Maut (1998)

Just when you thought Bollywood Horror couldn’t sink any further, along comes Jeetendra Chawda’s utterly deplorable Maut. Devoid of even the slightest hint of style, this film manages to plunge standards of modern Bollywood horror beyond the bottom of the pit with its cheap homemade look, amazingly disastrous make-up effects, and hideously stale, contrived storyline, and it’s beyond atrocious acting.

To attempt to explain the film’s events would be doing the film an honour it doesn’t deserve, as it is such a colossal mess from beginning to end. However, just for the record, the following is what we managed to comprehend from this cesspit of a film.

Proceedings begin on the typical dark stormy night with Harish Patel (the only recognizable actor) and a bodacious babe looking for a place to make out. They stumble upon a seemingly empty Haveli where they find a perfect bedroom for their merrymaking. Harish Patel is all over his beauty when suddenly, a figure wearing a rubber monster mask and two blue rubber claws arrives out of nowhere and begins to menace the bewildered couple. The “monster” catches up with Patel and claws him savagely, causing him to puke up some blood before biting the dust.

In a flashback, we see a young beauty named Kamini, an insatiable nymphomaniac and takes to anything on two legs to satisfy her burning lust. However, when she tries to make out with her brother-in-law, a pious sort, he responds by shooting her between the eyes! We then learn the history of the Haveli and how it came to be spooked by the vengeful spirit of a lustful seductress by the name of Kamini.

This would typically have been fine any other night of the year, but for this particular night as it is the dreaded Amavas ki Raat when those who die return to wreak untold havoc on those they despise. And so Kamini’s spirit swears revenge on the family. The latter was responsible for her death, but fortunately, a sagely Tantrik saves the day by capturing Kamini’s spirit and shutting her tightly into a bottle like a genie so that she can never quench her sordid desires. However, it isn’t long before the beastly Kamini manages to escape her bottle and returns to the old Haveli to settle the score with the family that destroyed her.

There is a bizarre twist as Kamini decides to use a body lying in the morgue to carry out her dastardly deeds. The trouble is that the body she chooses to possess has severe problems in that it was a body that was wrongly stitched up and is a woman from the torso and above but a man from below the waist!

This bizarre twist means that instead of lusting for men, now our Kamini, with her “endowment”, craves only nubile single young women. Kamini heads for the Haveli, where she starts to decimate a group of morons who have gathered to fulfil their carnal desires though ostensibly are at the premises for a picnic. The women are attacked brutally by Kamini, who turns into the rubber-masked monster with blue rubber claws and does her thing with horrifying efficiency. The sight of the masked rubber creature clad in a gorgeous, sexy black leather mini-skirt is one to behold as one of the most intriguing in recent monster movie history.

The movie throws all logic to the wind and events shaped to put as much bare female flesh on display as possible. There are some memorably cheap and smutty moments, like the bit when the rubber beast is strangling a bimbo, but the director’s cameraman and his lens remain fixated on close-up shots of her crown jewels! There is also a stunning head-spinning scene and a strangulation scene that seems to last an eternity. The acting is worse than ever witnessed before – on a par with Jeetu’s earlier and equally abysmal effort Khooni Ilaaka if perhaps a tad worse.

The new wave of Bollywood horror, in the hands of such directors as Jeetu, Baby, Tilak Raj and K.I. Sheikh indicates that the Ramsays, despite their numerous shortcomings, were comparatively a class act! Even the pretty dire Mohan Bhakri and The Talwars seem to be classy moviemakers compared to this lot – Come back, Tulsi and Shyam Ramsay, all is forgiven!

More impressive is that this film was enthusiastically embraced by audiences all over and was classified in 1998 as a big hit with overflowing profits. One of the most successful profit earners of the year and three similar cheap horror flicks, Murda, Shaitaani Aatma and Chandal. Unbelievable but true.