The faint of heart needn’t fret, even though there’s a lot of heart-gutting in this Friday’s attempted horror movie Ghost, starring Shiney Ahuja, Sayali Bhagat and the Russian actress Julia Bliss. The film, with its unflinching portrayal of blood, gore and cheap quality ketchup, has more unintentional humour than horror to offer, thanks to director Puja Jatinder Bedi’s obsession with the long redundant Ramsay brand of horror and to the assorted bunch of characters that intend to scare the life out of you, but tragically leave you laughing out loud. Hee…hee…hee!
Now, that wasn’t meant to be scary! Sayali Bhagat plays a doctor on duty at a hospital where gruesome murders take place at 3 am at night. The killer rips out the heart of its victims and leaves the mutilated dead bodies for the authorities to mull over. Enters a serious looking investigating officer (Shiney Ahuja) who, we are told, is very competent, but we discover later that he suffers from partial memory loss called retrograde amnesia. Not without reason, it turns out, for he has a link with the ghost that is now on a revenge spree.
And what a ghost it is: hair like they haven’t seen a comb for centuries; face like it just got dunked into a barrel of ketchup; and a voice that could pass off for a sheep’s bleat. But funnier than this ghost is a bearded character that symbolises both good and evil. It has a head half covered with Jesus’s crown of thorns, half with a devil’s horn; and with an evil owl on one shoulder and a white dove on the other.
To be fair, Puja Jatinder Bedi does manage to put together a few scary moments, like the anticipation that builds up prior to the murders in the hospital, but she makes a hodgepodge of the plot by throwing in needless songs and even a romantic track between Shiney Ahuja and Sayali Bhagat. In the thick of the investigations, the duo has a temperament to go clubbing and even shake a leg to a peppy song.
Shiney Ahuja, who is apparently no longer haunted by the ghost of his personal past, comes up with a lacklustre performance. Sayali Bhagat speaks her dialogues like some ghoul got into her and Julia Bliss is the one who walks away with our sympathy for having to undergo the smearing of hideous make-up. As the back story goes, her character was brutally beaten up and crucified.
In Ghost what we see is not just the crucifixion of a helpless girl, but of the horror genre on the whole.
Last word: Recommended for those who missed out on the unintentional laughter of the last week’s Players. This Ghost is funnier!
Rating: 1.5 stars out of 5
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