Stree

 "Based on a ridiculous true phenomenon" Warns a disclaimer right after the title card of Indian horror/comedy Stree.

 There are a few ridiculous phenomena in this movie, but the disclaimer specifically refers to the practice in some parts of the country to write "come back tomorrow" outside a house to deter ghosts from coming in.

 In the town of Chandery, the sign - which  adorns most houses - is meant for the eyes of the Stree... which simply means "woman". The place is haunted by a female spectre that roams the streets during the nights of a four-day-long festival, abducting men and leaving only their clothes behind.

 As the festival begins, gifted tailor Vicky (Rajkummar Rao) receives a visit from a mysterious beautiful woman (Shraddha Kapoor), who commissions him to put together a whole dress for her before the end of the festival. Vicky, who is completely smitten, agrees, and begins a very clumsy courtship of the mysterious stranger.

 As Vicky and the mystery woman develop a (very chaste) relationship, the ghost strikes night after night, leading Vicky and his goofball friends (Aparshakti Khurana, Abhishek Banerjee and Pankaj Tripathi) are semi-willingly drawn into an attempt to stop the supernatural menace.

 The movie focuses mostly on its goofy character humour, which is a good thing because the horror side of things is a complete bust. The film is built around a good monster - The Stree gets one kick-ass scene where her shrivelled face and luminous eyes are just about visible behind her veil, but her method of locomotion looks so bad it ruins any attempt at being menacing. It doesn't help that making men vanish and leaving their clothes behind just isn't a very horrifying concept.

 Director Amar Kaushik and Cinematographer Amalendu Chaudhary do build up some nice ambiance and compose a few lovely shots, but the horror scenes themselves rely too much on bog standard, over-used horror tricks: A silhouette disappearing in the background, a figure crossing quickly in front of the camera, Evil-Dead-style tracking camera shots crashing into the victims... all performed without any real sense of style.

 I won't hold 'not being scary' against a horror comedy, but I would like for the horror elements not to be this half-assed. Oh well, at least we get some nice sets.

 The humour fares a bit better; Vicky and company are all amiable dumbasses, and they have some genuinely charming moments together. There's a lot of broad humour and mugging, but most of the jokes are character-based and good-natured. There's a lot of picaresque moments that are oddly innocent, and the script by Raj & DK has some pretty clever ideas, including a deconstruction of some of the mythology it builds around its ghost. I laughed a few times, and honestly that's all I need to give a comedy a pass.

 There's an odd subtext against public urination. The first victim bites it after pissing on a wall, someone else is taken after our hero erases one of the warding messages with his pee, and another character is taken was shown earlier micturating along with two of his friends. Really makes you think, doesn't it? I wonder if this is the Indian cultural equivalent of premarital sex in 80's horror.

 In any case, none of this is enough to sustain it for two full hours. The soundtrack is also incredibly annoying - the incidental music is very on-the-nose and intrusive, and I deeply loathed every single one of the three or four hindi pop songs that the film chooses to accompany the action. Not my style, to put it mildly.

 The acting is... well, it mostly worked for me; Everyone overacts like crazy to try and sell the exaggerated characters, which is not my favorite mode, but I didn't hate it, and as mentioned they did manage to make me laugh. The one exception is Kapoor, who plays her character completely straight and thus makes the biggest impression.
 The biggest casualty of the film's over-eager tone is the protagonist, who Rao often plays as a live-action cartoon. The guy's charismatic, but not charismatic enough to pull off some of that shit, and as a result I found his performance a bit grating - especially on the romantic side of things. Seriously, during the big seduction scene I couldn't help but to think of Charlie Sheen in Hot Shots!
 It's exactly the same wildly over-acted pervy smug smile, presented in a very similar way:

This is a problem, because they're two completely different styles of comedy.

 Aside from a few niggles and a general unevenness, the whole thing is cute enough to be mildly enjoyable. Plus, it finds a graceful note with how it ends up dealing with the whole supernatural menace.

 It was successful enough to get a sequel, which is good because it teases one with a very strange final scene. Unfortunately, this is the first installment in something called the "Maddock Horror Comedy Universe", so the sequel incorporates characters from two other unrelated movies that were released in between; The whole thing comes with an MCU-style slate that stretches out to 2028 and I can't even begin to state how much of a turn-off this sort of shit is. The wife liked it, though, so we may still watch it at some point in the future. And one of the in-between movies is about a werewolf. I do like me some werewolves. Dammit, there go my principles.

 Oh well. In the meanwhile, does anyone else have a sudden craving for bacon?

Mmm, bacon.