Horror Story Review

An onslaught of terribad performances, sketchily conceived characters with a dismal intelligence level, screechy unscary jump ‘scares’ and dialogues that’ll make C.I.D writers cringe in embarrassment. Stay Away!

Rating: *

I believe the Indian Censor Board has taken a wise decision to stamp an ‘A’ or ‘Adult’ Certification to Ayush Raina’s latest horror story, ‘Horror Story’. Before I speak on why Horror story deserves this rating, let me tell you how the conversation must’ve taken place between director Ayush Raina and writer Vikram Bhatt to brainstorm this ‘epic’ title:

Ayush Raina: Mr. Bhatt, I’m super-excited to work with you. So, what do you have in mind?

Vikram Bhatt: A Horror Story

AR: (after reading script) Great! So what shall we name it? I was thinking ‘Room No. Death’ or maybe ‘Welcome… To Hell!’

VB: (cutting in) You are NOT thinking out of the box! This maybe the most frightening thing Indian audiences shall get to see. Let’s go for something unique. Let’s go for… ‘Horror Story’

AR: (fawning) Sir, you are a genius!

VB: Genius to Bhatt Khandaan Ke Rag Rag Mein Bhara Hai! By the way, you know mera next film on creatures is called ‘Creatures’?

AR: Wah! Kya baat kya baat!

Okay, now for the rating. I think the Censors deliberately chose this rating to keep young, impressionable minds away, not from the horror scenes of course because there aren’t any, but from an onslaught of terribad performances, sketchily conceived characters with an intelligence level of braindead sumatran rat-monkeys, screechy jump attacks from a ghost that looks like a flimsy ragged sex doll extracted from a rundown bordello, and dialogues that’ll make C.I.D writers cringe in embarrassment. One girl says, after the first character is electrocuted by the spirit in the bathtub: ‘Sam’s dead. You know what that means. Woh mar chuka hai!’. The last time I checked Dictionary.com, dead still meant ‘no longer living’. Still, thanks for making it clear for us, girl.

Horror Story is a film that can potentially cause dementia, because the character names are just too hard to remember. There are seven faces, four boys and three girls, whose names become clear only after they die. Number one is Sam. Number two? (after hours and hours of uhmming like Saif Ali Khan’s from Kal Ho Na Ho) Oh yes, Magesh! He’s the idiot who cooly followed a ghost nurse just because she said ‘Come my child’ and soon met his end. After further uhmming, I can say number three is Achint. The rest of the names I don’t remember and won’t take the trouble of looking up on the Internet. They basically enter a supposedly haunted house immediately after its builder’s death and reports of other paranormal occurrences, and die one by one. If you’ve seen a few horror films in your life, you can easily predict how Horror Story shall end.

What surprises you about this film is the level of stupidity of its characters. Seven people die one by one and these duh-duh-dodos realize after interval that sticking together is better than scattering out. Yet, it doesn’t stop these characters from walking right up to death. Consider the scene in which the ghost is sitting at the end of the room reading a newspaper article announcing the death of everybody. The girl who sees her starts walking towards her instead of dashing in the opposite direction. And this scene comes towards the ending, when EVERYBODY knows there’s this fricking ghost named Maya, a spirit who was a mental patient during the last days of her life, attacking them.

I’m gonna take author George Orwell’s help while describing performances in Horror Story: ‘All performances are equally atrocious. But some performances are more atrocious than the others’. These are actors picked from television serials (Karan Kunra, Nishant Malkhani, Hasan Zaidi, Aparnaa Bajpai) and modelling agencies perhaps (but television actors are usually picked from modelling agencies so almost every young face on TV is/was a model). The worst ones are Nishant Malkhani and Aparnaa Bajpai, who butcher every scene and together make a big reason for the film’s adult certification. This is an acting abattoir, guys.

Vikram Bhatt or somebody from the cast warned ‘Don’t watch this film alone!’. As a matter of fact, I didn’t listen to this advice and went alone for this film. Did I get a ‘spine-chilling’ experience? Yes, but that was because the theatre was practically empty and the A.C was on full blast. The movie, on the other hand, made me scream obscenies and make vulgar gestures towards the screen. If THAT is what Vikram Bhatt expected from his audiences, THEN I’d say he’s succeeded.

ourvadodara.in Rating Guide:

* = Avoid!!

** = Rent It / TV Premiere

*** = Book The Cheapest Seats

**** = Book The Best Seats

***** = Book The Best Seats + Buy The DVD!