Director: Akshay Akkineni
Actors: Akshay Oberoi, Parvathy Omanakuttan
Wait, I thought I’d walked into a horror film, having lowered my expectations anyway. Horror, like pure comedy, whether good or bad, has an uncomplicated relationship with its audience. You go in for the laughs in the latter, and to feel frightended at least for a few seconds, every now and then, in the former. Story is secondary. Sometimes bad horror movies make you laugh, but that’s part of the fun.
This picture starts off quite slickly, with top-rate graphic storytelling for opening credits. The background score, at least for its sound design, is of high quality. The sets look well done. And there is 3D for bonus effect.
But you know what, none of this is supposed to matter. All you need to scare the pants off the audience is to make them believe that what’s happening to the characters on screen could be happening to them. God knows, movies shot like home videos have achieved that phenomenally well: The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Actvity are only two best known (relatively) recent examples. Closer home, Ram Gopal Varma’s Bhoot and his production Vaastushastra, with their setting and situations, could rock your seat.
Given how distant you feel from the two loser type main characters in this movie, and the few scenes when ghosts appear are inserted so callously into the picture, you wonder if the filmmakers were even attempting to scare you at all. There is not a moment of effective horror. There is absolutely no humour. What’s the point then?
The hero delivers pizzas for a living. You’re more likely to find that lead character (“the pizza guy”) in porn films. The one here looks like a B version of Jackky Bhagnani (if that was ever possible). Hero’s wife is a writer of horror stories. Together they live off the insurance money earned from their parent’s death (that’s just ultimate in loser-dom). On an assigment to drop off a pizza, the delivery guy finds himself locked in a swanky bungalow / ground floor Dupleix apartment, happily shining a torch to a few ghosts, walking into various rooms, while he could simply run away. You can see wall-sized windows made of glass.
There is a twist at the end of this film that is way over-smart for its own good. By this point you already know Pizza (the movie) is frikin’ cold—not in a way that sends chills down your spine, which is what I had hoped for, since audiences down South, I’m told, have hugely appreciated this film’s original version in Tamil. This leaves you cold in a way that you casually stroll out of the theatre sighing, “Whatever boss.” What a waste.
