Therein probably lies the reason that many of the older Bollywood films, that many would consider B-grade, are worth investigating. Here I am foolishly trying to apply conventional film analysis to a Bollywood film, and what’s it doing? It’s screwing right out from under me. It can’t be pigeonholed and broken down like some piece of pre-fabricated, production line entertainment. They aren’t made that way. Earlier, I compared Wanted: Dead or Alive to Leone’s westerns and the Trinity films, and while those influences are definitely in this film, it is still a very different beast to those cited films. Fistful of Dollars never had mirror balls and chorus lines of cowboys grooving away to a disco beat.

I watched Rani Mera Naam in the only form that I could find it: on a DVD-R made from a wobbly, Greek-subtitled VHS tape. Although I know a lot of its dialog must be priceless, it is a film that requires no translation. For one thing, the silent movie level histrionics insure that you are never in doubt as to the characters’ feelings and intentions, and, furthermore, given the film’s mandate, those feelings and intentions are little more than a formality, anyway. What’s more, like all of Doss’s action films, the director’s signature combination of — and I’m going to say it again — cartoon-ish style and nonstop carnage is enough to leave you in a state of “did I just see that?” disbelief even in the immediate aftermath of watching it, thus making it a prime candidate for compulsive re-viewings.

As with many Bollywood spy films, Yakeen spends a great deal of the first half building up the family drama, which drags the story out a bit. But the second half flies along with a pretty tight little spy story, with some groovy incidental music and a show-stopping number by Helen in the ‘Club Ago Ago’ nightclub. It amused me to see that the swinging backing band during this scene was billed as ‘The Monkees’. After a slow start, Yakeen is an incredibly entertaining espionage adventure, and as someone who is still a novice at watching Bollywood films, I found it a refreshing change from the usual spy hijinx and tropes that I am used to seeing.

The film opens with the villain of the piece, who is simply referred to as ‘Boss’, watching as a woman madly flees from a house. In terror, she gets into a car and drives off at speed – excessive speed. She is driving so fast she cannot control the car and starts swerving across the road (this may be because her brakes lines have been cut — but don’t quote me on that). This comes to an end when she crashes through a stone barrier and drives off a cliff. Now how do we know that the man watching must be a villain. Well he is dressed in a hat and wearing sunglasses. Furthermore he is wearing ‘weird’ red gloves and is stroking a cat which he cradles under his arm. If that isn’t visual shorthand for ‘villain’, I don’t know what is.

When last we saw Dara Singh here at Teleport City, he was making his screen debut as the star of the dinosaur-rich 1962 Bollywood peplum King Kong. Flash forward several years to 1967, when Dara would make Trip To Moon, and we find a Dara Singh who has added quite a few jewels to his movie star crown. For one thing, he had appeared in over forty films by this point and had, in the process, become the undeniable king of Indian stunt films. He had played Tarzan, Hercules, Samson and numerous other loincloth-clad he-men, as well as James Bondian secret agents, Zorro-inspired masked vigilantes, and, of course, a fair share of swashbuckling pirates in frilly shirts. But one thing he had yet to play was a heroic, planet-hopping space adventurer. Trip To Moon, of course, would change all of that.

A serviceable if somewhat awkward masala adventure, very much in the spirit of old exploitation films that seek to teach us the perils of assorted alternative lifestyles even as they indulge in endless scenes of said lifestyle. Heck, even the confused message of the film is a throwback to the “have your cake and eat it too” style of cautionary exploitation films. In itself, that isn’t bad. But with a bit more work and a bit more willingness to question the convictions of his own character, Dev could have created something more along the lines of Joe, another film that revolves around an authoritarian figure (a father, in this case) seeking to “rescue” his daughter from a hippie lifestyle.

While, admittedly, some of my enjoyment of Khoon Khoon arose from the novelty of it being a Bollywood adaptation of one of my favorite films — just as it was with Inkaar, Raj N. Sippy’s reworking of Kurosawa’s High and Low — I also found it irresistibly watchable on its own terms. It is a taughtly-paced, rough-edged and deliciously trashy little thriller with all the garish accouterments I’ve come to love from 1970s Indian cinema. That it also turns that freaky, funky Bollywood funhouse mirror on an American classic is just the day-glo frosting on the cake. Okay, granted, the overwhelming feeling I brought away from it was a desire to watch Dirty Harry again. But since when is that a bad thing?

It’s far from competent, but it’s just close enough that it loses the magic. Don’t get me wrong — there’s plenty of stuff worth seeing in this movie, but there’s also plenty of stuff worth missing. This is a film for people already initiated into the ways of Harinam Singh, rather than a film that is going to convince you to donate your worldly possessions to the man and join his cult (in the cult’s defense, he will use your worldly possessions to finance another rubber mask monster movie). Luckily, Gumnam Qatil barely inches its way over the hour mark, so even when it gets bogged down in pointless exposition or scenes that don’t involve a guy dressed up as a skeleton or cute chicks in short skirts, it hardly sticks around long enough to overstay its welcome.

For me it was like witnessing the moment of impact between all of those things that provide me with some of my most profound movie-watching pleasures. In fact, had I known several years ago that I could be watching films that combined wrestling, men in togas throwing boulders, giant suitmation monsters, and Kumkum dancing frenetically to catchy Bollywood music, I probably never would have seen Mother India or Sholay in the first place. So it’s probably best for the sake of my film literacy that I didn’t. Instead, let’s just say that the broadening of my experience of Indian commercial cinema to include its products both high and low has deepened my appreciation for it considerably.

An obscurity like Love and Murder probably isn’t on the top of anyone’s list of films to hunt down and restore, but it’s nice to dream. The movie’s tale of an innocent trapped in a den of scoundrels is told with enough style and effectiveness to show that, despite its poverty row roots, a considerable amount of care went into its making. To my mind, it would be nice to see that care rewarded with a little retroactive TLC. Until then, we’ll just have to use our imaginations to fill in Love and Murder‘s gaps, while trying to get the most out of what there is left of it to enjoy.

I had pretty high expectations going into this film — not that it would be good, but that it would hilariously, confoundingly weird. And I was not disappointed. But I discovered that it was also actually pretty good. Sure, it’s crude. Yes, the special effects are more surreal than they are real. Certainly it’s schizophrenic. But realism seems to be the least of this film’s concerns. What it is, instead, is an incredibly energetic, offbeat, thriller that has one foot in The Evil Dead, the second foot in Hong Kong horror/action films, and a third foot in films like Alejandro Jodorowski’s Holy Mountain. Although it’s fun to watch it alongside previously mentioned piece of crap horror films, it’s nowhere near that level of incompetence. It makes sense, in it’s own batty way. But that’s the same way that vampires, demons, animated little skull bats, and demon tree rape make sense.

There’s almost a competent movie contained within the running time of Bhoot ke Pechhe Bhoot, though Kishan Shah never gets around to actually making it. Instead, what we get is another delirious, mangy looking low-budget Indian horror film featuring two store-bought monsters waving sparklers at the camera. I was pretty happy, though not quite as happy as I was with Shaitani Dracula. If Harinam Singh is the Harold P. Warren of Indian horror (Warren was the man behind one of my all-time favorites, Manos: The Hands of Fate), then Shah is definitely the Hershell Gordon Lewis: possessed of very little talent, but just enough to ensure that his films aren’t quite as cracked in the head enjoyable as Singh’s.