Merchant and Ivory’s India-set films tend to rip out my heart and stomp on it—in a good way. Two years ago I wrote about Shakespeare-Wallah for Switcheroo Month, and here I am again, this time with a sort of bildungsroman, complicated by imperial socio-political goings-on. Heat and Dust […]
When trying to decide what to write about this month, I realized director/producer Ram Gopal Varma has yet to appear on the Cultural Gutter—and that simply will not do. Some people reading this essay will assume I might write about one of his thrillers, since horror is a […]
Of all the things to admire about Darr (1993) (trailer)—its uncompromising tension and insistence on menace, the superstar-confirming work by a young Shah Rukh Khan, its creative sequences of characters’ imaginations, the wonderful use of background score—my favorite is how this film disrupts its maker’s own persona. Respected, […]
No one will be more surprised than I am that I enjoy Ramsay Brothers films. Since the 1970s, this family’s output has occupied a special place in Indian horror cinema. Working primarily in Hindi, the seven Ramsays made over 30 films (not quite all of them horror). For […]
A few weeks ago, the Indian cinema-focused Twitter account Cinema Rare posted a list of “some of the trippiest Indian films,” and with wording like that, I knew I had to investigate the whole thing, regardless of how likely I was to agree.* Skimming the 25 titles, I […]
When I first watched this zombie horror-comedy when it released in 2013, I felt like it didn’t have enough bite. I wanted it to do more with some of what it started to lay out, namely the smart and funny premise that the party scene in Goa (a […]
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The Cultural Gutter 