1998 Indian action movie
Bad Movie Rating: 5/5 (Fred: 5/5; Josh: 5/5; Libby: 5/5; Jeremy: was not able to finish)
Rating: 5/20
Plot: The Indian Jeff Goldblum wages war against Bulla, a guy with a mustache, and his henchmen after his father and fiancee are murdered. And holy hell does it hurt!
This might be the most amazing movie ever made. You know you've stumbled upon a good-bad movie classic when the film is this terrible yet still has a rating of an 8.3 on imdb. This movie's got a little of everything, but only if you think "everything" only includes a handful of gaudily-choreographed song and dance numbers and an endless array of fights. I only wish I could speak whatever language they speak in India because the subtitles seemed a little off. I had trouble keeping my eyes off the colors and action anyway. I mean, when there's a sequence that features both a monkey and a baby, you don't even want to blink, let alone take your eyes off the action. That's the best way I can think of to describe this film actually--it's a movie you don't want to blink during. The hero, played stoically by Mithun Chakraborty, is another one of those guys who has no business being showcased in an action movie like this. He's wonderfully goofy, but it's the bad guys who steal the show. Look at this fucker:
Look at him again! Because he just might be my new favorite actor. Sorry, Nicolas Cage, but Mukesh Rishi's entered my life. That's a great picture of him from this movie because it seems like he's at the end of one of his lines. Over half of his sentences ended with a drawn out vowel sound that made me laugh every single time. His cronies, in any other movie, would be highly entertaining, but next to Rishi's Bulla, they just can't keep up. And he says things like "I am not just a bubble. I am a volcano," "Wear the ring of my lust," and "Whatever I do, I do it in the open." That last line was his catchphrase, and none of us could figure out what exactly he was talking about. It doesn't matter though because Bulla is probably the greatest villain in silver screen history.
The fight scenes in this are as ridiculous as the musical interludes. And they're wonderfully inconsistent. In one street scene, the characters are flipping and flying around like they're in Keanu Reeve's kitchen. In another, there might be just traditional punches and kicks until there's a really good one which might be instant-replayed six or seven times. The hero has the odds stacked against him in nearly every fight scene, but luckily, nobody in this movie can shoot very well at all. Not that I'm dissing Shankar's obviously mad skills. I mean, when you can dodge a bullet from two feet, you're not a cat to be messed with.
We had to watch this movie in two installments. You know why? It was because our faces were being melted off by the glory that is Gunda, and a break was required after the first hour and twenty minutes. This, ladies and gentlemen, must have been what the Nazis found in the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
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