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Purana Mandir
[Mondo Macabro]
1984; color
Directed by Tulsi & Shyam Ramsay
Starring: Aarti Gupta, Mohnish Bahl & Puneet Issar
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Clocking in at a weighty two and a half hours, Purana Mandir will test your patience at times (particularly with the endless music numbers and the completely unnecessary comic relief subplot; which probably only makes sense to real Bollywood audiences) but it's so different from what most Western audiences are used to, that it's worth checking out purely as a cinematic oddity. The plot revolves around a curse laid down by the demon Saamri just before he's beheaded by a nobleman a couple hundred years ago. He yells that all of the nobleman's female descendants will die in childbirth, and adds that if his head and body are ever re-joined, he will return to further wreak havoc. To prevent the second part of the curse from coming true, the townsfolk decide to bury the head and body miles apart. Two hundred years later, the latest descendant is woefully watching his daughter, Suman, grow up and fall in love with a boy named Sanjay; he's not happy about this because he knows love leads to marriage and childbirth and, in his family's case, her inevitable death. The daughter is unaware of the curse but once she finds out, she and her boyfriend (along with another couple) set off to find the head and body of Saamri, reunite them and then burn the entire demon to end the curse. Seems simple enough but, of course, it isn't. Once the couples arrive at the family's remote ancestral castle, they meet the strange staff that looks after the place. (Who, unbeknownst to the couples, are convinced there's a buried treasure somewhere on the property.) The palace itself is notable for it's overt creepiness, not to mention the painting with moving eyes, and the over-abundance of hunting trophies that line the walls. (It's also interesting, at least to me, that a lot of the shots of the castle as well as most of the carriage chase scene are very Hammer inspired.) What none of them know is that in a walled-over secret room there's a locked box containing the head of Saamri. (The demon is held powerless because the golden trident of Shiva, which looks to be spray-painted cardboard with plastic stones glued to it, sits atop the box.) Eventually the secret room is discovered, along with the box with Saamri's head. Somehow the trident is cast aside and Saamri takes control of two of the caretakers and wills them (I guess) to take his head to meet his body. As you might imagine, all hell breaks loose once the demon is whole again and, once he's disposed of the second couple, it's up to Suman and Sanjay to save the day. According to the featurette on Bollywood horror that's included as a bonus on this disc, Purana Mandir was a groundbreaking film when it was released in 1984 because it marked the introduction of Saamri, the first major Indian horror film monster to be regarded as iconic. (In a Jason Voorhees / Michael Myers / Freddy Kreuger kind of way.) While as far as monsters go Saamri probably wouldn't stand a chance against any of the big three in a head-to-head showdown, this film holds it's own as a completely off-the-wall take on horror films - '80s or otherwise.
—the Kommandant
(Read Bunny's review of Bandh Darwaza here.)
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