⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
India does A Nightmare on Elm Street and I ain’t gonna lie, I prefer this dumpster fire to Wes Craven’s integral slasher flick… but that’s just how my brain works. A crispy-faced demon with a recognizable glove torments pretty young Anita because her police officer father was responsible for his death. Anita has also caught the lustful eye of a scumbag rapist, so you can add that to the list of growing concerns. Her hunky boyfriend, Prakash, manages to offer some protection when he’s not singing about his love for her during sun showers but it’s harder to put a stop to a maniac who attacks people in their dreams… even if he is rockin’ a mullet and duster combo that makes him look like a woman-hating Twitter user with a knife fetish. Bad dreams keep visiting our hero and her friends and eventually people start dropping… it just takes a bit. The group of friends are forced to hold up in a hotel due to car trouble and that’s when we’re treated to the first murder. It’s just like Tina’s in Nightmare if Wes Craven was on a deadline that already passed and way more interested in musical numbers than horror set pieces. Anita’s papa is pissed-off about his daughter’s friend’s murder but he’s kinda been a distant asshole since the death of Anita’s sister seven years ago. This murder makes the dead girl’s boyfriend the prime suspect but, as anyone knows who has seen the movie this one is flagrantly stealing from, the suspect doesn’t last long in prison. Bollywood Freddy visits him one night and kills him with cobras. Anita warns her father of his oncoming death and he calls bullshit and tries to slap the crazy out of her but a phone call from the prison a few seconds later proves his daughter’s grim divination correct. As Anita tries to calm down, Prakash follows her father into a hidden room where he’s caught hiding the bladed glove and forced to reveal his dark secret. Shakaal is the name of the dream-haunting fiend and he terrorized the country for a good bit of time. He was a demon disguised as a human (albeit one ugly-ass human) and he had a penchant for kidnapping and sacrificing children to gain more dark power. One of those children was Anita’s little sis and that’s when papa delivered some fatal justice, sadly too late to save his darling daughter. Papa and Prakash go to dig up Shakaal’s corpse to destroy it for good but they fail miserably at their task and only succeed in bringing the monster-of-a-man back into this reality which is bad news for Anita. Uh oh! Way to go you two! A tantric warns of destruction coming to everyone Anita knows and loves but does provide the key to defeating the dream demon. It involves dismemberment and relentless attack. Anita gets possessed by the demon which is bad news for her would-be rapist. Good for Shakaal! Anita gets grabbed up to be a sacrifice and it’s up to papa, mama and her boy-toy to save the day and put Shakaal down for good in a climactic confrontation in Shakaal’s impressive dungeon temple. Dollar-store Michael Jackson impressions, a musical bit about the joy of picnics almost immediately following an attempted rape, some really catchy tunes, blatant copyright infringement, magically poor fight choreography, comedic hijinks (as usual, provided by Johny Lever playing multiple goofy characters) one cannot legally call “comedy”, dance club intermissions and a runtime that will test most people’s patience… I’d be pissing and moaning if it weren’t from my beloved India. There’s a lot of unnecessariness stretching out the runtime but if you’ve seen any film from this region you should be prepared for that. Think NOES but handled by someone who only had that film described to them by a good friend who was really drunk when they watched it. Another psychotronic treat from the Ramsay house of horror.
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