Agyaat

CAST: Nitin Reddy, Priyanka Kothari, Gautam Rode
DIRECTOR: Ram Gopal Varma

A film unit goes deep into a jungle for a shoot where people start dying in mysterious, violent ways. Ram Gopal Varma takes this one-line premise, and makes a two-hour movie. Only a few scenes succeed in startling you. And you spend the rest of the time wondering where the director who gave us such splendid fear-fests as Raat and Bhoot has vanished.

In the best horror films, there are always patches when someone is closing their eyes, clenching their fists and clutching the person sitting next to them. There’s not one such moment in Agyaat, as the characters — a curvaceous heroine (Priyanka, previously Nisha, Kothari), a muscle-bound hero (Rode), a lovelorn assistant director (Reddy) and assorted others — go round and round in circles trying to escape the vicious entity after their lives, leaving pools of bubbling blood behind. Result: more blah than hold-me-please-I’m-ssssscared.

Ramu usually does well with jungles. His Jungle had a fearsome cast, a striking bandit based on the late unlamented Veerappan and an ultra-sexy item number. His thickets in Darna Mana Hai housed a genuinely scary ghost. In this one, the forest is satisfactorily dense, but the man-eating thing is much too invisible for its own good. It’s just a screech in the distance, and a rushing furrow in the ground, both of which can happen in your neighbourhood park too. The film ends with the declaration that a second part is in the works. Help.