Trip to Bhangarh: Asia's Most Haunted Place (2014) 1h 53m

If you've been a regular visitor here then you'll know I'm no stranger to Bollywood horror films.  I think this actually marks my fourth or fifth film (if you're also counting last Cut's three hour kid's horror film that I couldn't make it through).  Don't be fooled by that poster.  I don't know why only one of the five main characters made it on here.  I think it's because they assumed he was the hottest?

Trip to Bhangarh... has five friends showing up for a college reunion and hearing a story about a fort that is supposedly the most haunted location in Asia.  A story of black magic, jilted love, and cursed souls is given as our backstory to this haunt.  The friends decide to make a trip up to the fort during the day time to see if they can find anything.  Finding nothing, they return home only to have a run of bad luck around the 10-day mark.

Using the term "horror" loosely here, Trip to Bhangarh is really more of a horror-comedy.  In true Bollywood form though, there were (I think) four musical numbers thrown in this film.  Since none of these had much to do with the movie I took this time to do other things elsewhere in the house.  IMDB lists this as the only film some of these actors did.  While watching it I felt like they had taken a stage acting troupe and asked them to be in the film.  It's the typical stage-to-screen variations in body movement that stick out.  The audio track sounded like the whole thing was ADRed in later.  It was synced well if that's the case, but it kept me from allowing myself to actively watch the film.

During the course of Trip to Bhangarh... the plot just unravels into a sloppy mess .  The final reveal was interesting but then has this really long "villain explains the plot" sequence that went on for close to ten minutes.  I didn't care that much.  Just say "I'm doing it because of X."  I don't need all this fucking backstory.  You're the bad guy?  We got it, moving on to the net scene!

I give Trip to Bhangarh: Asia's Most Haunted Place 1 photo of Bhangarh out of 5:

1920 London (2016) 2h

I've seen horror films from India before but never an actual Bollywood horror film.  While there is only one short dance section, we still get treated to three or four montages set to epic songs.  The sets are elaborate and remind me of the early MGM big budget films.  Also, this movie is long as fuck for no real reason other than Bollywood makes long films.  Fuckin' way too long...

1920 London revolves around a prince/princess couple getting a cursed locket in the mail.  The prince becomes possessed by an evil spirit and the wife returns home to seek help.  Eventually she has to turn to her ex-love that at some point learned all kinds of magick during or after she sent him to prison.

Unlike most of the films I rant about on here, I'm not going to spoil this one.  I was really into 1920 London.  Sure, it was long and at one point I picked up my 3DS and played a bunch of Project X Zone because I got tired of another flashback/song section but everything that this film brought to the table was well done.  Some things I've seen before but nothing felt recycled.  They kept old ideas fresh and had some great scenes and special effects with it.  Some great special effects... not all.  There were smoke effects that looked really bad for modern CGI.  We also had a scene where an exorcism is being performed and the possessed girl is almost always in red light.  This may be for a visual sense of "evil", but it's also a very lazy tool to make bad make-up look good.  The classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde film had the character transitions done by switching the lighting color.  You couldn't tell because it was black and white, but he had colored make-up on that only shows up when a green gel was showing or a red gel was showing.  That's a little horror history.  I went off track with that...

I give 1920 London 4 possibly haunted lockets out of 5:

Don't forget, you can follow us on Facebook at Facebook.com/30daysofplight or on Twitter @30daysofplight