Darna Zaroori Hai

Unlike the various Asian film industries, India's all-singing, all-dancing Bollywood isn't known for its horror output. That didn't stop director Ram Gopal Varma from helming the 2003 anthology film Darna Mana Hai (Being Scared Is Forbidden), an apparent hit that never made it to Austin. The sequel, however, has arrived, and, like its predecessor, it's another series of six minor supernatural and suspense shorts with a wraparound story involving a group of Dubai schoolkids who seek shelter from a storm in the house of a bizarre old woman who jangles their nerves via the aforementioned yarns. (Imagine the first five minutes of John Carpenter's The Fog with John Houseman in drag, and you're on the right path.) Things begin with a bang – as they almost always do in Bollywood – with a rousingly surreal floor show during which a jewel-bedecked chanteusse writhes atop a pyramid of scantily clad males while extolling the virtues of fear ("C'mon, die! I know you wanna!"). Sadly, the rest is all downhill, with a clutch of stand-alone shorts so utterly devoid of even a single frisson they make the John Landis' tragically uncompleted segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie look like Kwaidan by comparison. Sajid Khan's irritating opener, featuring the heavyset comic Monaj Pahwa as the devil's own theatregoer (he flicks popcorn at fellow members of the audience and generally makes you wish some of Lamberto Bava's film-loving demons would show up to eat his brain) is a direct lift from an old episode of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone that goes nowhere fast. Likewise the inane follow-up, in which Amitabh Bachchan plays a college professor ("You want to study molecular technology!") who believes his house is haunted by the single most uninspired apparition in the history of film. Then there's the horror director who unwittingly invites a sexy ghost (Sherawat) back to his home for what he assumes will be an invigorating game of Pass the Ectoplasm, but which instead turns out to be … more lifts from The Twlight Zone. Darna Zaroori Hai translates as You Gotta Be Scared, which is either one of the most glaring examples of cinematic false advertising in recent memory or, more likely, a clever, Westernized marketing hook to lure in the unsuspecting. Either way, it's somehow reassuring to know that even in India, horror-film sequels just plain suck.