Khopdi (1999)

We have recently returned from India with a suitcase full of desi schlock horror feeling very pleased indeed. Most of the fodder looked dire at the very least but somehow, memories of the last atrocity fade quickly when confronted with the lurid cover of a film like Khopdi for instance.Everything about Khopdi VCD suggests that within lies yet another turd of celluloid excrement featuring fat men wearing masks from the local Wal-Mart Halloween costume section chasing brain dead chubby girls in and out of showers and bedrooms.

The film begins with a respectable, middle-aged housewife overcome by a gang of repulsive, greasy people, including a woman. They ransack the house for money and gang rape the elderly housewife for fun though sadly, the one female in the gang doesn’t join in.

It’s not long before a mysterious woman starts seducing the rapists one by one. The frumpy old housewife dies of her rape wounds, and the gang decides to throw her in a shallow grave. Still, the twist is that when she makes her final vengeful move, she happens to sprout an unsightly mixture of porridge and rice, which grows specifically on her face and hands exclusively. The woman then evidently frightens her victims to death. Perhaps she chokes them with the stench of her porridge breath because there is never any suggestion otherwise.

Later in the film, she reappears wearing a bad cut-price rubber mask featuring a particularly un-frightening skull. Thus, the movie’s title – Khopdi – is due to the rubber mask worn in one of many atrocious scenes. To give due credit, the film is truly frightening for its sheer awfulness and perhaps the most horrifying aspect of all is that Khopdi is just one of the tens of such hideous desi horror that has spawned in the wake of the demise of the Ramsay Brothers. The type bought by budding horror geeks at the age of 5.

Indian horror requires a new direction. Ram Gopal Verma’s new breed of horror is too dependent on recent Japanese and Korean chillers and rapidly becoming redundant as Grudge 2. Khopdi is a painful experience that only sadomasochists could derive pleasure from. Not perhaps the worst ever film but not too far off either.