GHOST Review

Ghost is a Hindi horror film that opened this last Friday only in India. Normally, this is a film I wouldn't be able to review simply because I had no access, however a company called Mela has struck a deal to release select films on VOD in the US day and date with India. It's a pretty neat deal, unfortunately, Ghost is a massive disaster that straddles the line between bad and "so bad it's good".

Ghost is the story of a series of gruesome murders taking place in a hospital. The victims are all horrifically disfigured and their hearts ripped out when they are eventually found. Into this mess steps a surprisingly attractive doctor named Dr. Suhani (no first name is ever given), played by Sayali Bhagat, who turns in an early contender for the most wooden performance of 2012. Detective Vijay Singh, played by Shiney Ahuja in a comeback performance after having been acquitted of rape in 2010, is called in to check out the case. They fall in love, sort of, cue the songs, etc...

In all honesty, the first hour and a half of the film are mind-numbingly boring. Nothing really happens apart from a few murders and a lot of talking. We get a few fleeting glances of some sort of supernatural creature, and a few references to someone called Mary, but nothing else to really go on. Dr. Suhani and Vijay carry on with a brief love affair, which leads to the aforementioned song and dance segments, ever so clumsily crammed in-between dismemberments and eye gougings. There is also some tension between Vijay, who is a grown ass man, and his father who expects him to take over the family business rather than solve "petty robberies". There is also a brief detour in the form of a televised adventure reality show in which Vijay is shown, but of which he has no memory. It all adds up to a lot of extremely clunky foreshadowing that can in no way be parsed without extensive exposition, that's where Bollywood comes in...

The last half hour of Ghost is a minor masterpiece of camp horror cinema. Vijay, it turns out, had amnesia after being conked on the head. From there, the film turns into an extended flashback sequence featuring Vijay and an Australian woman, surprisingly named Mary, falling in love, getting married, and then getting jumped outside the chapel. It all goes downhill from there.

I had given some consideration to making this review spoiler free, but fuck it, if I don't spoil some things, you'll never understand my affinity for it. It turns out that Vijay wed Mary against his father's wishes, and rather than telling his son that he disapproved, the elder Mr. Singh ordered a hit on Mary. He tells his henchmen to beat Mary senseless with lashes and crucify her, which they do. They fucking crucify her. Seriously.

Upon her discovery in a local wooded area, the paramedics take Mary to the hospital.  Guess which one. Her near lifeless corpse is wheeled into the emergency room where she is declared brain dead, except that her damned heart won't stop beating, even after she's stopped breathing. The phenomenon stuns all of the doctors and her beating enrages the Australian consulate, who insists on an investigation. All the while, Mr. Singh is worried that as long as the girl lives, he'll never get his son back, so he orders the head of the hospital to knock her off by removing her heart. At first the Hippocratic oath stops the doctor, but a few rupees go a long way in this film, and not only does he kill her, he has a local meat vendor butcher her like a lamb, remove the heart, and replace the body. Nice.

Eventually, the hospital's director is cornered in his own morgue by the cops who've found out the truth, and intend to run him in. However, he's having none of it. He runs, only now, he's got a ghost on his trail, why she didn't just kill him first is anyone's guess. What follows is a ludicrously shot and staged chase scene involving a couple dozen "ghosts" in the worst make ups I've ever seen. It is amazing. My wife, who only sat down with me for the last twenty or so minutes, was dying of laughter as we both were nearly in tears from this incredible sequence.

As the film ends, our villain is chased from the hospital out to the adjoining road where he is confronted by.... Jesus! Yes, Jesus. Jesus wants to punish the good doctor. Rather than being smitten by The Lord, doctor sahib asks to be fed to the pigs. Oh, did I fail to mention that was a small group of feral pigs nearby? There is a small group of feral pigs nearby. Jesus, being the big hearted soul he is, grants the doc his final wish and the film ends with the doctor being eaten by pigs, Mason Verger style, and the ghost of Mary giving Jesus a hug. End credits.

Are you shitting me?

It took me three days to finish this goddamned movie. It was fucking terrible for all but the last thirty minutes of that experience, but the end of this movie kicked into overdrive and damn near saved the whole experience!  The film looks and sounds cheaply made, just the sort of thing that an accused rapist has to do in order to get back on Bollywood's radar. However, there is beaucoup WTF going on, and it all comes together in a blissful explosion of crazy on the back end.

I cannot begin to describe all of the bizarre stylistic choices made in this film. First of all, any scenes of violence are shown in blown out negative, rather than in color, seemingly to appease the CFBC, the Indian censor board. However, apparently that didn't even work as the CFBC mandated cuts in the film in order to get it an A rating which means that it can show in theaters. There were scenes too gruesome for the film that had to be taken out. You couldn't really even see what was going on in the gore scenes, so now I'm really curious as to what isn't there.  In addition, the ghost is a cross between Avatar, a spider, and a burn victim with '80s styled crimped blonde hair. She peeks out from everywhere from the ceiling, to the doorway, and in the end there are no less than two dozen ghosts dangling from the ceiling in the lobby of the hospital. Amazing stuff.

What really got me was Jesus, though. The film opens with a bunch of scripture running as a scroll at the bottom of the screen. It was like Dr. Bronner got a hold of the chyron and started typing. It made no sense at the front end of the film, but as time went on, um, it still didn't really make any sense. Dr. Suhani, who drops out of the film about 2/3 of the way in even more suddenly than she dropped out of this review, makes frequent allusions to religion, but insists she's not a Christian. In the middle of one of the murders, the ghost is accompanied by, I shit you not, zombie Jesus/Satan. It was incredible and the kind of thing you can't unsee. I couldn't take screen shots, so I took the below photo with my camera phone. Holy. Shit.

The madness and ineptitude on display in Ghost is perfect fodder for the fans of "so bad it's good" cinema, and you know who you are. The insanity of the film only getting bigger and better as time goes on. I can't imagine this film will come to the States anytime soon, but when it does, it might be time to crack open a few brews, invite over some friends, and get ready to watch their brains explode. Ghost is fucking TERRIBLE, but I can't get it out of my head. Have I already encountered this year's Gandhi to Hitler? I don't know, but it is sure as shit leading the race.

On a lighter note, apparently Mela has got some other day/date deals working for this year, so hopefully I'll get to see more Hindi new releases in my own home, so look out for those reviews to come, as well as a series on classic Indian action and masala films to blow your minds. See you then!