Dobaara Hindi Movie
Oculus was not exactly scare you out of your seats kind of scary. And it's silly to see the official remake that's so shoddy it kills you by boring you out of your wits. It's so tedious, you begin to root for the evil to win and kill the siblings.
The siblings Natasha and Kabir are played by real life siblings Huma Qureshi and Saqib Saleem. The casting is right, but you see that talent lies with the sister entirely. Kabir is released from a psychiatric facility ten years after he has killed his parents. His sister insists they both go back to their childhood home and kill the evil that lives in the mirror.
The torture of the audience starts even before you get to the house. There is a garbled wannabe song being sung at a restaurant. You are jolted when you realise it is Punjabi in an English accent and that she's saying, 'Koi kadar na karadi' (This is perhaps the only jolt you will get in the film).
The English evil spirit speaks French, and you wonder why? Her costumes are laughable at best and the usual horror film tropes are used so badly you wish you could disappear into the mirror like Rambo the dog. You also wonder why they have a squawking cat special effect in the film. You wonder why Natasha is so mean to her brother when he has just been released from the psychiatric hospital? And why is he allowed alcohol and why is his lawyer/girlfriend offering him a glass? But you are glad for small mercies because they don't show him in an isolation ward in a straitjacket, going mad because he can hear his dad saying, 'Fee Fi Fo Fum!'
Adil Hussain and Lisa Ray are parents and they are so boring, you want the evil to kill them faster or materialise out of the screen and kill you. Adil Hussain is supposed to be an artist, a sculptor but the budget probably didn't allow for a better artist to paint the canvases shown in the studio. Why do we notice the childish canvases? Because the story just does not move forward. You see Adil Hussain emerge from the basement hugging a bottle of wine, but there is no increasing madness from being involved with the evil, only a scene where Adil Hussain is made to wear a mask and dance as if he's demented.
For a horror movie there are so much dialog you want to tear your hair out. There are no silences at all. The brother and the sister talk, talk and talk some more. And as the film crawls ahead, the dialog just becomes incoherent. It's a relief to see credits roll.
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