Victoria House (2009)
Cast:  Shakti Kapoor, Shiva, Prithvi Vazir, Meghana, Sudhir, Ramesh Goyal
Director: Hriday Sharma
Nutshell:  One of the members of a Film Crew drowns by accident, after which a mysterious figure starts a killing spree of the remaining crew
Review by Omar Khan

The film opens with a terrified, skimpily dressed hotel manager calling frantically for help from her trusty aide, Ramu Kaka. As the lights go out and she finds herself alone in the dark, her panic steadily mounts. Ramu Kaka (Sudhir) eventually appears and manages to calm her down, while the return of the electricity settles her already frazzled nerves.

Later that night, a sizeable film crew arrives to take up residence at the hotel, where they also intend to shoot their latest production. Logistical problems delay the filming and progress is painfully slow, although the crew themselves seem perfectly content to linger, enjoying the comforts of the lavish hotel and one another’s company.

Then one evening, a member of the unit is found dead after apparently drowning in an accident.

The entire crew is devastated and almost inconsolable. In their desperation, they consult a thoroughly fraudulent tantrik, played by Shakti Kapoor, and his accomplice, who begin spinning tall tales about their ability to resurrect the dead. The crew are understandably sceptical, but Shakti confidently insists that he has restored several people to life before and that they should place their faith in his extraordinary powers.

Against all expectations — including, apparently, Shakti Kapoor’s own — the corpse is successfully revived.

For a brief moment, everything is hunky-dory.

The celebrations do not last long. Another member of the crew is murdered soon afterwards, followed a night or two later by yet another unfortunate colleague, who is strangled by a piece of gym equipment and left for dead. More inexplicable deaths follow, and the increasingly nervous film unit becomes desperate to finish whatever footage it can, get the hell out of the hotel and return to Bombay.

The local police prove almost entirely useless as the unseen killer continues striking with impunity.

Suspicion gradually falls on the elderly hotel keeper, Ramu Kaka, although there is no evidence connecting him to any of the murders. With the police getting nowhere, yet another tantrik is eventually summoned, and the mystery finally begins to unravel in unexpectedly dramatic fashion.

Unfortunately, almost nothing that precedes this revelation is remotely dramatic.

Victoria House is shocking, but entirely for the wrong reasons. It is so thoroughly uninspired and lifeless that there is almost nothing to recommend. The acting is atrocious, the horror effects are virtually nonexistent, and the film seems determined to avoid every ingredient that might conceivably enliven a cheap horror movie.

There is no monster, no ghost, no vampire, no mask, no fangs, no blood, no gore and precious little violence. Even the murders are staged with such staggering ineptitude that they barely register.

In fact, Victoria House barely qualifies as a horror film at all.

There is no atmosphere, no style, no spooky billowing smoke, no crumbling haveli, no cackling witch, no hairy beast lurking in the shadows and not even a half-decent tantrik hurling powders around while chanting incomprehensible incantations. For a film operating in this particular corner of Hindi horror cinema, that is an astonishing achievement.

Worse still, it cannot even fall back on sleaze or unintentional comedy. It isn’t sexy, it isn’t funny and, most disastrously of all, it isn’t quite atrocious enough to become entertaining.

Victoria House is the pits.  The only effect it might have is to bore its audience to death.