Kabrastan (1988)

It’s hardly surprising that the Bollywood horror cycle came to a shuddering halt in the early ’90s considering some of the utter crap that had been churned out in recent times. Mohan Bhakri, competing with Vinod Talwar as the Crown Prince of Indian Horror Ramsay’s being King), came up with an extensive advertising campaign to support his latest horror opus. Yet, the film fizzled out at the box office, hastening the end of the horror cycle.

The movie stars the taken-for-granted cast of Raza Murad, Javed Khan, Kunika, Jagdeep and a usual lot of no-hopers or faded has-beens. Perhaps the most startling feature of the credits is that it features songs by Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle and lyrics by Nida Fazli – somewhat surprising for a z grade slice typically cheesy and utterly lame horror.

This movie features Raza Murad as a Frankenstein like surgeon who uses his desperate patients as an excuse to further his own medical experiments and hopefully the fame and glory that he reckons he deserves for being a pioneering genius. Murad has to find fresh cadavers for his experiments as long-dead corpses don’t seem to work and it isn’t long before he takes to murder to get what he requires. His simpering wife begins to suspect that something fishy is going on, but she gets treated with even more disdain than usual and told to stay in her place.

Meanwhile, the young children are traumatized by a paintbrush that proceeds to write menacing messages in blood-red on the household walls but are traumatized further when Dad Raza Murad takes to lashing them for telling tales.

Raza Murad slips further and further into his dark, murky world of evil, but slowly his house and his family are targeted for revenge by one of the vengeful souls of his victims. It’s a puffy mess of a movie from the very start. However, this time around, we don’t even get a hairy beast or a rubber-faced man-in-a-monster-suit lumbering around to relieve the monotony as director Bhakri has claimed that in this movie, he has made his “point of view” camera the “real” monster! What a rip off!!

Well, audiences reacted to Bhakri’s monster-less horror tale with an emphatic thumbs down, and the film was to depart theatres in record time. There is a distinct lack of anything remotely “horrible” on screen. The audiences’ patience and sanity are severely tested with painfully long drawn out scenes featuring the talent-less Jagdeep doing what he does in every single scene film. Torture the audience with his utterly bereft and sub-infantile brand of comedy.

In this movie, we have another unfortunate site. The once-respected Amjad Khan is reduced to playing the role of a pervert and is cast parallel to Jagdeep. A colossal come down for the man who enthralled audiences with his performance as Gabbar Singh in Sholay. No wonder he was to perish a few months after featuring in this pile of utterly irredeemable rubbish.

Events on screen are so stupefyingly dull that it becomes a significant challenge to watch this atrocity to its wretched conclusion. Bhakri has come up with an appalling stinker this time which doesn’t have an iota of anything to recommend. Even the Lata and Asha songs are jarring as they appear out of place and conflict with the surrounding dross. Kabrastan is unforgivably putrid and tedious crap of the worst kind and gives even the gutter level genre of Bollywood Horror a bad name!