Ichhadhari Shaitaan (2000)

Another zero budget piece of sleazy garbage hailing from the South (fertile ground for horror trash these days) featuring a bunch of 30-something teenagers heading off into the jungle to research the local tribals (yeah, right!).

The elderly looking students drive along merrily in their jeep having song contests and the usual moronic banter that one associates with 30-year-olds who have yet to graduate. On their way, their jeep breaks down but fortunately in a delightfully scenic spot, complete with a waterfall where it doesn’t take the girls long to take a dip and enjoy some frolic while the cameraman closes in on the wet clinging clothes of the rather lumpy beauties.

On the road, once again, spirits are high and the jokes are flowing when suddenly they are ambushed by some very hostile natives carrying spears and behaving very poorly indeed. An all-out fistfight ensues with the burly teens more than holding their own against the spindly natives. However, after much kicking and punching, the blimp that seems to be the students’ leader pulls out what looks like a pistol and immediately, the natives meekly surrender, clearly being familiar with the power of the barrel. Meanwhile, one bulbous beauty has been dragged away by some eager natives who start to smear her with the gooey black tar-like shit and the impression that one gets is that she is probably going to be consumed that very night. However, when she regains consciousness, she merely kicks her captors and flounces off into the jungle once more, hoping to hook up with her imbecilic research group mates.

Order is restored, and once again, the natives seem to be toeing the line. The group is shown to an old dilapidated Haveli, which serves as their living quarters while they carry out the work for their thesis, though by the looks of it lustful thoughts are the only thing they seem to have on their mind. It’s not long before there are long steamy scenes of fairly hideous heavy petting and much rubbing of flesh. Most unsavoury indeed, and one wishes the threatening demon spirit indicated to viewers by a roaming Point-of-view camera would get to work with some haste.

Soon the evil spirit strikes when one of the beauties, Ruby, fancying one of the lads like mad, settles down to write him a note explaining how she feels. An eerie wind picks up, and for some very odd reason, Ruby is compelled to wander out into the jungle, searching for god knows what. She wanders further and further into the thick jungle and is suddenly attacked by the twigs and the vines of the forest that force her to the ground and proceed to “rape” her for about ten painfully gratuitous minutes before letting up leaving her for dead.

There is much sobbing and weeping when her fellow researchers discovered her bloodied body. One of the lads accused of being responsible for her death is sitting at the same desk that the victim sat at night before. Soon the same ill wind picks up, and all of a sudden, in a quite brilliant Anti-Tobacco statement of a scene, the fag Vivek is smoking starts spewing up an almighty mushroom cloud causing him to flee into the forest like a madman. Soon he is engulfed and torched yet mysteriously discovered the next night by one of his friends having a head-spinning fit like Regan’s from the Exorcist! Escape isn’t so easy, though, as a flame lights up from the cigarette and starts to follow the floundering Vivek in his mad dash for survival.

Later Bhavna, one of the brain dead researchers, freaks out in fear and dashes out of the house only to be menaced and tracked by the serial rapist vines that eventually catch up with her and administer another ten-minute interlude of pure sleaze. Though the rapist remains unseen mainly, the audience is treated to a long scene where the woman bobs up and down and struggles, strains and sweats – it’s a most unpleasant voyeuristic scene shot from a point-of-view camera perversely turning the audience into the protagonists of the rape. And once again, the scene seems simply endless.

Finally, what’s left of the research team turn to the local Tantrik for help. However, the audience has already been shown that he is a dreadfully evil chappie who worships the stone of the Ichhadhari Shaitaan (Immortal Demon) and waits to trap innocent passers-by and offer them as a human sacrifice to his idol. He pretends to be helping Bhavna and reawakens her from her deathly state, much to the excitement of her friends. Still, it soon turns out that she has other plans and has become a deadly instrument of the diabolical Tantrik’s dreams of world domination (I kid you not).

So, will the Tantrik succeed in turning his forest-raped beauties into an army of undead zombies to achieve his master plan, or will the remaining intellectuals led by that inflated moron manage to derail this diabolical scheme? Unlikely though it seems, they do have a stone that bears the head of the Icchadhari Shaitaan, which might come in handy when push comes to shove. This film, directed by the unheard-of Anil Naidu, is in keeping with the rest of 90’s Bollywood horror – stretching the bounds of cheapness to the extreme.

The film is shot like an amateur home video, and the acting is unimaginably awful, though the story and script hardly allow for anything better. There isn’t even half a scare on display, and a terrifying aspect of the film remains the frightening Hindi dubbing. Ichhadhari Shaitaan is a quite stunningly inept film entirely in keeping with 95% of horror coming out of Bollywood in the ’90s and beyond. Once again, this kind of drivel makes Ramsay’s stuff in the ’70s and 80’s seem like pure class.