KARZZZ

CAST: Urmila Matondkar, Himesh Reshmmiya, Shweta Kumar, Gulshan Grover, Dino Morea; DIRECTOR: Satish Kaushik

When Subhash Ghai’s Karz came out in 1980, there were mutterings about how it had ripped off cheesy Hollywood drama The Reincarnation of Peter Proud. But they soon subsided not only because Ghai cleverly admitted to copying, having out-cheesed the original effortlessly. It was also because Karz was a cracker of an entertainer: as the born-again hero, Rishi rocked, there’s never been a crueller, classier vamp than Simi, and if ever there is a compilation of classic movie themes, the haunting Ek Hasina Thi is sure to top the list.

This Karzzz, despite the extra zees for luck, is a blot. Except for the names of the characters, which are exactly the same, nothing else is: the treatment is sloppy, even by Satish Kaushik’s standards, and the acting is plain execrable.

For those who’ve come in twenty-eight years after the fact, this is how it goes. Pop star Monty (Himesh) starts having visions — of a man and a woman, a huge mansion in the hills, a “Kali ka mandir”, and an airplane going up in flames. It’s a case of “punarjanam”, a psychiatrist declares sagely. And whoosh, we are launched into a series of flashbacks, unravelling how Monty is actually rich businessman Ravi Varma (Dino) re-incarnated, and has come into the world to wreak revenge on the murderous, greedy-for-his-millions wife Kamini (Urmila).

Himesh adds a hair transplant and a smile to his extremely-limited repertoire (in his last year’s debut Aap Ka Suroor, he had appeared throughout in his till-then trademark baseball cap, and scowl). A badly-made up Urmila dons skin-tight gowns, large tracts of her chest gleaming with bronzer, gold trousers, and scarlet lipstick. She also sounds distressingly like Archana Puran Singh when she simpers: hard to think that she was once an A-list actress. There’s also a new girl, Shweta (director Indra Kumar’s daughter) getting a brief look-see: all she has to do is to gaze adoringly at Himesh. That must have been tough. Even the climactic song-cum-whodunit denouement, which has been lifted completely, is mangled. In between, you can hear Rohini Hattangadi, who plays the “dukhiyari maa” utter lines like these: “mere kaleje ke tukda”, she goes, “mere laal”.

... contd.