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tbr_the_unconquered's review
3.0
Two books on Tyrannosauruses and one book on tyrants later, I sat down to write a review about this band of brothers. The Ramsay brothers were a group of 7 men who decided to break away from the cyclostyled world of Hindi cinema and explore the horror genre through their movies. What was ironical was that the horror movies they created eventually became clichés themselves. Unlike the major production houses of the 70’s, they lacked big stars and budgets but made up for this amply with innovative and unorthodox ideas in filmmaking.
The trend that still continues across most of mainstream Hindi cinema is to glorify romance and run around the same pole in varied colours and tones. Horror was always the unruly child and not something that all the audiences loved. At the time when the Ramsay brothers came to the fore, a horror movie was so taboo that it would not even get a wide release. Their stories were almost all formulaic : a monster, some sex, religious ways of defeating the horror etc. and these kept repeating time and again in the stories. The main audiences were teenagers who wanted the cheap thrills and also the men and occasionally women who wanted a couple of hours of entertainment away from the drudgeries of daily chores.
None of these movies have aged well which is to say that they make you laugh out loud if you watch them now and yet there is a cult following for them. Having watched none of these movies earlier, I did go to YouTube to check out some of these and found them to have a huge fan following. Through a series of interviews and conversations with the Ramsay family and lovers of their movies, the author recreates the time these gentlemen spent in making movies. It is an interesting retrospective of a time when one family made a bunch of movies (with basically the same story) and thereby made a lot of money in the process. They lost their lustre in the post globalization India when Hollywood began asserting its charm on the mind of moviegoers but then found their footing in the television world.
A chronicle of a forgotten episode in Bollywood pop-culture. Recommended.
The trend that still continues across most of mainstream Hindi cinema is to glorify romance and run around the same pole in varied colours and tones. Horror was always the unruly child and not something that all the audiences loved. At the time when the Ramsay brothers came to the fore, a horror movie was so taboo that it would not even get a wide release. Their stories were almost all formulaic : a monster, some sex, religious ways of defeating the horror etc. and these kept repeating time and again in the stories. The main audiences were teenagers who wanted the cheap thrills and also the men and occasionally women who wanted a couple of hours of entertainment away from the drudgeries of daily chores.
None of these movies have aged well which is to say that they make you laugh out loud if you watch them now and yet there is a cult following for them. Having watched none of these movies earlier, I did go to YouTube to check out some of these and found them to have a huge fan following. Through a series of interviews and conversations with the Ramsay family and lovers of their movies, the author recreates the time these gentlemen spent in making movies. It is an interesting retrospective of a time when one family made a bunch of movies (with basically the same story) and thereby made a lot of money in the process. They lost their lustre in the post globalization India when Hollywood began asserting its charm on the mind of moviegoers but then found their footing in the television world.
A chronicle of a forgotten episode in Bollywood pop-culture. Recommended.
bmaji's review
Blandly written, but fascinating anecdotes of a cult Indian indie-filmmaking family transmitted straight into your impish brain.
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