Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Woodstock Villa (Released in 2008) - Suspense film, but can be missed

Suspense films have several criteria that they need to meet. They should have great performances, they should be taut and with a quickly moving story, the scenes in the movie should make sense (even though the story and occurrences in a suspense movie will be out of the ordinary), the music and background score should make sense, and at the end, the viewer should feel that the story progression made sense. If a movie fails at several of these points, then it is difficult to praise a movie, but at the same time, the performance by the lead actor (played by Sikander Kher) is creditable and one of the few plus points of this movie. The movie stars Arbaaz Khan, Neha Oberoi, and a few other stars such as Gulshan Grover, Shakti Kapoor, Sachin Khedekar, etc. The movie had music by Anu Malik, and Virag Mishra.
The movie is made by the White Feather Films and is directed by Hansal Mehta, but suffers from problems such as a loud score, and the biggest problem being the story that does not seem to make sense through the movie, especially post the interval (and the interval is interesting, given that the movie is only 90 minutes long). This is the undoing of the movie, especially the fact that viewers do not appreciate the movie - and the reviews by critics at the time of the release of the movie were pretty harsh.



So what is the story of the movie all about ? Well, you have this down on luck guy, Sam (played by Sikander Kher), who is without a job (you don't far if you sleep with the wife of your boss), who owes rent on his flat and also owes money to a bad guy (Gulshan Grover); he needs a lot of money. And what does he find ? He meets this lady Zara (played by Neha Uberoi) in a disco, who tells him that she wants to test her husband's love for her, this husband being Jatin (played by Arbaaz Khan). So she tells Sam to kidnap her and demand a huge ransom. Now, since he so much needs money, Sam decides to go ahead, and that is where things start to go wrong.
He goes with her to a place called Woodstock Villa, and when he is out, Zara gets killed in the meantime; something that Sam comes back and sees, and is panic stricken. He gets a phone call that he has 30 minutes to clean up the mess, and so he buries the body in the forest and cleans up. It is later that he sees Zara in a video and comes back to the city to know the truth. He finds Zara and gets the truth from her, and the truth is very different from what he had experienced so far. There was a Zara and there was a Jatin, but the body he had buried, and the girl he was in touch with, one of them was Zara and the other was somebody forced to step into the role. How does he resolve this ? There is suspense, but some of the parts of the story are not so readily believable; and that loud score in the movie ? It needs to be done well to work well, but really does not.

Woodstock Villa (Released in 2008) - Suspense film, but can be missed

No comments: