Horror flick too feeble to frighten
DIRECTOR Bushan Patel’s Amavas will surely top the catalogue as the worst horror-actionthriller in recent times.
Set in the UK, the film begins with an expressionless Karan Ajmera (Sachiin Joshi) wanting to surprise his girlfriend Aahana (Nargis Fakhri) by taking her to an exotic location for a romantic holiday with the intention of proposing marriage.
But Aahana, after stumbling on pictures of an abandoned castle in one of Karan’s albums, insists on visiting it. Karan is reluctant but agrees to take her there. The castle happens to be the Ajmera’s summer home.
This sets the ball rolling for a freewheeling ride of ineffective horror tropes, from nightmares to supernatural activities to shadow scares and jump-cuts to sounds of heavy footsteps, creaking doors and tolling bells.
The cardboard-thin plot meanders. The Director: Cast:
Rating: ★✩✩✩✩
first half of the narrative is pure pain. The third act picks up momentum but gets entangled in its own convoluted logic.
If the story is absurd and thoughtlessly crafted, the dialogue is pure garbage. A couple of innuendoes are blatantly obscene.
On the performance front, Joshi lacks screen presence and energy. As Karan, he is unimpressive. In certain scenes he appears frozen stiff and in others he sleepwalks though his act. In fact he does not even make any effort to lip sync the lyrics of the songs he is supposed to be singing.
Ali Asgar, armed with a facial prosthetic, is unrecognisable. As the talkative butler Goti, he is interesting and amusing, but is wasted in a poorly-crafted role.
Fakhri as Karan’s girlfriend Aahana, Mona Singh as the psychiatrist Shivani, Vivan Bhatena as Karan’s friend Sameer and Navneet Kaur Dhillon as Karan’s ex-girlfriend Maya, are all perfunctory.
Visually, the screen is plastered with dark frames to create an eerie atmosphere, but what you get is bland darkness that robs you of any visual delight.
The special effects are the only saving grace that offer some insanely eruptive imagery, but they are lost in the dull and absurd telling.
Similarly, the songs mesh seamlessly into the narrative, but due to the film’s poor picturisation, you care less about them.
Overall, there are no squeamish or twitchy moments in the film, hence it is advisable to stay indoors rather than to venture out to see this Amavas. |