Darna Zaroori Hai takes off with the Sajid Khan directed story about a crass and fat guy who cocks a snook at his dear mother's warning to avoid watching the scary film Darna Mana Hai coz today's Friday the 13 th and actually takes a short cut for the latenight show. The shortcut goes through a cemetery, and our young bozo is disdainful and disrespectful of the departed souls resting there. But he finds the film boring, and through an irritating pattern of jump cuts, keeps returning to the snacks counter to stuff more and more popcorn into his vile mouth. As this mercifully short story lurches to its end, our bozo finds himself at the cemetery once gain, taking the shortcut home, and now, strange things happen to him. There are a couple of startling and scary moments here, but they come not from an underlying and continuous state of fear in the mind of the viewer due to the storyline, but from the sudden and nerve jangling appearance of scary apparitions with startlingly loud sound effects. What ultimately happens to our fat bozo is a result of his terrified mind. and the end actually evokes an ironic chuckle from the audience when we see a cutout that says: Darna Zaroori Hai. Coming Soon! And speaking of irony, Manoj Pahwa as our fat slob of a bozo is completely over the top in a caricaturish and completely overacted performance - much like the director of his story Sajid Khan is in all his TV shows! The story doesn't really chill you, not at all. Two, three moments at the most, and the casual intrigue of what's gonna happen next. That's about it for this one.
As the film unfolds, we see a group of adventurous school kids in the thick of a jungle. The rest of their classmates are at a resort, while this brave doesn't want to waste a school picnic in a hotel - so there they are, in a dense jungle, walking along, taking in the sights, and never mind that before long it's night, and the kids are still walking on. Finally, they stop when they see a lonely, deserted house in the thick of the woods. It looms large over them in the distance. Suddenly, the skies open up in thunderous rain, and the kids rush to the porch of the deserted house, and before long, are in. Where they meet an old, scary looking grandmotherly lady. Aren't you afraid of living alone here, a brave kid asks her, and she nods, wide eyed. But our brave fella scoffs at her fear and says nothing can scare him. The old lady throws him a challenge - I can scare you, she says, with my stories. I'll tell you six stories. If by the sixth you aren't scared, I lose. The kid agrees, and the stories take off, one after another, as narrated by the old woman.
The second story, in terms of setting up a scary premise, and the way it is handled, is the best of the lot. Directed by Ram Gopal Verma himself and featuring Amitabh Bachchan as a professor who keeps seeing a man moving furtively about his house, even as his perplexed student (Riteish Deshmukh) gets more and more rattled, is a treat to watch during its buildup phase. Bachchan scares you with his completely convincing and sudden reactions of nervous excitement to the apparition he's seeing, and this short story is well edited and builds up to chilling effect, but the end is a bit of a let down and a whimper. While Riteish Deshmukh looks and acts the part of a clean cut student rattled by his obviously eccentric professor, Amitabh Bachchan puts in a brilliant performance.
Another good story from start to finish is the one starring Arjun Rampal, Bipasha Basu and Makrand Deshpande. Set in around midnight, of course, in a bungalow on a deserted stretch of the Bombay-Goa highway, the story begins with Bipasha Basu letting Arjun Rampal into her house on his request that he be allowed to use their phone to call up a mechanic as he needs to get to Goa in a hurry and his car has died down. Bipasha and her husband Makrand connive to pl
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