Lour Da Shaitan (1996)
Cast: Sunita Khan, Zamurrad Khan, Asif Khan
Director: Nawaz Khan
Synopsis: Pashto Nightmares from the Pseudo-Porno ‘90s. Blood, guts, daggers, obesity and a lot of spandex.
Reviewed by: Omar Khan

It’s been a minute since I last watched a Pashto film. They can sap the energy from your soul and suck the brains out of your skull, rendering you, the viewer, a little like a cabbage boiled to oblivion; very dead, very mushy and rather stinky.

After a decade’s hiatus, it was decided to check out the first and most promising of the six or seven Pashto films, purchased from a bedraggled corner shop deep in the dark maze-like alleys of Karachi’s notorious Rainbow Centre. Once THE thriving hub of World DVD piracy, but now a pale shadow of its former glory days, where technology has jolted most of the shops out of existence.

There were once hundreds of VCD and DVD stores selling anything from the latest Hollywood and Bollywood blockbuster to the most horrendous Pornography imaginable, along with equally offensive religious bigotry and hate-mongering videos of sermons from far and wide. Even open-heart surgery videos were available for those into that sort of thing. The Rainbow Centre was a thriving example of an open market, where anything demanded was sold, however questionable. The criminals selling porn were in cahoots with the local police and would tip off the cops when anyone bought the objectionable material. Upon leaving the market, the buyer would be entrapped by the police, where they would work out a bribe, and the pornographer would get their films back to display on their shelves proudly. The local system at its most efficient.

The advent of Pornography over the internet has meant that the ‘90s-style semi-pornographic Pashto masala film has suffered just a little. Yet during the ‘80s and ‘90s, Pashto cinema perfected a conveyor belt of locally produced smut beyond Pornography for the sheer in-your-face gall, and that too considering these films are made for a populace that considers itself more pious and more Islamic than anybody else on earth. The Pashto-speaking lands are not unsurprisingly referred to as “The Bible Belt of Islam”.

To even attempt to describe the “plot” of this movie is an impossible prospect. Essentially, it is a shoddily created orgy of bulbous bodies, violence, spandex, lycra, heaving bosoms, plunging daggers, fountains of blood, aggressiveness, and a cameraman who has mastered the sexual act using his zoom lens.

There is some attempt at stringing this nightmare with evil men perpetrating horrors upon the helpless and valiant, pot-bellied, loudmouthed men with baritone voices and large moustaches into a semblance of a plot.

There are also several highly sexualized yet utterly repulsive item number songs to alleviate the tedium. Still, all they do is startle and numb the senses by repeatedly bashing the viewer over the head with extreme close-ups of body parts that can’t even be identified. Everything seems to ooze out of tight lycra thighs, and bosoms heave to bursting point. This is somebody’s concept of sexy, but it is more like aversion therapy to make sex appear repulsive and repellent. Beauty in the Eye of the beholder is the phrase that comes to mind. These eyes found neither beauty nor anything else; just endless violence, loud-mouthed posturing, old fat men serenading obese garishly

Lour Da Shaitan painted lycra sluts in public gardens, and infinite fight scenes with women not being spared the odd humongous slap and blow or two.

The film was one extended two-and-a-quarter-hour nightmare with no redeeming qualities, unless you are into heavyweight men and women playing cute and sexy.

As the title role, Sunita Khan, Daughter of the Devil, is the only slightly amusing aspect of this garbage with her fight scenes and outlandish outfits, but we have seen it all before. An utterly hideous experience – tortuous. It ranks among the most horrendous and traumatic cinematic experiences ever, and I don’t mean that positively. The one use of this movie could well be a useful one when you have unwanted guests, just throw this on for a while, and unless they are criminals or degenerates or complete morons, it’s bound to have your guests making their polite excuses and heading as far away from you as quickly as possible.