Zero Stars (out of 4)
Watch Bloody Ishq on Hulu
Don’t let the above star-rating fool you — Bloody Ishq is a helluva fun movie. It’s just terribly made.
Director Vikram Bhatt’s fascination with computer-generated imagery dates back at least as far as 2013’s unintentional comedy gem Creature 3D, which featured the titular CGI monster. 2022’s Judaa Hoke Bhi marked the first time Bhatt would shoot a film entirely in a virtual production studio, generating just about every image in the movie apart from the actors using Unreal Engine (most commonly used for making video games).
Bloody Ishq presumably follows suit, since the entire movie looks like it was shot in front of a green screen. Other than the actors and the props they interact with, everything else on screen is computer generated. It looks like trash.
Bhatt’s latest horror venture — co-directed by Manish P. Chavan and written by Mahesh Bhatt and Shubham Dhiman — features his standard blend of supernatural mystery with sexy undertones. Neha (Avika Gor) survives a near-drowning with major gaps in her memory. She returns to the remote island mansion she lives in with her husband Romesh (Vardhaan Puri), but there’s something malevolent in the house.
While Neha is stuck on the island, too fearful to go near the water to ferry to the Scottish mainland, her best friend “Ayesha” (Ram Setu‘s Jeniffer Piccinato) appears in the house out of nowhere. Ayesha reminds Neha that she’d been looking into Romesh’s shady dealings before her accident, including the suspicious death of Romesh’s father.
The trouble is, Neha can’t remember anything — until she plays the piano! Then she’s able to see letters floating in the air like they’re part of some futuristic hologram that she can rearrange with her hands to form the title of a book she was reading before she almost died.
She only utilizes this magical ability once.
Herein lies the problem with the movie. Shooting in a virtual environment allows Bhatt to indulge whims without any regard to the shackles of physics, and he takes way too much advantage of this freedom. Why stop at ghosts when you can CGI mind powers, explosions, or a pointless car race? Having to adhere to the laws of physics forces a kind of economy of space and movement that in turn shapes the plot. Absent those restraints, Bloody Ishq‘s story spirals out of control.
It would be one thing if the use of CGI was limited to things that couldn’t be done safely or easily in reality — like having Neha scale a cliff in a mini skirt — but all the sets are CGI, too. Bhatt isn’t creating a whole world from scratch, a la James Cameron’s Avatar. It’s not hard to build a bedroom set or find a cafe to film in. Bloody Ishq was made the way it was in order to save money, and the final product looks cheap.
However, all the things that make Bloody Ishq a movie of low quality help to make it a film of vast unintentional comedy. I enjoyed watching every second of it. The floaty unreality of the CGI mansion interior and the way characters move throughout it is funny. As a bonus, the home is decorated with the same kind of creepy paintings as the haunted hotel in Bhatt’s goofy 2015 horror flick Khamoshiyan.
The acting is not good, although one can hardly blame Gor and Puri for not doing their best work in front of a green screen. Gor plays Neha in overdrive, culminating in a hilarious scene in which she reacts to someone impaled with a stake by screaming, “First aid! First aid!” and hunting for a kit full of BAND-AIDs and Bactine.
There is nary a Scottish accent to be heard among the “Scottish” extras. The sex scenes are not at all sexy, consisting mostly of closeups of faces that make it unclear as to whether the participants were even in the same room during filming.
Perhaps the secret to enjoying Bloody Ishq is a matter of calibrating expectations. Revel in all the things that don’t work about it, and you’ll have fun. Bloody Ishq is so bad it’s good.
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