Ek Aur Maut (2001)

The film opens with shots of a teeming, overcrowded Mumbai accompanied by a voice-over explaining how vice and crime are woven into the very heartbeat of the city. This is a metropolis that never sleeps, infested with every conceivable form of criminality, from massive corporate scams to petty pickpockets working crowded streets and everything in between. Crime, we are informed, is part of the very fabric of the Mumbai experience.

The audience is then introduced to various representatives of this criminal ecosystem. There is the aspiring starlet dreaming of Bollywood stardom who is duped by a sleazeball posing as a talent scout and winds up in a cheap motel room before the police burst in. There is the small-time mob boss dragged from his plush residence and thrown into jail. There are countless other crooks, fraudsters, thieves, and assorted lowlifes rounded up by a determined police inspector. Yet for every criminal arrested, there appear to be thousands more operating from every nook and cranny of the city.

There is the sultry siren who lures gullible men with her beauty before relieving them of their cash. There are racketeers, swindlers, and gangsters everywhere. The police may catch one, two, or three offenders in a day’s work, but fresh fraudsters and tricksters seem to spring up by the dozen like a plague of rats entirely beyond control.

A clash of egos soon erupts among the various goons languishing in prison. There is no escaping vice, crime, and sleaze in this city, and our heroic policemen are fighting what appears to be a hopeless battle against an irreversible tide of scum.

This serves as the film’s prelude.

Then the songs arrive.

And the romance.

Whether these developments spice things up or bring proceedings to a grinding halt will depend entirely upon the viewer’s tolerance for badly timed musical interruptions.

IMDb describes the film as an action thriller, even though the VCD cover appears to promise some kind of Z-grade horror movie. All, supposedly, will be revealed during the next ninety minutes.

Various sleazebags are released from prison and immediately resume their criminal activities. Before long, they begin turning on one another. Raza Murad, whose principal hobby appears to involve collecting and distributing “lovely beauties,” is one of the principal gangland figures among the mix. As rivalries intensify, gang wars threaten to plunge the city into unprecedented chaos.

Meanwhile, sleazeball Raja, who regards the pursuit of attractive women as something of a full-time occupation, romances a new conquest. Their casual flirtation blossoms into true love, and soon they are singing melodious duets in scenic locations while professing eternal devotion.

Naturally, disaster strikes.

One afternoon his beloved suffers a terrible accident, tumbling down rocks and disappearing into a river. Despite extensive efforts, the police fail to locate her body. Raja is heartbroken, but grief proves remarkably temporary. Before long, another gorgeous bombshell appears and captures his attention.

Unfortunately for Raja, this latest beauty has been dispatched by the villainous Raza Murad to ensnare his enemy.

Unfortunately for Raza Murad, things don’t go according to plan.

While enjoying a swim, Mala is suddenly attacked by an unseen force and drowns under mysterious circumstances. The plot thickens as the deadly triangle involving Raja, Goga Kapoor, and Raza Murad becomes increasingly ruthless.

At least that is presumably the intention.

Unfortunately, at roughly the halfway mark, the narrative is strangled by three or four catastrophically misplaced song sequences. The already threadbare plot slows to an insufferable crawl, while the agony is compounded by comedy scenes that somehow become the most horrifying aspect of a film marketed as an action thriller.

A thriller entirely devoid of thrills.

The film plods aimlessly onward toward a supposed climax. Several of Raja’s subsequent romantic interests are attacked by an invisible spirit accompanied by loud, screeching disco music in scenes that are astonishingly inept. Apparently, the missing girlfriend whose body vanished into the river has returned as a vengeful spirit and now stalks Raja’s future partners to a soundtrack of killer disco beats.

It is not often that an audience finds itself yearning for a rubber-faced witch, a cackling demon, or some grotesque monster to appear and enliven proceedings. Instead, we are treated to a point-of-view camera drifting around accompanied by what sounds like a haunted disco remix.

Neither frightening nor amusing.

Merely stupefyingly uninspired.

The endless low-brow comedy and relentless song sequences only make matters worse. The film, already struggling for momentum, slows to the point of complete paralysis. By this stage, the viewer’s only remaining hope is that the end credits arrive swiftly and mercifully.

Even Raza Murad’s recurring “I love lovely beauties” catchphrase begins to wear thin after a while, and that is saying something.

So we lurch towards the final revelation at the pace of an arthritic snail.

The sole mystery, if it can even be called that, concerns the identity of the force behind the Disco Beat Killer. Is it Pooja’s restless spirit? Is it something else?

One by one, Raja’s girlfriends meet grisly ends at the hands of the invisible assailant. Eventually, the Disco Beat Killer turns its attention to Raja’s gangland rivals, including Raza Murad and Goga Kapoor. Finally, a police inspector uncovers the truth and all is revealed.

The film ends.

The suffering ends.

And the viewer is free.

Having endured vast quantities of Z-grade Bollywood nonsense and more dubious Pakistani productions than any reasonable person should watch in a lifetime, it is genuinely difficult to imagine something quite as painful as this cinematic atrocity. The mind boggles.

How could anyone pay to create something this woeful?

How could anyone expect an audience to sit through it?

How?

There is no flair. No Ramsay-style monster movie atmosphere. No outrageous Harinam Singh insanity. None of the sublime madness of Joginder or Son of Dracula. None of the bizarre splendour of Adam Khor Haseena.

No rubber masks.

No cackling witches.

No ghostly goblins.

No deranged Tantriks.

No Chudails.

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Unspeakably awful and utterly devoid of redemption.

This film doesn’t merely scrape the bottom of the barrel.

It somehow manages to tunnel beneath it.  Should really have been titled “Aik Aur Moot” because that is exactly what it is.  Excrement.