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Bhatt’s cleverness is using the songs as a form of internal monologue, of contrasting the scenes of unhappiness experienced by Bipasha Basu in the present with the songs that flashback to the early days of her marriage and show her happiness with a stylised romanticism.
#Raaz 2002 movie#
At face value, the idea of a horror movie with songs seems an odd one. However, Vikram Bhatt reserves his best for the musical numbers. Bhatt eventually winds the melodrama up to the equivalent of a standard cheap Evil Dead (1982) ripoff in a climax that involves possessed zombies, a victim being electrocuted by a flying electric cable and the heroine having to dispatch a zombie by ramming it repeatedly with a car, before setting the dead woman’s grave on fire.
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There is one good scare late in the show where we see Bipashu Basu turn up at the house to tell Dino Morea to come away with her because he is at danger from Malina, only for the real Basu to then turn up and realise that the ghost has lured him away pretending to be her. Most of the first half of the film is a hackneyed variant on the plot device of the wife with the unstable mental past seeing ghosts while everyone around her including her husband thinks that she is seeing things. The shocks are predictable – you can guarantee when someone backs into the camera that is the direction from which someone will surprise them, or that the moment the camera focuses on a car door the locks will slam. His shocks are quite schlocky – mystery screams coming out of the woods, breath misting on a window pane, blood pouring from chandeliers, doors slamming, lights going on and off, a veryunconvincing special effect with a tree log flying down at people – while his creation of atmosphere is rudimentary at best. At most, Vikram Bhatt has a routine technical competence but little in the way of style. At another point, the film unashamedly borrows the central image from The Exorcist (1973) of a possessed woman backlit and mouthing obscenities on a rocking bed.Īs a horror film, Raaz is down about the level of a cheap mid-1980s American video release.
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Director Vikram Bhatt even goes so far as to replicate the scene where the wife becomes sensually possessed by the other woman and throws the husband on the bed. Raaz has been fairly much stolen directly from What Lies Beneath (2000) – it features an identical plot about a wife believing that she is being haunted and then finding her husband has been having an affair with the dead woman. Bollywood is often blatantly imitative of Western films and will happily steal entire plots outright. Raaz is one of the rare Bollywood ventures into horror cinema. Bollywood also has no equivalent of the Hollywood studio system and instead films are independently financed and can sometimes be backed by disreputable and underworld sources. While Hollywood tends to fall into certain genres – thriller, teen, sf, action etc – almost all of Bollywood’s output seems made to a single formula, one that seems to involve a heady mix of romance, drama between clearcut caricatures and, of course, a good deal of singing but rarely much in the way of genre bending or works that go against the grain – there is, for example, very little horror and science-fiction in Bollywood. Films are generally made on much lower budgets. Of course, Bollywood cinema is very different to Hollywood moviemaking. Bollywood was so named as a concatenation of Bombay (Mumbai), which is the centre of Indian filmmaking, and Hollywood. Hollywood films might reach a far greater percentage of the world’s population overall but Indian (or Bollywood) cinema is seen by a far greater number of people within in its native country than American films are and is also the country with the greatest number of films made in total annually. It surprises some people to learn that India actually has the largest cinema industry of any country in the world.