Shamshaan (2000)

Any budding romance between a handsome aspiring police officer and the local beauty is brought to a brutal and abrupt end when the gorgeous Komal is lured into a trap and gang-raped by the villainous elder brother of her college friend Maria, played by horror veteran Mac Mohan.

The obligatory grim and prolonged assault scene is followed by Komal’s murder at the hands of her attackers. Believing themselves safely rid of the problem, the scoundrels dump her body into a shallow grave and carry on with their lives. Unfortunately for them, this being a Bollywood horror film, burial is rarely the end of the story.

All it takes is the appearance of a very peculiar-looking rock sporting what appear to be a pair of Sridevi’s eyes, accompanied by some deeply unsettling cackling noises, and the unfortunate Komal rises from the grave once again. Adorned with an alarmingly cheap Halloween-style mask, she returns as a vengeful spirit determined to settle old scores.

Initially she attempts a more artistic approach, serenading her tormentors with mournful songs about wandering spirits and lonely cremation grounds. When music fails to produce the desired fatalities, she adopts a more direct strategy and begins frightening her attackers to death with repeated appearances in her bargain-bin rubber mask. Remarkably, the method proves highly effective and before long the body count begins to mount.

Meanwhile Komal’s chain-smoking boyfriend spends much of the film engaging in lengthy fistfights with assorted local hoodlums while the ghostly Komal graduates to the traditional uniform of the Bollywood revenge spirit: flowing white attire and an expression of permanent supernatural irritation.

The townspeople are baffled by the mysterious deaths and it falls upon the dashing Kiran Kumar, playing yet another police inspector, to investigate the increasingly strange happenings and restore some semblance of order.

Shamshaan offers little that genre fans have not already witnessed dozens of times before. The plot is formulaic, the horror scenes are largely ineffective, the death sequences are astonishingly inept and the songs frequently bring proceedings to a grinding halt. The obligatory Tantrik Baba eventually appears, dispensing mystical wisdom and theatrical mumbo-jumbo exactly on schedule.

One mildly entertaining aspect of the film is the presence of two mimic comedians. One performs a surprisingly competent imitation of Shatrughan Sinha’s famous Bihari swagger, while another channels veteran screen lecher Prem Chopra with reasonable success. Their appearances generate more amusement than anything intended to be frightening.

As expected, there is no shortage of scantily clad bathing beauties, endless shower sequences, gratuitous flesh exposure and awkward romantic interludes. Horror, meanwhile, remains in desperately short supply.

In truth, expectations should probably be tempered for any film whose musical highlights include a song cheerfully proclaiming:

“Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum, log mujhe kahte hain atom bum.”

That lyric alone tells you almost everything you need to know.

Shamshaan is yet another misfire from director R. K. Khanna, a film that manages to be tragic in almost every conceivable sense of the word. The real horror lies not in the ghost, the mask or the murders, but in the fact that someone thought all of this constituted a good idea in the first place.