A sleepy Sunday evening and I was wasting my time on my laptop. My roomies suddenly pop out with the idea that its been a while since we saw a movie. Well, having spent half of the weekend in hibernation I thought I should give my body a stretch and I nodded. The only tickets that were available at such short notice in PVR (unfortunately the only theatre at walkable distance from our abode) were for Ram Gopal Verma’s Phoonk. Ok, so we thought let’s scare us a bit.

We thankfully missed out on the first 10 minutes of the movie owing to a faulty ticket machine. Hmm.. but the movie began pretty well actually in retrospect. The acting was ok, but then nothing scary seemed to happen. Then again I thought they were just preparing us for that big 5-lakh rupee moment. Well, the thought and the wait persisted till the end. The general pattern was to build up some excitement, focus on some random objects ranging from a giraffe to Elmo to a pic of Lord Hanuman and then suddenly fade out to daylight without anything happening. There was just one slightly scary scene in the whole movie. Other attempts were too cheesy and the entire theatre audience was laughing, me included, during those supposed-to-be-BOO! moments. My friend, Jithin, kept defending the director (don’t understand why, but he has this habit of liking all the worst movies on planet Earth) saying that what else could he do in a horror movie? Well for starters, he could make me scared for god’s sake!

Not everything was bad. Amongst the positives the movie was only 2 hours long :) and didn’t use too many B(ollywood)-grade special effects (when RGV had a chance to actually make it worse with those added in). The real positive was the camera work though. It was just brilliant. Sad it was wasted on a poor movie. The long single shot of the kid entering school and the camera panning to crow.. well masterpiece!

All in all, I don’t recommend this at all. Quoting Arnab Goswamy from Times NOW, “If you wan’t to watch something really scary, try RGV ka Aag” but don’t waste your time and money on this! Should have stayed at home and slept!