Purana Mandir (1984)

... aka: Old Temple, The

Directed by:
Shyam Ramsay
Tulsi Ramsay

Starting with 1972's Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche (“Two Yards Under the Ground”), the Ramsay family, which includes father / frequent producer F.U. Ramsay (who “presented” / backed many of the films) and SEVEN sons (Shyam, Tulsi, Kiran, Gangu, Kumar, Arjun and Keshu Ramsay) who worked in various capacities on these films, began a horror film legacy in their home country that lasts to this very day. Among their cumulative credits are over 30 genre films and the popular TV series Zee Horror Show. Many outside of India have never even heard of the Ramsay clan nor seen one of their films. I too was one of those people before this fell into my lap. To be honest, I've purposely avoided Indian / Bollywood cinema until now because I've heard certain things about them which just didn't appeal to me. I've heard they're corny as hell. I've heard they're overlong. I've heard they are often structurally all over the place. I've heard that each film, regardless of genre, injects musical numbers and dancing into the works whether it melds with the plot or not. While the Ramsay family are fairly well-known in India, what they were churning out in the 70s, 80s and 90s was pretty much considered lowest common denominator entertainment in Bollywood.

A theatrical hit in its homeland, Purana Mandir (which translates to The Old Temple, though "The Old Palace" may have been more appropriate) was co-directed by brothers Shyam and Tulsi, written by Kumar Ramsay and shot by Gangu Ramsay. Arjun Ramsay was the associate director, Shyam was the editor, Tulsi was the production designer and the sound was by Kiran Ramsay. The producer is Kanta Ramsay (Kanta meaning “beautiful” or “desirable” in Hindi), who is perhaps the Ramsay matriarch or a Ramsay sister or the wife of one of the Ramsay brothers. Maybe I'll eventually figure it out. The only one who appears to have been a no show on this particular production was Keshu.

Things begin 200 years ago in the city of Bijapur. King Hariman Singh (Trilok Kapoor), his daughter and their guards are heading through the woods at night when they encounter the fanged, clawed, forest-dwelling demon Samri (Ajay Agarwal). Samri quickly gets to work slaughtering the men and also gets his hands on the princess. Direct eye contact with the particular demon results in eyes bleeding and turning white in an idea likely swiped from Horror Express (1972). Samri is eventually apprehended and brought before a tribunal, where he's convicted of raping virgins, killing and drinking the blood of children, grave robbing, feasting on corpses and other crimes so bad “even Satan would shun” him. Defying the advice of an old holy man, the king orders the creature's body be buried behind his palace and the head be placed inside a chained trunk with the Holy Trident of Shiva on top, which will then be bricked up inside a hidden chamber. Prior to the execution, Samri curses the king and tells him that as long as his head and body remain separated all of the female heirs in the family will die during childbirth, but if his head and body are somehow reunited, he will put an end to the king's dynasty altogether. I guess damned if you do, damned if you don't with this particular demon!

A series of kings come and go over the years and the palace is eventually vacated altogether and lost to the sands of time. Ranvir Ajit Singh (Pradeep Kumar), the king's last-living descendant, is a wealthy, important man who lives in a mansion in Bombay with his spinster sister Damyanti (Ashalata Wabgaonkar) and his beautiful teen daughter Suman (Arti Gupta). Suman is fast becoming a woman and Ranvir fears that if she falls in love, gets married and becomes pregnant she will die... just like his mother, who gave birth to him, and his wife, who gave birth to Suman. Suman knows nothing about the curse but she does know that her father doesn't want her to date anyone. Unbeknownst to him, she's been sneaking around with the handsome Sanjay (Mohnish Bahl) behind his back and has fallen for him despite the fact he comes from a poor family. Once Ranvir discovers what's going on, he attempts to pay off Sanjay to leave his daughter alone, but he refuses. He then has his bodyguards beat him up and whip him but Sanjay's karate-fighting (!) best friend Anand (Puneet Issar) shows up to save him.

Realizing that his attempts to keep the two young lovebirds apart is a battle he's going to lose, Ranvir decides to come clean about the family curse and the palace where the demon is buried. That prompts Suman and Sanjay, accompanied by Anand and his wife Sapna (Priti Sapru Walia), to sneak off to Bijapur to try to break the curse themselves. Upon arriving at the palace, they meet up with the current caretakers: watchman Durjan (Sadashiv Amrapurkar) and his “dumb” (i.e. retarded) mother Mangli (Sadhana Khote), who speaks only in unintelligibly gibberish. They're shown around and settle in, but it isn't long before all kinds of strange things begin happening. Eyes move on a painting, a portrait bleeds, a woodsman with a half melted face (Satish Shah) lurks around, a black cat and a snake attack and Suman keeps seeing visions of the demon, is caught up in a blood shower and falls down the stairs. Eventually the secret chamber is discovered, as is the chest, which contains Samri's still-living head. It promptly possesses the woodsman (who gets ping pong ball eyes as a result) and sends him out to reunite the head with the body. A gypsy (Dheeraj Kumar) and his “jungle slut” sister (Alka Noopur) also get involved in the action.

So let's go ahead and get the bad stuff out of the way first. This runs a whopping 144 minutes. That's nearly two-and-a-half hours. I wish I could say all that time breezed by but, honestly, it doesn't. There are five full musical numbers performed in this. While several of these are upbeat, include dancing and are fun to watch, there are two syrupy ballads (one of which - Woh Beete DiN Yaad Rahe - was a big hit in India) that are downright excruciating to listen to. Not only are the song lyrics revolting cheese, but these scenes actually harm the narrative. The first is put together like some filmed modeling portfolio with the two young stars posing and pouting in various positions on the beach and the second requires the leading lady to suddenly get jealous and all weepy over her boyfriend trying to get information from "jungle slut." However, even these corny, pointless little musical interludes (which are at least integrated into the plot) aren't what does the most damage here... 

Far more unforgivable is a lengthy and utterly useless “comic” subplot that has nothing at all to do with the main plot. While I don't want to go into too much detail about it, I'll just say it involves an armless man out for revenge, a 70-year-old woman who seems to enjoy being sexually assaulted, a rotten-toothed, completely over-the-top rapist buffoon who mugs directly into the camera and the man's six-member tribe of painted, spear-chucking “Indians” who wear rubber Halloween masks on the back of their heads (!) ... including one of Ronald Reagan (!!) To link these up with the existing characters, Anand meets the rapist guy and devises a scheme to save him from being executed multiple times by villagers to collect reward money; a plot that ends once the goon in thrown into a cage with a live bear. While these scenes may appeal to those who like gonzo filmmaking, they also detract from the pacing and otherwise serious mood of the rest of it. If I were given the job of editing this movie, I would cut all that nonsense, plus a few of the musical numbers, out and save everyone about 40 minutes of their precious time. Trust me, the film would be all the better for it.

But dammit, enough with the negative. I was much more pleasantly surprised by how much I loved pretty much all the rest of the movie. It's fun, fast-paced (whenever it kicks into gear) and even exciting in spots. Many of the horror sequences are also pretty stellar. They're not only edited, lit, photographed and scored in a rather inventive, off-kilter fashion, but the special effects makeup is pretty good and many of the locations used, as well as the art direction and use of both colorful lighting and lots of fog, ensure they're also extremely atmospheric. There's plenty of blood and gore, the design of the hairy demon creature is great and echoes of numerous American, British, Italian and Hong Kong horror movies are felt throughout. I also wouldn't be one bit surprised if there are several hundred zoom shots used in this film. That takes some getting used to but I eventually did. All in all, there was more than enough cool, bizarre-o stuff going on to make me glad I finally watched this.

Unlike most other Indian films, this has received an English-subtitled American DVD release from Mondo Macabro, who've paired it up with the 1990 Ramsay movie Bandh Darwaza (“The Closed Door”) for their Bollywood Horror Collection Volume 1 release. Mondo Macabro followed that up with Bollywood Horror Collection Volume 2, which includes Veerana: Vengeance of the Vampire (1988) and Purani Haveli / “Mansion of Evil” (1989),  and Bollywood Horror Collection Volume 3, which includes Tahkhana / “The Dungeon” (1986) and Mahakaal / “The Monster” (1993). All six of the Ramsay movies in these sets were co-directed by Shyam and Tulsi. To my knowledge, none of the rest of the 30+ films from the family have seen the light of day outside of India.

★★★

Crime of Crimes (1989)

... aka: Crimen de crimenes
... aka: Corredores de drogas (Drug Runners)
... aka: Death Clinic
... aka: Todes Ambulanz (Death Ambulance)

Directed by:
Alfredo Zacarías

The Mexican writer / director of Capulina vs. the Mummies (1973), The Bees (1978) and Demonoid: Messenger of Death (1981) teams up with “presenter” and uncredited executive producer David Carradine (whose career was really on the skids by this point) to make this low-budget cautionary tale about “A parent's worst nightmare!” What could possibly go wrong there? As it turns out, plenty! Thankfully, the things that go terribly wrong go wrong in ways that are strange, hilarious and always entertaining. Before I start this review, I'd like to point out there is absolutely nothing at all funny about the exploitation / abuse of young children. It's a serious issue and no one right in the head would make light of something like that. However, that doesn't mean a well-meaning movie about the subject that fails horribly at conveying its message cannot be funny. Pretty much any subject matter can end up being amusing when it's completely mishandled, even if the subject matter itself is far from it. I'm sure everyone involved with this one thought they were making an important, timely, thought-provoking movie. Unfortunately, it just didn't turn out that way. If “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions” then Crime of Crimes is a certifiable highway to hell... Bad movie hell!

As Crimes begins, upwards of forty underage girls have all mysteriously vanished in the East Los Angeles area. Depressingly, our children's lives have been put in the hands of a couple or moronic, swaggering detectives; Jeff Young (Jeff Weston) and Mike Silva (“introducing” Miguel Ángel Rodríguez), who are so bad at their jobs they drag people into the station without a stitch of evidence, arrest innocent people and hassle law-abiding citizens while all kinds of horrible things are happening right under their noses. Even their boss, Captain Frank McEntire (Carradine), hopelessly sighs “You two morons are their only hope” before shooing them out of his office.

Meanwhile, nice guy Pablo Mendoza (Richard Yñiguez), his very pregnant wife Lisa (Susan Saldivar) and their young daughter Angela (Maggie Ochoa) arrive in town from Tucson, Arizona in their moving van. Pablo, who was previously struggling to get by washing cars, has moved his family there in the hopes of giving them a better life working for a well-known car mechanic. Upon arrival in L.A., they're given a warm welcome by a racist, slovenly gas station attendant (Bruce Kimball) who refuses to let their little girl use the bathroom, prompting Pablo to scream “Up yours, porky!” before beating him up and then flinging the contents of his daughter's potty chair right in the guy's face (!) Pablo then settles his family into a small apartment behind where he works. His boss, Tom Hernandez aka “Mr. Wonder Tools,” is played by Kent Osborne, who'd previously appeared in a handful of Al Adamson movies.

Despite already being convicted of six counts of child molestation, Karl Johnson (Aldo Ray) is free and out on the streets lurking around schools, parks and playgrounds looking for victims. He tempts little girls into the ice cream truck he operates (“How would you like to ride in the ice cream truck?”) but what he does with them once he abducts them isn't what you may think. Karl actually works for a clinic that specializes in removing vital organs from kidnapped children that are then sold to the highest bidder on the black market. The fully-staffed clinic is run out of the mansion home of a sneering, millionaire piece of Euro-trash named Caesar Canaletti (Bill Countryman), whose chief surgeon, Dr. Hoffman (Jimmy Williams), is a jittery, heroin-addicted junkie they're blackmailing into working for them. The clinic also has many other doctors and nurses plus an army of thugs who have no issue doing Caesar's bidding, whether that be shooting uncooperative staff members in the back or taking the remains of dead children up to the Hollywood hills to bury in shallow graves.

Because Pablo has brief, harmless encounters with several of the little girls who eventually turn up missing and his fingerprints are lifted off a pair of shoes belonging to one of them, he becomes suspect numero uno. However, none of that changes the fact that dozens of girls had disappeared long before he even arrived in the area! Regardless, the cops handcuff him, punch him in the gut and then drag him to the station, where Carradine encourages his men to “come down hard on him” to coerce a confession. Pablo is promptly thrown into prison and manhandled. While he's behind bars, his wife passes out in a park, is taken to a hospital and delivers a baby, while little Angela finds herself in the clutches of Karl, who knocks her out, gags her, ties her up and puts her inside a large cardboard Luvs Diapers box (!) for easy transport to the clinic. After some negotiations, a woman there pays 50,000 dollars for her heart. One may next expect to see a father enacting his revenge and rescuing his little girl, but that's not what happens at all. He simply goes home and is forgotten until the very last scene!

Because more traditional procedural has failed them, the two dim-witted detectives then decide to go on a vigilante killing spree and hunt down each person they suspect may be involved and force them to either confess all they know or die. They first visit “The Ice Cream Man,” who attempts to burn one of them alive with gasoline and a lighter before he's shot in the head. Next up is the doctor, who ends up committing suicide by leaping out of his second story window onto a car to avoid spilling the beans. After going to a dance club to get info from the doctor's drug dealer, they're finally able to get Caesar's name and the location of the operation. However, Captain McEntire, not knowing that his detectives are behind those deaths, sends his other men out to apprehend them, which leads to a lengthy car chase en route to the clinic where numerous old police cars are destroyed. I don't know about you, but I doubt the errant detectives would be receiving a pat on the back for 1. running around killing suspects behind their superior's back 2. driving recklessly through suburban neighborhoods and putting innocents in jeopardy in the process or 3. putting other officers lives at risk by causing them to wreck their vehicles in a completely unnecessary high-speed pursuit throughout L.A. But guess what? That's exactly what happens!

Nobody out there seems to know about this obscure, barely-released movie... and that's a shame. This is the exact type of stupid, fast-paced, technically inept, 80s direct-to-video trash that fans of terrible movies should seek out immediately. Not only is the entire plot completely moronic, but the film is incredibly poorly-made to boot. The dialogue is laughable and much of the acting is terrible, but where this really shines is in the sound recording department, which is absolutely hilarious! Sometimes they use sound recorded during filming but, at other times, they poorly loop dialogue back in for whatever reason, which sounds as if the actors are suddenly speaking the lines through a tin can. To make matters worse, they also clearly use other voice actors to do the dubbing, so sometimes you'll have the actors speaking in their normal voice and a minute later speaking in someone else's voice. It's bizarre to put it mildly. The sound problems extend right over to the God awful sound effects, including a car chase accompanied by what sounds like someone scratching a record album over and over again and a moment when Aldo Ray barely taps a guy in a stomach and this loud PUNCH sound is added. There are also issues with the photography, continuity, editing and pretty much everything else but, alas, I only have so much time in one day.

In addition to being poorly-made, this also suffers from a cast who doesn't know whether they should play the material earnestly or camp it up, characters who are the lead one minute and then disappear from the rest of the film the next and “heroes” who are every bit as unlikable as the child molester and the black market organ dealers! During one sequence, Pablo and his wife are discussing a little girl who was kidnapped from their neighborhood and how scary it all is... a few seconds after letting their young daughter wander off outside all by herself to check out a fire! The police are also shown in a consistently bad light; lying to parents and even coercing doctors into lying and concealing info from parents about their missing children. A police secretary acts like she's being inconvenienced by having to take reports from crying mothers and concerned citizens about what's going on. Perhaps this originally had intentions to say something about how irresponsible adults and inept authority figures are at fault for children being kidnapped, sexually abused and murdered, but this is all so poorly handled, over-the-top and preposterous it's impossible to take seriously for a minute.

As far as the “names” in the cast are concerned, Ray does what he was hired to do fairly effectively, while Carradine spends most of his time sitting at a desk looking grumpy, disinterested and sometimes mumbling his lines with a cigar dangling from his bottom lip. I'm sure he probably had more pressing things on his mind at the time he made this as he'd just been arrested for drunk driving a second time and (as per the Los Angeles Times) faced a stiff sentence that involved “... three years' summary probation, 48 hours in jail, 100 hours of community service, 30 days' work picking up trash for the California Department of Transportation, attendance at a drunk driving awareness meeting and completion of an alcohol rehabilitation program.” In addition to Ray and Carradine, Musetta Vander (billed as “Mussetta”), who went on to bigger things, has a small, early role as a mother of one of the kidnapped girls. And there's also another unexpected surprise guest...

At the end of the tape distributed by VCI Home Video there's a message from the "Child Protection Program Foundation" and Phil Sheldon, who has his fat ass planted in a chair surrounded by bored-looking kids and warns that “Children are our future and we must protect that future... We must protect it from the horrible things that happen in this film!” Sheldon's tax exempt non-profit organization, which was also known as "Survivors and Victims Empowered" and by other names, later made the coveted list of “America's 50 Worst Charities” and was sued multiple times for misleading donors, including an accusation that less than 1 percent of 4 million dollars they listed as charitable expenses actually went to directly helping children. The organization also pushed for restrictions of sex and violence on TV and raised money via telemarketing, junk mail and even a mail sweepstakes scam. Phil's father is Rev. Louis Sheldon, who founded the ultra-conservative Traditional Values Organization, and is the creator of the "National Task Force to Preserve the Heterosexual Ethic," a regular Fox News contributor and author of the book The Agenda: The Homosexual Plan to Change America. Like his father, Phil is also heavily-involved in right wing politics to this day. I'm not sure if either had anything to do with the actual making of this movie but Phil clearly endorsed it.

SBIG