31 Days of Asian Horror: Kaal (2005)

Written and directed by Soham Shah, Kaal follows the story of a group of wildlife experts trying to collect information about a string of attacks and deaths that are attributed to a man-eating tiger.

Whether intentional or not, Kaal is a campy thriller that tries to be scary and doesn’t accomplish any of that with overacting and a generally terrible plot. The story takes a while to get going, and really only jumps into actual tension and intrigue towards the latter half. The problem with this is that the movie is over two hours long, forcing you to trudge through an hour of random bickering, not-so-great characters, and overdone jump scares that attribute nothing to the overall story. It takes a while to be somewhat interesting, and that’s only after the turn. The movie is just not good enough to dedicate that amount of time and falls flat even when it starts to get sort of interesting.

The tigers used in the film are real, opting to not use any sort of computer-generated ones, which is a slight bonus to the overall story. The movie spends a lot of its time in this area of trying to be a solid thriller, but unintentionally going over into the campy horror side and using the tigers worked a little bit more to ground a lot of it when dealing with those scenes, even if the rest of the movie didn’t follow suit. I wanted a fun creature feature but was left with a boring 2-hour movie, that didn’t go anywhere and takes itself well too seriously.

Kaal is currently streaming on Netflix.

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31 Days of Asian Horror: Betaal (2020)

Today’s drama is the short Netflix series, Betaal. Produced by American film studio Blumhouse with India’s Red Cillies Entertainment, the 2020 series was written and directed by Patrick Graham. A military unit is dispatched to settle a dispute between a remote village and a construction company regarding a closed tunnel. Despite warnings from locals, the tunnel is opened unleashing evil spirits.

What makes Betaal unique is how it uses spiritualism and folklore with the intrusion of modern day society. For years the locals have been able to live peacefully with their rituals helping contain the curse in the mountain and it isn’t until a commercial contractors greed unleashes the evil. This also plays into the spirits themselves as they are much closer in appearance and to that of modern zombies. The difference between the two sides makes for a really interesting first episode, and I was really excited to see how it was going to play out throughout the series. However, this doesn’t carry over for most of the series. All the locals are gone by the time the tunnel opens, and we don’t come back to them.

Even with the intrigue of the new take Betaal falls flat. The plot is kind of messy, it’s largely boring with storylines that go on and feel like needless filler and the reveal of the truth behind the zombies just doesn’t live up to what it could have been. I also felt that there was some weirdness in direction, as there are times when the group would be serious and the acting fine, with other times almost purposeful campiness and weird line delivery. The series is relatively short, which helps a bit, but on the whole feels like it would have been better as a movie, especially it focused more on the butting of heads of modern vs tradition and less exposition. That being said, I do think it’s worth giving a shot. With the episodes being about 45 minutes apiece, it’s a fine way to spend an afternoon and an interesting new look at the zombie genre.

Betaal is streaming on Netflix.

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31 Days of Asian Horror: Agyaat (2009)

I’ll admit, I’ve watched little to no Indian/Bollywood dramas or movies, and Agyaat is definitely the first horror for me to run across. I figured I’d give it a try because it fit today’s theme (Film Maker Tuesdays) and wanted to branch out of my comfort zone in where I usually watch for Asian horror. Netflix has sort of a sizable collection of Indian movies and dramas on their site, so it was pretty easy for me to find something that seemed interesting.

Directed by Ram Gopal Varma, Agyaat is set in the jungle where a film crew is working on a project. The lead male actor is over the top and conceited, the crew largely consists of amateurs, and there become several problems that effect the shoot which causes the group to have several days of free time. They decide to tour the jungle during this downtime where the meet an entity that starts killing them one by one.

I’m not going to lie to you, it was pretty hard to watch this movie in the very beginning. It was largely boring for me and I ended up zoning out for a long time before realizing I was still watching it. I do like the idea of what the movie was trying to do in the beginning, as it was deliberately campy so that when the entity starts to kill the tension ramps up, but for the most part none of the characters were likeable or interesting enough for me to care whether they died or not and just generally felt apathetic about caring. And usually that doesn’t bother me, I don’t have to like a person to be able to follow them, but no one was even interesting. I think the problem was that’s all we were doing for 40 minutes, rehashing and drilling in what type of people this group was, when it didn’t need it to spend that much time setting it up. Especially when they were deliberately one-dimensial caricatures.

I do think when the movie finally started to get into the horror is where it started to settle into the story and I was able to enjoy it a lot more, but it took too long to get there. The first half barely even had the mention of the spirit/thing that hunted in the jungke. Almost every “scare” came from the movie they were shooting. Even when the movie finally became a horror movie it mirrored the first part in that it was the same kind of thing over and over with out very much payoff. The intrigue of the entity wasn’t enough to keep me fully invested and while you could see where it was supposed to go, it just wasn’t getting there. There were a lot of missed moments that could have helped flesh out the script more and make this more of an appeal, but in the end it fell flat.

Agyaat is currently streaming on Netflix.

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