Well! Well! Well! Many may wonder why I am such a late entrant to review this awful/awesome movie at this unearthly hour - so the story goes that I am new joinee and had to start somewhere, so why not from apna Bollywood. I managed to catch this pretty recently at home on a DVD - Sorry but Canada doesn’t boast about many theatre complexes screening Hindi films except Toronto (Albion and Woodside if I am not mistaken)
Ram Gopal Varma tries his level best (and yes! .. He succeeds too albeit sometimes) to feature in a certain league of film-makers who dare to think beyond the menacing tales of shaadi-byah etc. kind of movies that have succeeded in nothing but failure to strike a chord with the next-gen. Off-beat films like Satya that dealt with a very crude handling of the under-world that Indian metros have been facing for quite sometime now was and will remain a definite plus on his CV apart from other memorable flicks that I either don’t remember or don’t intend to mention.
But puhleez! Taking inspiration (like Bappida mujik adopt korta hoi!) from the Sholay’s Gabar theme ’ jo dar gaya ?’ - DMH does not come any where close to any such genre; it scared me, not in the real sense but in the sense that people like RGV can term this as entertainment. Also the DMH so-called virus didn’t work well, as it intended to, on my PC due to some server settings which helped me see that this is a running application and my Windows has not crashed! Good Lord help those who might have gone numb seeing the devastating scene when Windows throws that exception and a HEX address and the DOS screen that ’pretends’ to wipe out your drive contents - but nevertheless, it was a new idea never encroached upon my someone before and yes ? a novel theme depicted in the fiml too. Full marks to the makers who came up with a un-conventional plot of converting the story-telling act employed by Dadi-Nani for their grand-children to a commercial film.
Performances-wise: Most of them were upto the mark and were perhaps paying some sort of tribute to RGV for introducing them to filmdom (andar ki baat: kisiko paise nahi mile b’coz sabka cameo-like role tha). Vivek’s confidence, the guilt creeping on face of the Teacher (I forgot his name ? dah!) for a crime he committed in the early years, the deadly smile of Sanjay Kapoor (aati nahi fame), the cute-after-the-killing smile of Saif and Boman Irani’s timeliness deserves a mention here. The scenes of Sohail and Antara failed to scare and hence failed to set the context of the otherwise brilliant components of the film.
I guess they should have paid more attention towards the sequence of episodes to first build up the environment and then proceed forward. The apple seller (also seen in Main Madhuri banna ?) also made good faces and tried to scare Shilpa aunty but not me. The last twist of the movie - the surprise package ’Sushant’ in the form of owner of the hut in the jungle does pretty good justice to his role by acting weird and sticking to his mantra - jo dar gaya, samjho mar gaya OR should I say - jo dar gaya aur mujhe pata chala, woh maar dala gaya!!
Negative marks awarded to Aftab (please someone go and tell him about the hazaar haters he has amongst the audience), Isha Koppikar (she is fit to do Girlfriend and Khallas; please acting karna band karo), Antara and Sohail were just about okay. Also the rest of characters along with the jungly troupe headed by Sameera-man pissed me off!
The rest of story-tells aka Sameera Reddy and the one who drives the jeep justified their roles, though Sameera donned as if she is the hero of the whole troupe! Channel [V] VJ needs to get into the skin of the character to be able to deliver a performance capable of noticing him in the crowd if not getting him an applause. The stars mentioned above did manage to come out of their usual setting and tried well to gel in the individual characters.
Music was so so and garishly loud (not for me fortunately but for those who might have ventured into the theatres with Dolby sound systems; I guess most of cinema halls in Mumbai boadt to have this system, please correct me if I am wrong; ek arsa ho gaya, Mumbai ke theatre mein film dekhe hue) but the songless theme of delivering did work here though I can’t imagine Bollywood films without the usual songs routine though I myself loathe the idea of 40+ actors romancing their daughters’ age or half-age heroines skimpy dressed and running here and there in an effort to dance.
The absence of such stuff made it look more serious and that look prevailed throughout the film; adding to this the night setup in the jungle also gave the film its required eerie look and feel. Not to mention the look and feel of the costumes/design of the actors also was different so yes - you have your say - it was certainly different and perhaps brings with itself a new genre of film-making and entertainment and I am harmonize the same.
Overall: good performances by some, even gr8 novel theme but overall ’too many characters TRIED to spoil the broth’ - certainly recommended if you’re alone and its raining outside (used to happen to me always when I was in college and got semester vacations, dad used to be out of station - Navy), mom used to either read from her collection or sleep or listen to FM stations while I was left to myself - one such incident happened with one of female cousins who happened to ’utilize’ this time by watching RGV’s Kaun starring Urmila -she got so scared that sounds resembling knocks on the door used to make her shudder and she happened to call me and one of my other cousins to her house till her parents got home! (we used to stay in adjoining bungalows) I still remember the way she tried her level best to conceal the fear and the way we both were trying to conceal the erupting contagious laughter that was developing within us owing to the sequence of occurrences and ofcourse her weird facial expressions. Had a hell of a gr8 time that day!!
BTW, RGV is planning to make a sequel to DMH called ’Darna Zaroori Hai’ - now he’s contracdicting what he portrayed in this movie but nevertheless waiting to see how the product turns out to be.
Yeh public hai yeh to sab janti hai: kindly review the above review, rate and let me know how my first baby steps fared! If not very well, will like to know your comments/suggestions/criticisms to improve.
Just to mention: I didn’t have time to go thru’ the individual reviews posted by Msians before me for this film; kindly ignore any attempts that may look like copyright violation - I certainly am not in that category and believe in ’sweat of thy brow’. So kindly ignore any such repetitions that you may see in the above review. Thanks in advance!