Hotel (1981)

Directed by:

Shyam Ramsay

Tulsi Ramsay

The biggest turn-off for Bollywood movies, at least to me, is the length coupled with already knowing going in that the amount of filler is going to be huge. This one runs two hours and fifteen minutes, which perhaps isn't so terrible in theory. That is, until you consider that 135 minutes includes well over an hour of horror-free primary plot set-up, various (usually completely pointless) subplots, countless characters of varying degrees of importance (some of no importance whatsoever) and five musical numbers. That's just how they roll in India.

Suraj (Navin Nischol) is still in love with the beautiful Sushma (Neelam Mehra), even though she's long since married someone else. But that doesn't stop him from masochistically thumbing through old photos of her and having a five-minute-long musical fantasy with lyrics so corny they sound like pages ripped right out of an 11-year-old girl's diary. It's revealed that Sushma's father refused to allow her to marry him back in the day because he didn't make enough money. Nowadays, Suraj is very successful, however. He's a millionaire land developer and businessman who lives in a mansion and is busy building his empire when he's not obsessing over the one who got away. He sends his crooked, amoral building contractor Chhagan Patel (Ranjeet) and assistant Lalwani (Sudhir) to the remote, picturesque area of Balipuram to purchase some land on which he hopes to construct a lavish hotel called Hotel Hilltop.

Upon arrival, Chhagan attempts to bribe government officials into letting him buy state-owned land but is unsuccessful. He then discover there's one plot in a good location. The problem? While it may be unused it's not exactly unoccupied. It's an old Christian graveyard filled with hundred-year-old graves. Overseeing it is the elderly priest Father Benevolent (Krishnakant) who is aghast that the men would even consider disturbing the peaceful cemetery. That is until he learns that Chhagan is working free of charge for a deceased millionaire philanthropist's widow and hopes to build an orphanage and hospital there. All lies, of course, but it does the trick. He returns to Suraj, lies to him about needing two million dollars to purchase the land then returns to the priest and is able to get it for free because he believes it'll be used for a good cause.

Chhagan has his sexy secretary Shabho (Prema Narayan) pose as a wealthy widow who will be financing the project, buys off lawyer Kapoor (Pinchoo Kapoor), zoning official Mr. Gupta (T.P. Jain) and even the priest's young servant Yudi (Prem Bedi) to help seal the deal. As for bad omens, during the contract signing, the power goes out, a thunderstorm erupts and a wolf howls as soon as pen meets paper. Once the priest discovers the scam he's fallen for, he keels over from a heart attack. Chhagan arranges for the bodies to be dug up and then thrown into a mass grave while he puts the grave markers in a warehouse and hopes to sell them. We're then treated (?) to another long musical dance number which, to be fair, is much better than the first because it's set at a disco, features ass-bumping (!), grinding (!!) and what appear to be nunchucks (?!) and a weird song where dueling male and female vocalists debate about whether or not she should give up her virginity (!?!)

Vijay (Rakesh Roshan), Suraj's business partner, sends his immature brother Sanjay (Prem Krishan), who typically wants money but doesn't want to actually work for it, to oversee the hotel construction. There, he overhears Chhagan and company discussing what they've done. Sanjay gets his hands on some incriminating papers but they murder him, hide his car and bury his body. When Vijay shows up, they simply tell him he took off and, since that's fully in-character for his ne'er-do-well sibling, he believes them. Besides, he's a bit distracted. A feisty village woman named Vandana (Bindiya Goswami), who makes daily ice deliveries to the hotel, has struck his fancy. He even gives her a job at the hotel as a cook.

Just in time for the grand opening, smoke rolls out of the mass grave and then a series of supernatural "accidents" occur, starting with a man getting crushed by a falling chandelier while the secretary performs a song / dance routine wearing gold lamé hot pants and go-go boots. Sushma shows up with her much-older husband Girdharilal (Narendra Nath), who's an ill-tempered, insecure wife beater she was forced to marry to relieve her father's debt. In an embarrassing "comic" subplot, Mehmood plays a guest hoping to rekindle his relationship with his whiny wife only to run across a film director (Rajendra Nath) who keeps hitting on his spouse. The director attempts to slip an herbal love spell into the wife's drink but Mehmood drinks it and ends up falling in love with him instead. He then shaves off his mustache, starts acting like a flaming queen and stalks the director around the hotel trying to "romance" him.

Everyone's trapped there by a landslide, the phones go out and, in between all of the bickering, romance and comedy (not to mention a horribly choreographed / edited / sped-up fist fight on the terrace), we get the occasional supernatural murder. Someone's knocked down the stairs and impaled on a spear, another is run over by a driverless car and yet another is struck by lightning and then explodes! There's also death by boulder crushing, shards of broken glass flying out of a mirror (copied from the 1978 film THE LEGACY) and a phantom Doberman that keeps attacking. The most amusing bit is when a lovey-dovey musical number gets interrupted after the female singer discovers a corpse with its head twisted around backwards and starts shrieking mid-song. While most of this is silly there are a few standout serious horror moments, most especially the atmospheric bits in the woods where hands burst from the ground and shambling zombie-like figures in shrouds slowly lurch toward prospective victims.

What we've really got here is the epitome of a mixed bag. The long set-up is a double-edged sword. On one hand, the elaborate con game Chhagan is orchestrating is pretty interesting and motivations and characters are very well established before the horror even kicks in around the hour-and-fifteen minute mark. On the other hand, you have to wait an hour and fifteen minutes for the horror and even then it's constantly interrupted by the mood-crushing subplots. The seemingly complete disregard for pacing and tone is jarring and difficult to adjust to. One minute it's zipping right along and the next it slows to a crawl during an overlong dialogue scene or musical number, or it will immediately cut from a serious moody horror sequence to something goofy and lightweight. Both of the romance subplots, plus Mehmood's story, feature lame, half-assed resolutions because, well, they probably didn't have time for anything else. Actually, the Vinjay / Vandana one features no real resolution at all and you're kind of left hanging there.

As usual, there are a lot of Ramsay names on the crew list. Kumar Ramsay wrote the story and screenplay, Gangu Ramsay was the director of photography and Kiran Ramsay was the audiographer. Singer / dancer Leena Das appears in the second musical number. The same hotel location was used for other Ramsay films like Guest House (1980) and Dak Bangla (1987).

Though there were many soundtrack album and home video releases (on VHS, VCD and DVD) for this title in India and other parts of Asia, it was never released in America. Strangely, there was a pre cert VHS release in the UK from Orson Video but this release was only in Hindi. The later DVD release on the Indian Ultra Movies label supposedly comes with English subtitles.

★★1/2

Nostril Picker, The (1993) [©/ 1988]

... aka: Changer, The

Directed by:

Mark Nowicki

I'll give these folks some credit for trying to make this stand out from other 80s slasher flick shelf filler. For starters, the original (and far more appropriate) title The Changer was switched to the much more memorable The Nostril Picker, which likely would have prompted more people to pick this up at video stores... never mind the fact that the killer is only shown briefly picking his nose twice. Second, this boasts an amusingly tasteless premise; sort of a horror spin on an 80s teen sex comedy plot, though they clearly don't take it as far as they should have.

Middle-aged Joe Bukowski (Carl Zschering) keeps striking out with the ladies... and it's no wonder! He's an obnoxious, sloppily-dressed drunk who possesses no social skills, lives in a dilapidated apartment, typically has sex with a blow-up doll and eats dog food out of a can for dinner. As if that's not hopeless enough, he's also a former mental patient who was only released, against his shrink's wishes, because of overcrowding. After being threatened by cops for hassling a girl on the street, he bumps into a 'Nam vet bum (Horace Grimm) who tells him about something called "morphosynthesis;" a skill he picked up from "the gooks" in Vietnam. It involves reciting an incantation followed by whistling a song of one's choosing, which will allow him to either improve upon his physical appearance or change into someone else entirely. However, the bum warns that if he does it too much it will drive him crazy.

Later that night, Joe recites the spell and whistles his favorite song (uh, "London Bridge Is Falling Down") but nothing seems to happen. It isn't until he goes to a bookstore and tries to purchase a porn magazine that he realizes that he's transformed into an underage teenage girl (played by Ann Flood). And all it takes to flip back over to his male appearance is to whistle again. As the girl, Joe starts going by "Josephine" and quickly ingratiates himself with the popular clique at the local high school, led by Jennifer Armstrong (Laura Cummings). At first, he uses his powers just to be a pervert (spying on them in the shower room, using the bathroom, etc.) but things soon turn nastier.

Brenda (Aimee Molinaro), one of Josephine's new girlfriends, invites him over to keep her company while she babysits. As they watch "Attack of the Cannibal Girls" on the late night show, he reverts back to Joe, cuts off her fingers and then slashes her throat. It's the first of many murders to come. When detectives Vince Armstrong (Edward Tanner), who's also Jennifer's father, and Ed Simpson (Clyde Surrell), show up to investigate they soon realize the girl had also been raped with a knife post mortem and partially cannibalized.

Next up is Tracy (Heidi M. Gregg). Since everyone is on lockdown and forbidden from going out late at night due to the murder, Josephine and Tracy decide to sneak out of their homes to see "Great Big Buckets of Blood" because "Those TV critics hated that one. You know, the fat guy and the other one? It must be good!" Tracy doesn't even make it out of her front yard and is receives the same treatment that befell her buddy. Ditto for Crisi (Gail Didia), who's lured to a baseball diamond late at night with the promise of smoking weed. Posing of the teenage daughter of a war vet "cripple," Josephine then picks up a hooker and takes "her" home where he discovers "she's" actually a transvestite (Steven Andrews). After the hooker's attacked with a pair of water pistol dicks (!!) he manages to knock Joe out, escape and make it to the police to file a report. He's also able to lead them to his apartment. With the cops closing in, Joe starts suffering from hallucinations of his deceased mother chastising him and his blood-covered, lingerie-clad victims.

This starts out amusingly crude and fairly entertaining due to the ridiculous but truly off-the-wall premise but it starts running out of steam by the midway point once you realize they aren't going to be taking full advantage of the good central idea. As the police investigation becomes a more prevalent part of the story and they attempt to psychoanalyze the killer, giving him a serious backstory involving childhood abuse, suicide attempts and drug and alcohol addiction, the fun just kind of dissipates. This would have worked much better had they just gone all in on being tasteless instead. The acting is mostly terrible but there's at least some gore (including a bloody throat slashing) and a few interesting touches, including an unbroken 360 spin around a room as Joe does various things in his apartment and a record album plays.

The director went on to work on major Hollywood movies as a colorist. The special effects supervisor was Gary Jones, who'd move on to direct Mosquito (1994), Spiders (2000) and some other movies for the SyFy Channel in addition to fx work on over a hundred other films, including some of the early Sam Raimi cult classics.

If there was any kind of U.S. home video release in the 80s, 90s or first decade of the 2000s then I'm completely unaware of it. I'm pretty sure this didn't make its legit North American home video debut until 2014 when Massacre Video finally put it out on DVD. However, this was released at least three different times in the UK by the company Vipco, starting with a 1993 VHS release. The copyright date in the end credits is 1988.

★★