Adam Khor (1991)
Cast: Badar Munir, Shahnaz, Asif Khan, Naimat Sarhadi
Director: Qaiser Sanober
Synopsis: Horrible hairy behemoth on a gruesome rampage in this wild Pashto shocker.
Reviewed by: Omar Ali Khan

Another gruesome death in the locality leaves the police baffled, and the villagers increasingly irate and frantic at the inability of the law to protect them. Everyone speaks in hushed tones of the bloodthirsty "Adam Khor", supposedly responsible for the mounting death toll. Who is this marauding Adam Khor, and how can he be discovered and stopped before perpetrating further horrors on the innocent populace?

To make matters worse for the poor villagers, they must also contend with a deranged practitioner of black satanic rituals residing in the adjacent forest, calling himself Haibat Khan. Every now and then, whenever the whim takes him, Haibat and his men descend upon the village, carrying off the women and slaughtering anyone foolish enough to stand in their bloody path. Haibat ritually hangs his victims upside down before hacking off their heads, spilling their blood into bubbling vats of flavoursome broth—the secret, apparently, of his potent virility.

The monstrous Haibat unleashes his fury on the local police inspector to set an example to anyone harbouring similar thoughts of apprehending him. Babur, the honest but hopelessly outmatched cop, is ripped to shreds in an orgy of violence, while his wife is gunned down in cold blood by Haibat's savages. The officer's young sister, the rotund Shahnaz, watches in horror as her family is butchered before her eyes. Moments later, she emerges, her eyes sparkling with the fire of vengeance, and vows to devote her life to hunting down and destroying Haibat Khan. She promptly enters the forest to prepare for her one-woman guerrilla campaign.

Meanwhile, the village receives a new policeman in the form of the wrinkled but virile Asif Khan. Haibat Khan's fearsome goons abduct Asif's nubile young sister, chasing her through the forest before cornering her and preparing to "satisfy their animal lust". At that precise moment, however, a most remarkable natural phenomenon occurs. The earth begins to rumble and shake, cracks appear in the ground, and after several increasingly violent tremors, the planet itself seems to explode. Out climbs a rather dusty saviour in the form of the unflappable Badar Munir. Brushing the earth from his clothes, he single-handedly thrashes Haibat's goons with the superhuman power he always seems to possess, bless his soul.

While Badar is busy reducing the villains to pulp, an altogether different menace stirs deep within the forest. Some beastly, unworldly, bloodthirsty creature emerges in search of lunch and promptly ravages the unfortunate girl, leaving her in a most gruesome state.

The police arrive to find Badar standing over the corpse and immediately arrest him as the dreaded "Adam Khor".

Fortunately for Badar, his pet monkey launches a fearsome grenade attack on the police convoy, allowing the innocent hero to escape into the jungle, where he joins forces with Babur's vengeful sister. Badar then recounts the tragic tale of his youth. He once lived happily with his parents and younger brothers and sisters in a home filled with joy. One fateful night, while making his way through the forest, he heard strange noises and stumbled upon the mutilated corpse of a freshly murdered girl.

As he buried the body, the villagers descended upon him and accused him of being the man-eating "Adam Khor". (This unfortunate habit of burying corpses seems to land him in trouble with remarkable regularity.) The mob then set upon his poor parents and bludgeoned them to death for spawning the evil "Adam Khor".

Soon afterwards, Badar's ill-fated younger siblings are brutally hacked to pieces before his eyes.

After a grim struggle against the odds, Shahnaz and Badar finally track down Haibat Khan, only to discover that he is considerably more than a trigger-happy, satanic-worshipping psychopath. In one particularly memorable moment, Haibat reacts rather strangely when offered a helping of pulpy red ketchup with his dinner, sending him into rapturous throes of almost erotic ecstasy.

Clearly, all is not well with Haibat Khan, and his devoted wife begins to worry about her increasingly deranged husband, who has developed a curious habit of taking midnight strolls through the forest for reasons best known to himself.

Here is another delirious Pashto shocker that takes filmmaking to the very edge. The special effects are hysterical, and the marauding, fanged, hairy behemoth is a sight for sore eyes. The gore levels are spectacular, with man-eating wooden dogs, flying bats, fanged monsters, demons, spinning heads and intestine-ripping all forming part of the delicious scenery. What more could a horror fanatic possibly want?

Alas, the sleaze factor is surprisingly restrained for a Pashto production, although we are treated to one or two full-fledged Lycra-clad backside shots thrust enthusiastically towards the camera on several tasteful occasions.

This fabulous slice of pseudo-werewolf delirium is a genuine gem of awfulness and ineptitude. It takes considerable skill to produce a film possessing such an astonishing absence of redeeming qualities, yet somehow remaining irresistibly entertaining. For lovers of the bizarre, life simply cannot be complete without witnessing at least three Pashto movies. Try to make this one of the three if you possibly can.

Perhaps the most astonishing fact of all is that this film walked away with the Nigar Award for Best Pashto Film of 1991, which speaks volumes about the "quality" of the local industry at the time. Released on 14 April 1991, it proved a healthy box-office success and continued to perform steadily on subsequent re-releases.