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Koi Aane Ko Hai…
Rating: Poor
The Koi and the Anna/Jaana here is supposed to curdle your blood in your veins, but instead, this bizarre exercise ends up in boiling it because of its dangerous content and trite treatment. As a result, what is meant to be ‘horror’ peters out to be ‘horrible’, indeed!
And it is dangerous because it is being packaged as ‘Truth’! That’s how in the beginning itself, some humdrum gentleman comes on the screen and glaring awkwardly into the camera says, ‘I am Chawla’ and then goes on to stake a claim as to the yarn that follows being a true one and having occurred before his own eyes.
This kind of thing is criminally irresponsible and a crafty attempt to con the viewers into accepting the corny mumbo-jumbo that goes in here as a true story. It’s ethically criminal because it seeks to substantiate and authenticate superstition and blind faith in an audience, whose mindset is, most unfortunately, already ridden with these plagues.
Indeed, just because someone rises to say ‘Hey, I am so and so and I saw ghost in my neighbour’s loo, last night’, doesn’t make it truth. Actually, there are n numbers of instances whereby such claims have been found to be phoney figments of imagination or downright mischief, on scrutiny. What have the makers done to ensure the authenticity of such wayward claims? Did they have any scrutiny, any research done? Did they try to deduce ‘the real’ Truth from the ‘professed’ Truth before letting it loose on a highly gullible multitude of viewers? Did they employ any rationalist to expose the hocus-pocus or put these claims to some empirical tests?
Apparently, they have done nothing of the sort!
Because it is the same old hat about ghosts entering bodies like they were some Model Town flats and then those winds slapping tress, things quaking and falling all over for no rhyme or reason, and, of course, the mandatory Lobaan smoke curling in from all across.
All of this can still hold your attention, even be entertaining, if done with loads of imagination (Horror is, after all, a known genre of entertainment). Even the Ghost stories are fine for a thrill – but mind you, for a thrill only and not for the corroboration or propagation of the supernatural gibberish, which is what this dunce series sets out to do.
What happens here is that Suhasi, a middle-class girl, has got married and is now travelling by the train in a journey to her Sasural. It is night and pat comes the fright. A Bhootni is after her (why, o’ why?)
The thermos flask vanishes and the bride is thirsty. She makes towards the washroom and suddenly, the ghost appears to her as a shrivelled old hag sobbing inconsolably. Then it disappears and reappears immediately as one Mrs. Rawat, supposedly travelling with the Baraat. What kind of a ghost is that to be playing such hide & seek and fancy dress changes from a tattered Dhoti as the hag to a nicely decked housewife.
Anyway, this madam ghost continues with her little games later on too with Suhasi and then, one day possesses her body as if on a new Leave & License contract. The results are so pathetically predictable – Suhasi breaks into those weather-beaten convulsions (remember Exorcist?), arching her body upwards in the air and then thudding back on the bed. There is also the superstitious junk of lemons suddenly turning rotten, coconuts drying, gusty wings flapping and so tiresomely on and on and on.
It’s all so hopelessly, ‘Déjà vu’!
You’ve seen it all any number of times and that too, without courtesy Mr. Chawla and without the pompous claims of truth being tagged to it.
And while the goings-on are clichéd, the persons acting them out are Wax-museum pieces. The young leads need a crash course in speech, diction and emoting – they are so wooden that you gape at the wisdom (or the lack of it) of those who have plonked them bang before the cameras to make such a sorry spectacle of themselves. The supporting cast also just goes through their motions listlessly, playing those cardboard characters.
Technically, too, the entire drill is strictly humdrum with even director Santram, who has shown some flashes in a couple of his past works, coming out as a flat tyre here that just cannot wheel this inanity to any destination whatsoever.
As a true happening, it is, of course, bogus and as a pure horror flick, it is banal and an out and out damp-squib. The production house has long had Kitchen-circus as their stock-in-trade and now they have replaced it with Horror-circus this time. But once again their strange obsession with the decadent persists and instead of the decadent values projected in their earlier breast-beating dramas, they are now selling decadent occult myths.
We hope the viewers can call their bluff, so that soon ‘Koi Aane Ko Hai’ becomes ‘Koi Jaane Ko Hai’…
Mercy be!
- VB
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