved liposuction and augmented Brazilian Buttocks.

Finally, one night, Catherine’s constant drunken bitching gets out of hand, and Ravi backhands her sending her toppling over the staircase railing and crashing onto a glass coffee table below, which unfortunately proves painful to the extreme. (think Lee Remick’s fall in The Omen, but then maybe not). Ravi and his buddy plan to throw her body into a shallow grave, but as they prepare to bury her, she springs to life and creates one hell of a racket before they shove her in a coffin and nail it shut and leave her buried to rot.

However, for those who have ever watched an Indian horror film, the wronged body thrown in a grave must emerge for revenge. It’s not long before Catherine’s blood-stained and scarred corpse is seen causing havoc and spreading fear in the lives of her ex-husband and his accomplices. Meanwhile, Nancy, the dutiful maid, is a crucial witness to the murder, and matters are complicated when the all-knowing Priest “Father” gets involved, and then Uncle Tom appears smelling a rat, a dead rat.

It all moves along at a brisk rate, and fortunately, the songs are kept at bay, as is the comic element. Shyam Ramsay has done an efficient job of this revenge horror potboiler, but sadly the make-up effects are very sub-par, and Catherine’s corpse should’ve at least been more terrifying than when she was alive.

The acting is hammy yet vigorous and spurs the movie along. The soundtrack is noisy, and the torrent of abusive language is sometimes a little startling. It isn’t anywhere near as good as Raaz, which it aims to follow in certain respects. However, it’s still reasonably entertaining horror fodder without having any of the old school style of the “classic” Ramsay’s films some of us grew up watching.
Aryan Vaid impresses with his physique and acting, and Tarun Arora is an excellent sleazy gym buddy. Heena Rehman shrieks a bit like the shrieks described by Bilawal Bhutto of the infuriated Sindhi workers rising against injustice.

The film will disappoint those seeking the atmospheric and old school clunky templates of the Ramsays films of their golden era of the 1970s and 1980s, but on its own, it’s a bit of a shriek and a reasonably enjoyable one at that. The thought does arise if the film might have broken a Bollywood record for the amount of time the words “bitch” and “Bastard” spat out venomously. Shame about the make-up and lack of gore, though.