Tag Archives: Jeniffer Piccinato

Movie Review: Bloody Ishq (2024)

1 Reply

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.

Links

Movie Review: Ram Setu (2022)

2 Replies

1.5 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Ram Setu on Amazon Prime

Ram Setu is interesting because it explains many of the limitations placed on the Hindi film industry by India’s current political environment, then proceeds to exemplify all of the problems it identifies. It’s a thought-provoking movie, albeit for the wrong reasons.

The story is set in 2007, allowing the filmmakers to plausibly deny that the movie is about present day India. Atheist archeologist Aryan (Akshay Kumar) discovers important artifacts in Afghanistan that reinforce the country’s connections to India via the Silk Road. Aryan notes that the whole region shares a cultural history, regardless which religion predominates, past or present.

It’s significant that writer-director Abhishek Sharma has his main character voice the merit of preserving history based on cultural import — which often aligns closely to religious import, to be fair — because Sharma spends the rest of the movie ignoring that nuanced sentiment in favor of pandering to religious zealots.

Aryan is hired by the Indian government to write a paper declaring that Ram Setu — a now-submerged land bridge connecting India to Sri Lanka — is a naturally occurring structure. This crucial step will allow shipping magnate Indrakant (Nassar) to demolish part of the bridge for speedier ocean transit. There are environmental concerns about the project, too, but they are nothing compared to the vociferous opposition by Hindu groups who believe that Rama himself built the bridge.

Aryan’s wife Gayatri (Nushrratt Baruccha) is a believer and warns Aryan against getting involved. He does anyway. Due to the ferocity of the protests, Aryan is scapegoated and suspended, and the couple’s son is bullied at school. Aryan figures that the only way to clear his name is to accept Indrakant’s offer to investigate Ram Setu personally and prove that it is not a man-made structure.

Indrakant and his villainous lackey Bali (Pravesh Rana) are condemned for demanding Aryan and the other researchers — including environmental scientist Dr. Rebello (Jacqueline Fernandez) and geologist Dr. Gabrielle (Jeniffer Piccinato) — cherry-pick their findings to support the bridge’s destruction rather than follow the evidence where it leads. Yet Ram Setu does the exact same thing. It lays out plenty of plausible counter-arguments, but it ends up with Aryan being converted and publicly declaring that God is real.

Sharma writes a couple of courtroom scenes in which the lawyer for the state argues that that even if Ram Setu was man-made, Aryan hasn’t proven that Rama was the one who built it. And further, why is the bridge’s significance to Hindus more important than its significance to Christians and Muslims? All these claims could fall under the cultural value statement that Aryan himself made earlier in the film, especially if they are considered collectively. But Aryan insists that Rama is the architect and that Hinduism’s claims on the bridge are the only ones that matter.

Based on the positions Sharma writes for the opposition, he knows what a movie that trusts in the intelligence of its audience would sound like. Unfortunately, he took to heart one of the lessons Aryan learns: don’t anger the mob. The end result is a movie that feels pandering, and therefore forgettable.

The adventure aspects of the film are not bad in concept, but there wasn’t the budget to execute them properly. There’s lots of obvious green-screen usage, with backgrounds and environments that feel fake. The practical sets that are used are pretty good.

Performances across the board are uneven, with Kumar being needlessly shouty at times. His emoting in the film’s lone dance number is unappetizing. Telugu star Satyadev Kancharana is a welcome addition to the story as helpful Sri Lankan tour guide AP.

Links

[Disclaimer: my Amazon links include an affiliate tag, and I may earn a commission on purchases made via those links. Thanks for helping to support this website!]