A demented insurance sales agent (Rajpal Yadav) barges into a couple’s afternoon love-making and creates horrific havoc, a wannabe actress (Mallika Sherawat) hitches a ride with a hot-shot director who wants to switch from family films to the horror genre, a professor (Amitabh Bachchan) looks into the mirror to see an eerie stranger.
Ram Gopal Varma’s Eye Scream is every bit as scary as you want it to be. There are chewable chunks when you fall off your seat. Elsewhere the doddering ghoul material topples over under the weight of grim pointlessness.
Fortunately the scare -snare is laid out with loads of tongue-in-cheek Hitchcockian humour! For example, the fat man in Sajid Khan’s story watches Darna Manaa Hai in an empty theatre.
Ram Gopal’s scare-fest could’ve been far more frightening if it had not tried to pack in so many stories into one scoop of eye-scream. Devil knows, there’re elements of genuine horror in the presentation.
Apparent ghosts turn out to be human-beings, while apparent human-beings turn into ghouls before the final fade-out of each short story. The sense of ongoing ambiguity is the narrative’s main asset.
The pick of the lot is the Mallika Sherawat –Anil Kapoor story (directed by Jiji Philips who directed Anil Kapoor in the whodunit My Wife’s Murder some time ago). Anil is a hotshot director called Karan Kapoor(??) who picks up a sexy hitch-hiker (Mallika Sherawat). The girl plays mind games with Kapoor all the way to Khandala. This segment is funny and scary. And also rather tragic.
Two of the stories end with their protagonists , Manoj Pahwa and Anil Kapoor, dying of heart failure after being scared by pseudo-ghosts. Just goes to show, shiver at your own risk
Humour in facts runs through all the stories. Whether it’s the furiously tongue-in-cheek prelude directed by Sajid Khan where a fat man(Manoj Pahwa) gorges his way through a screening of Ram Gopal Varma’s Darna Manaa Hai(very Hithcockian touch, that), then is scared out of his life in a graveyard.
Even the Bipasha-Arjun episode(the two look so well-matched together) has its moments of mirth. But the ghoulish element—the raison d’etre for these stories—get way out of hand with kids dropping dead as an old woman sits them down to tell them stories. Kids getting bumped off isn’t fun. Horror films are at the end of the day(or night) meant to assuage your fear of the unknown.
What the film’s seven directors do is to bring a kind of compulsive cohesiveness to the tale of the unknown. Lamentably the segment directed by Ram Gopal Varma featuring the mighty Bachchan falls short and hardest. Though Riteish Deshmukh stands up admirably well to the formidable competition.
Many of the other actors surprise you by their presence – Bipasha’s smouldering sensuality, Randeep Hooda’s startling intensity (as a man possessed), Rajpal Yadav’s manic portrayal of working-class dementia, and of course Mr Bachchan as a man who imagines he’s being stalked by an invisible entity.
At the end of the scare-fest you’re looking at a film with a profusion of talent. But not enough proof of the talent’s productivity .
Recalling the experience of doing the horror genre and episodic cinema for the first time. “It was just a day’s work. I remember I flew into Mumbai in the night , shot all day and the following night and then left Mumbai the next morning. Yeah, it was quite something. Ramu’s passion is to keep making films and to keep surprising people by doing unexpected things. He asked me to do this one segment in Darna…, and I did! It’s wonderful to have Ramu in the industry. He’s always up to something innovative. He takes up fresh challenges all the time and the end-result comes out looking good. His films are made within given budgets and are safe business-wise. It’s really creditable how Ramu conducts the business of film making.”
But it didn’t make much business sense for Mr Bachchan to have done Darna Zaroori Hai free of fee. “It’s true. Ab ek din ke kaam ke liye kya paise lenge?”
This is not the first film that Mr Bachchan worked gratis. He acted in Sanjay Bhansali’s Black without remuneration and put in a guest appearance in a Kannada film Amrithdhare free of cost. “Black, because it was a film I would’ve happily paid to be part of. And the Kannada film because a dear friend, you, asked me to. Yeh sab chalta rehta hai. Not worth discussing.”
He moves on. “Though I’ve done a supernatural thriller Rakeysh Mehra’s Aks , Darna Zaroori Hai is a hardcore horror. I had never done that before. It’s wonderful to work with a director who envelopes you in your thoughts and concepts. There’s a constant back-and-forth of ideas with Ramu. He often tells me how to do a scene differently from the way you’ve done it, so that it finally looks better. During Darna Zaroori Hai I had my own pre-conceived notions of how the scenes should be performed. Ramu thought it needed a slight correction. We did it his way…for the better.”
Mr Bachchan disagrees that the younger directors are nervous of correcting him. “Not at all. And if it was true it would be detrimental to the film. If he can’t tell me where I’m going wrong, he’s no director, just a project maker. Irrespective of my age and seniority I’m subject to the director’s authority once I take on a project. I’ve never given any director opportunity to feel I’m not open to instructions…Why only Ramu? I’d like to believe I share a compatibility level with all my directors. It’s just that he finishes a project fast and moves on to another. There’re some directors who come back with projects , others don’t.”
Darna Zaroori Hai was Mr Bachchan’s first segmented multi-story film. “I don’t think I’ve done something similar in the past. I’m petrified of horror films in real life. If there’s a horror film or serial on television I can quickly change channels. I saw Ramu’s Bhoot where a ghost kept appearing . I can’t tell you how tormented I was. For months afterwards every time I went to bed I imagined that woman from Bhoot would appear from nowhere, from under the bed or behind the curtain. Horror films do leave an impression. A lot of people enjoy horror films. I really admire their strength and guts. But filming Darna Zaroori Hai wasn’t at all traumatic. When you’re shooting horror you know the ‘ghost’ will have lunch with you during break. Besides there’re four hundred people on the sets so you’re quite secure.”
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