Vahshi Aatma (2001)

Vehshi Aatma is a film that by all accounts claims to be a horror film yet turns out to be that and so much more! It’s not a horror film and contains not a shred of an element of horror, fantasy or the supernatural.

The ultra-cheap film that looks no more than a home video begins with the inauguration of a much-hyped Drugs Awarness (sic) Centre. It is at the splendidly if bizarrely festive inauguration that we are introduced to a lad who has won the battle against drug addiction and has now turned into the countries leading anti-drugs crusader. He takes the opportunity to share with the audience “how it all happened – about his descent into a drug-induced hell”.

It all began in college, where the cherubic lad got his first taste of the nasty stuff courtesy of a bimbo girlfriend. Thrown somewhere into the mix is a grand scheme by some evil uncle’s to usurp his family’s ancestral Haveli that is in the hands of his elder sister. The evil plotters scheme is that by getting young Kiran madly addicted to drugs, his sister will have to pay huge bills when she seeks treatment and when things get too much for her, she will be forced to sell the house at a throwaway price. So there are various nasty bepaunched heavies each out to claim the Haveli as their own.

The film is hopelessly inept in every department – the acting is abysmal and the direction even worse. The songs are as risible as the stunning dance sequences that accompany them. The film’s posters market the movie as a horror film which is a total rip off as there isn’t the slightest element of horror (horrible yes, horror no) in this film. In the opening two minutes, the drug-addicted Kiran is menaced by four thugs wearing Halloween party rubber masks….surely not an attempt at horror!?

It’s a gruesomely hideous film of value only as an instrument of torture upon unwanted guests or as a test of ones own ability to withstand excruciating levels of pain. The end comes far too late. The audience has either passed out due to sheer boredom or left the theatre ages ago or pressed the eject button when the cheese value and the diabolical dubbing begin to reach overdose proportions.

What a truly dreadful experience this turgid film is – however it serves as yet another example of why the reputation and business of horror films plunged to the lowest depths in the ’90s, the era when the Ramsay’s, Bhakri and Talwar stopped producing their brand of terror. Talwar, at his worst, was still Hitchcock compared to the heaps of rotting excrement turned out by R.Mittal, R.Kumar, Tilak etc. This film is irredeemably horrendous and the worst thing about it is that despite its poster art, it isn’t even a horror film at all.