Andheri Raton Mein (2003)
Cast: Moon Moon Sen, Rajani Chandra, Rajiv Raj, Mohan Joshi, Zunaid Memon, Anil Nagrath
Director: Anil Dhanda
Synopsis: Shades of Lipstick at first, then a crusade against police corruption.  dull, nasty stuff.
Reviewed by: Omar Khan

 

Teenager Pinky is forced to accompany her elder sister and her fiancé to a birthday party where older people are celebrating by dancing lewdly and suggestively to a song that suggests abandon and wilful debauchery!!!  Why they would have dragged an impressionable teenager to such a sleazy event is anybody’s guess, and sure enough, the party ends in disaster.

Pinky, totally disinterested in the song and gyrating bodies, takes a stroll where she comes across a drunken letch who rapes her and throws some paltry money at her after he is done.  Pinky, her innocence ravaged, grabs a wrench and smashes it into the rapists head, killing him on the spot.  Funnily enough, the party revellers who were so involved in their song and dance didn’t hear Pinky call for help; now they hear the rapist being conked on the head and fall to the ground dead.  The police are summoned, and they insist on taking Pinky away to a jail cell while her case is to be examined in court. 

The case doesn’t go as planned, and instead of taking pity on the young girl, she is charged with murder and thrown back into the cell while her sister is distraught, as she should be, considering she dragged the young girl to the sleazy party.

The corrupt jail keeper, in keeping with her custom, provides girls from the prison to keep rich and powerful scumbags happy, and she sends Pinky to entertain him.  Innocent and helpless, Pinky is said to have taken her own life, leaving her sister mortified and unconvinced.  She is reminded of the horrors she had to face up to and now plans on exposing the corruption in the prison and courts to clear her sister's name and to rid the system of endemic corruption. 

Once inside prison, with the help of the sole honest officer, she begins her quest of exposing the mafia that runs the system, with seasoned officer Moon Moon Sen as the queen bee of corruption.  Sadly, the film gets bogged down in the second half and fails to pick up momentum.  It's all very predictable with nothing new to offer.  A missed opportunity.  Some of the villains shine, but the film's plot stagnates and is unable to find its way.  What could have been another Lipstick-like Insaf Ka Tarazu clone falls well short and peters out into just another C-grade movie trying to pitch some important morality.  The VCD cover of the film tries to sell it as a horror film, but it has none of those elements either.