Census Bloodbath: Boom

Note: The only copy of this movie that I could access was in unsubtitled Tamil, so take my review with a huge grain of salt.

Year:
1981
Director:
Bharathiraja
Cast:
Kamal Haasan, Madhavi, Radha
Run Time:
2 hours 15 minutes

Plot: Tik Tik Tik follows photographer Dilip (Kamal Haasan, who also starred in this film's Bollywood remake, Karishmaa), who makes friends with a group of models and ends up dating one of them, Sharadha (Madhavi). When the models begin dying one by one, Dilip becomes the prime suspect. He strives to protect Sharadha and discover the identity of the real killer while avoiding the police.

Analysis: I have seen quite a few Indian slashers from the early 1980s at this point, and the majority of them are boring. While I can't say that I liked Tik Tik Tik either, it is certainly never boring.

The second half of the movie is something I can fully get on board with. It takes Indian cinema's habit of blending horror with the romance and musical genres and goes one step further by adding an action-crime component with a full-on James Bond villain thrown in for good measure (he doesn't have a cat, but he does roll around shirtless on a bed of diamonds, which is just as good).

The movie is over-the-top and kooky as hell once it really gets rolling. However, it takes a looooooong time for it to get to that point. The first hour is a real slog, for a multitude of reasons. This includes the erratic editing, which I think is supposed to build Dilip's photography into the visual schema of the movie by shoving in random still images. This almost never works, instead making Tik Tik Tik feel distracted and manic.

Also, the lead is an abrasive, bumbling, "don't take no for an answer," lecherous idiot. I was never once on his side, and it was tough to be asked to root for him on his two-hour-plus adventure. He never improves, it's just that the movie eventually adds enough other material to drown him out.

Another demerit for Tik Tik Tik is that, considering how many other subgenres it's balancing, it doesn't focus much of its time on being an effective slasher. While the erratic editing does result in a few genuinely horrific images (largely via superimposed shots that combine two of the movie's manic moments), there are no onscreen kills and the murder plot frequently takes a backseat to underbaked romance or flop-sweaty slapstick. 

Oh, and the musical numbers are pretty boring. They lack bombast and just kind of sit there taking up space.

All in all, I guess I wasn't furious that I watched it, but I don't think I would recommend it to anyone but the most slasher faithful among us.

Killer: Oberoi (Shamasundar L. Asrani) and His Henchmen

Final Girl: Dilip (Kamal Haasan) feat. Sharadha (Madhavi)

Best Kill: The ultimate death of the villain Oberoi is melodramatic as all hell. He swallows all the diamonds that he smuggled into the country (via the models that he has murdered) and shoots himself on the front steps as the police approach. It's quite a scene.

Sign of the Times: There are more corded phones in this movie than characters.

Scariest Moment: Sharadha is menaced by an underwater assailant while swimming in a pool.

Weirdest Moment: In one scene, every time Dilip moves his head to reveal the horse-themed shot glasses that are on the shelf behind him, there is a neighing noise on the soundtrack.

Champion Dialogue: N/A

Body Count: 7; give or take - it was not always easy to tell exactly what was happening, and to whom.

1. Sherley (Sarika Thakur of Sannata and Karishmaa) is killed offscreen.
2. Swapna is stabbed in the chest with a knife offscreen.
3. Radha is killed offscreen.
4. Ambulance Driver is killed offscreen.
5. Woman is shot in the back.
6. Goon is shot by the police.
7. Oberoi shoots himself in the head.

TL;DR: Tik Tik Tik is a kooky good time, but only after you slog through the first hour.

Rating: 6/10

Census Bloodbath: Paint Me Like One Of Your Final Girls

A Note: This movie was only available to me in unsubtitled Tamil, so obviously my review is to be taken with a few huge grains of salt. However, I have made a point of focusing only on visual styling, music, and slasher structure rather than plot, characters, etc.

Year:
1986
Director:
M.R. Bhoopathy
Cast:
Mohan, Revathi, Nalini
Run Time:
2 hours 13 minutes

Plot (according to a translated synopsis that matches up with what I saw): When women around town begin mysteriously dying at the hands of a killer wielding a lethally sharp palette knife, Inspector Vinoth (Nizhalgal Ravi) takes on the case and targets local painter Chandru (Mohan) as the prime suspect. Chandru's new girlfriend Annam Poornima (Revathi) finds herself caught in the middle.

Analysis: As Census Bloodbath continues plowing through the slasher movies of the 1980s, we're kicking off 1986 proper in December, and I can hardly think of a better way to mark that occasion than by starting with a review of the Indian slasher December Pookkal (December Flowers).

And by that, I am referring entirely to the title featuring the word "December," because otherwise, I have generally found that the vibe of the Indian film industry's output in the 1980s allowed for very few genuinely thrilling horror movies. While Cheekh and Haveli had their moments, for every mildly sparkly diamond you unearth, you find multiple grimly mediocre efforts like Sansani. Or Sannata. Or Saboot. Or, god help you, Moodu Pani. Are you catching my drift?

December Pookkal certainly follows in the footsteps of those latter titles when it comes to its quality as a slasher. Even though it has a nice giallo-esque touch by featuring a black-gloved killer with a unique weapon, its kills are infrequent, bloodless, and so elliptically edited that, while you're aware that the killer has a consistent M.O. (putting the sharp palette knife in the general vicinity of a victim's neck before striking), you never understand even once what actually happens to the victims.

Simply put, it's a shit slasher. Thankfully, it's not a half-bad musical dramedy. The choreography is quite lovely, in fact. Particularly when it comes to the first big romantic number. That sequence, which places Mohan and Revathi in a forest of towering trees, mimics the push and pull of the early stages of a romance in a way that is completely charming, if not entirely inventive.

The movie's innate sense of rhythm isn't limited to its musical moments, either. Both the laughs and the thrills benefit from a strong sense of timing. The comedy is mostly driven by the performers and their rat-a-tat back-and-forth line deliveries, while the thrills are elevated by the rhythmic editing that punctuates moments like an early torture scene and a disorienting party where Poornima gets overwhelmed as the dancing and drinking around her spin wildly out of control.

This all makes for an exceedingly pleasant watch. But don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that December Pookkal is some kind of masterpiece. I appreciate the kinda twisted romantic denouement and the fact that characters keep randomly getting hit by cars, but the slasher scenes are never anything more than boring, for one thing. And there are too many characters populating the periphery of this story, forcing the movie to stop dead whenever it periodically drags them back in.

It's just not quite a good movie, even though it approaches being one in a variety of ways. Certainly not one that's good enough to be worth overlooking the language obstacle for non-Tamil speakers.

Killer: Chandru (Mohan)

Final Girl: Annam Poornima (Revathi)

Best Kill: I usually abhor gun deaths in slashers, but the other deaths are so bland and samey. So I'm picking Chandru's demise, where he is shot by the police and subsequently milks his death throes, thrashing and squirming for what feels like a full minute and a half.

Sign of the Times: Two characters listen to a radio report via the biggest boom box I've ever seen.

Scariest Moment: Chandru and Poornima stroll along the beach while giant waves are crashing to the shore, and I became increasingly worried that they might get swept out by the tide.

Weirdest Moment: A character wanders into some sort of art collective/den of sins, where a dude is covered in fake cobwebs and a little person is poking the ceiling with a giant stick. 

Champion Dialogue: N/A

Body Count: 5; I think? The kill scenes weren't super legible, and my lack of understanding of the dialogue may have led me to misread a discrete kill as a flashback explaining the preceding one. But I'm pretty sure my count is correct.

1. Well Woman is stabbed in the neck.
2. Woman is drowned offscreen.
3. Shower Woman is stabbed in the neck.
4. Blue Dress Woman is stabbed in the neck.
5. Chandru is shot.

TL;DR: December Pookkal is a reasonably charming Indian musical drama, but offers very little in the realm of slasher fun.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 839

Census Bloodbath: Run Of Tamil

Year: 1980

Director: Balu Mahendra

Cast: Prathap Pothen, Shobha, Malasia Bhaskar

Run Time: 2 hours

There is a slight issue I come across sometimes in my journey to watch every single slasher movie released during the 80's: foreign countries like to make movies too, and sometimes if you want to watch a slasher released in a language you don't speak over 40 years ago, you have to take what you can get. And sometimes subtitles aren't a part of that package. So it's entirely possible that the screenwriter of the Indian Tamil-language film Moodu Pani (AKA The Mist) is the next Shakespeare. We're not here to review the story today, we're here to look at the 1980 porto-slasher as a purely cinematic and visual object, which is kind of the point anyway, wouldn't you say?

...This still might not be the best movie to do that with.

Moodu Pani is another "hero killer" movie, like that same year's Maniac, centering around the psychology of its twisted protagonist Chandru (Prathap Pothen). Chandru hates women because his dad cheated on his mom, as far as I can tell. I will give that motivation the benefit of the doubt that maybe it's given more layers in the actual dialogue. But, knowing the state of the slasher film in this period, it probably doesn't. Anyway, he either is a taxi driver or frequently poses as a taxi driver (because he also works on a film set at one point, though never again), and he visualizes many of the women in his car as his dad's mistress and attempts to strangle them. There's also a woman who spends a full hour of the movie sitting on a porch chatting, and he's in love with her for some reason so he kidnaps her, leading to a prolonged series of escape attempts. 

To be fair, I would probably be just about as confused about the plot if I could understand everything.

The film would probably be much more successful at delivering any kind of atmosphere if its killer wasn't one of the most milquetoast screen presences in the history of cinema. Pothen plays Chandru like a stammering geek, and while I understand this approach is meant to highlight the vastness of the evil living inside him, the (infrequent) killings are staged in a way that highlights their artificiality and don't pack the visceral punch of something like Maniac. That said, I could at least understand a woman initially trusting Chandru, rather than Joe Spinell's Frank in Maniac.

There are only two moments where Chandru seems like an interesting cinematic figure in any way, and both of them use the same technique to heighten the fright. Chandru seems to get stuck on a single phrase, begging a character for something he wants, repeating the same words over and over and over in an increasingly shrill plea. It's an outward expression of how he gets stuck inside an obsession and compulsively must act out his urges no matter what anybody around him thinks.

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to cut this review a little shorter than I prefer, because there's literally nothing else about Moodu Pani to talk about. Other than the novelty of being made in India, which has a gorgeous landscape and architectural tradition, the film has absolutely zilch to look at. It's understandably low budget, considering it doesn't even have the backing of the Bollywood machine, which wasn't as flush with cash in 1980 as it is now. But there isn't even a single angle the camera takes that makes a choice beyond merely staging the action in the center of the frame, lit with even, sanitized sitcom brightness. 

It also does the thing that some Indian musicals do where they only justify shoehorning in music numbers during diegetic performance moments, which limits the fantastical inspiration that they usually are capable of exhibiting. While Moodu Pani has a performance or two, it couldn't really be classified as a musical in the way that the Hindi slasher entry from 1980 - Saboot - could. This prevents the film from wasting even more time, because those numbers wouldn't have been any good, but as such it lacks even the basic spark of joy that something like Saboot's swoony romantic number during a search for the corpse of the singing woman's father.

Killer: Chandru (Prathap Pothen)

Final Girl: Blue Shirtdress Girl, who if I had to guess based on who gets top billing is probably Rekha (Shobha)

Best Kill: Pass. But if I had to choose, as my article word count demands, I suppose the first strangling, which is rendered amusing by the fact that the lady's hands somehow end up super bloody despite her not being stabbed.

Sign of the Times: Chandru is rocking the mustache, clear glasses, ring tee vibe.

Scariest Moment: In one scene, a character is talking to Chandru but their voice is drowned out by a screeching in his own head.

Weirdest Moment: Again, maybe I'm misinterpreting events, but Chandru appears to solicit a prostitute via a six-year-old pimp.

Champion Dialogue: N/A

Body Count: 2

1. Yellow Sari Woman is strangled.
2. Brown Dress Woman is strangled.

TL;DR: Moodu Pani is a movie I didn't get to experience in full due to a lack of subtitles, but I don't think it would have made much difference in me finding it aggressively bland.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 899