Author Archives

Unknown's avatar

Beth Watkins

Dracula Sir

Content warning: self-harm, sexual violence, police violence.  From the trailer, I thought Dracula Sir was going to be the kind of film that the film industries of India do often and, generally speaking, very well: a reincarnation story.  I was already hooked by the title alone, but a […]

Maha Badmaash

I’ve been watching Bond movies since seeing No Time to Die in the theater—I ACTUALLY WENT TO THE MOVIES!!!—so it’s time to bring another Indian spy-ish film to the Gutter. I say “-ish” because, as previously discussed, the formulas of popular Hindi cinema generally don’t allow for the […]

The Unexpected Guest, Indian Style

The works of Agatha Christie, like many other best-sellers in the English language, have been successfully translated into mainstream Indian cinema.* Gumnaam (1965) moves the stage version of And Then There Were None on a jungle- and ruin-covered island somewhere off the coast of India (and if you’ve […]

Junoon (The One with the Were-Tiger)

The title Junoon—”obsession”—can refer to a passionate, elegant 1970s film about India’s 1857 rebellion against British rule, starring an internationally famous cast under one of Hindi cinema’s most highly regarded directors. Or it can refer to a 1992 creature-ish feature about the deranged spirit of a jungle cat […]

Shakeela

[Content warning: suicide.] While flipping through the new options on  an Indian streaming service I subscribe to*, I discovered Shakeela, a film that actually managed to release in cinemas in December 2020. Almost all of the Indian films that I heard discussed with any vigor in 2020 were […]

Karate!

When I last investigated this film in the early 2010s, it wasn’t on youtube, and I was distraught: when you hear that there is such a thing as a 1983 disco karate movie, you need to see it right now and then immediately share it with an appreciative […]