Desi Ghost Busters:
This one’s for film lovers, written and directed by aficionados of B-horror flicks—right from Hollywood Halloween zombie and stoner movies to trashy Indian horror films, so awful that they have become cults, to the creepy supernatural TV series. If you blink while watching Phone Bhoot (title borrowed from Hollywood thriller Phone Booth), you miss a visual or aural reference to an Indian or American movie. Dhaaba Raam Se appears in shining neon during an action sequence between bhootnis, and the immortal Raka from Ramsay Brothers’ Purana Mandir has an important guest appearance.
The two leads in the film directed by Gurmmeet Singh are good-for-nothing horror movie devotees, Galileo ‘Gullu’ Parthasarathy (Ishaan Khattar) and Sherdil Shergill aka Major (Siddhant Chaturvedi), who live in an apartment that it a horror shrine, with an effigy of Raka, whom they rescued from a film studio, taking pride of place.
A bhatakti aatma (wandering soul), Ragini (Katrina Kaif), figures out that the two can see dead people, and wants their help. But first, after a start-earning-or-else ultimatum from their fathers, they start a ghost-busting business, calling it Phone Bhoot. The success of their endeavour worries the powerful tantric Atmaram (Jackie Shroff), who dangles moksha (salvation) before the undead, to make them commit murders and robberies for him. His sidekicks Rahu and Ketu are tasked with the job of getting Gullu and Major into his lair so that the rivals can be eliminated.
The plot, such as it is it wafer-thin, and the gags look like hard work, but some of the lines (Jasvinder Bath, Ravi Shankaran Raj are credited as writers, but a lot of throwaway quips sound ad-libbed) do raise a chuckle. Nothing is spared the horror-afflicted gaze – there is a Lady Dayana (Nidhi Bisht) whose power is in her plaits (TV watchers would recognize where this comes from), and there is a Chikni Chudail (Sheebe Chaddha) with feet turned backward. In a funny piece of self-parody, Ragini tries to teach the Bengali chudail to pronounce moksh and gives up with an exasperated, “Tumhari Hindi weak hai, kya?”
The hat-tips, nods, in-jokes just never stop. Ragini chasing after Chikni gasps, ‘How far will you run, you have reached Lahore!” and the theme of Veera Zaara pipes up.
“You think you are heroes?” says Aatmaram to the young men. “The original was in 1983.” And he plays the Hero theme tune on the flute.
Katrina Kaif uses her own, much-criticized ad of a mango drink, to seduce Gullu and Major. To subdue a Tamil spirit, Gullu shows her a picture of Rajinikanth.
And this is just skimming the surface. The production design and VFX team must have fun on this one. The actors—Jackie Shroff in particular— are in on the adolescent humour and deliver without trying too hard.
Would it amuse or make sense to those who are not prepared for an in-built movie quiz? Hard to say. Because without all that OTT cleverness, Phone Bhoot is an unstructured, make it up as you jumble. Just like the Ramsay Brothers horror movies, this one goes straight into the so-bad-it’s a hoot pile.
(A slightly modified version of this piece first appeared in scroll.in)
