Boochaadu Review

Vicky Gunjanna's baaackkk!!!

Er, Vicky Gunjanna who? Vicky Gunjanna who??? Okay, here's a clue.

1, 2, Freddy's coming for you
3, 4, better lock the door
5, 6, grab your crucifix
7, 8, gotta stay up late
9, 10, never sleep again.

Still no? Okay, Vicky Gunjanna is none other than Freddy Kruger, morphed and otherwise done to Telugu. If you've collapsed laughing, we commiserate and give you until the next paragraph to recuperate. If you've instead gone Freddy who, then you're obviously not as horror-savvy as you should be, are you? Well, Freddy Kruger is the famous nightmare man of the 'Nightmare On Elm Street' series. It must have gotten even more difficult for him to sleep at nights after knowing what he's being called now.

Anyway, getting back to business, this movie is the first part of the series, dubbed in Telugu. And how.

The main lead, Heather Langencamp, is called Jhansi (hyuk hyuk hardi har har, er, sorry), and her boyfriend - none other than a very young and puffy-haired Johnny Depp, who in the recent years has made a successful career out of the elusive art of non-acting - is called John (thank goodness for small mercies).

The plot is brain-numbingly simple. Freddy/Vicky, whom we shall call Freckly for convenience, attacks teens in their nightmares. If they die in their sleep, then they are dead in real life too. Freckly has a score to settle with their parents, hence the rampage. So here's the diary.

Death 1
Person murdered: A teen girl, slashed to death by an assailant who looks like a scarecrow, only better (made possible with the highly imaginative art of sticking bits of flesh, tackily, on the face of the protagonist). Pretty predictably, this is how the movie starts.
Mode of murder: Sharp talon like objects attached to tattered gloves.
Time of death: After the mandatory sex scene.

Death 2
Person murdered: Boyfriend of victim number one, imaginatively called Raja, who is cooped up in a cell accused of her murder.
Mode of murder: A particularly scheming bed sheet that coils around his neck, forms a noose and hangs him to death.
Time of death: Sorry, there are no clocks in jail cells.

Death 3
Person murdered: Johnny Depp!
Mode of murder: Swallowed by his own bed - what worse form of treachery? And this while listening to Yesudas. The mode results in a mushroom cloud of blood, which causes the ceiling to resemble the insides of a ketchup bottle.
Time of death: Just when you are beginning to wonder what exactly Depp is supposed to be doing in the movie.

So going by the equation 4 - 3 = 1, we are left with the large-toothed, hirsute Jhansi, who takes on the huge task of getting Freckly into her nightmare and then annihilating him in reality. And she does it by setting up a booby trap (no, nothing on the lines of your current imagination) that very conveniently leads him to his end. Her very heartfelt and convincing utterances in the process, of "Devudaa, nannu rakshinchu!", make you really want to reach out and hold her hand.

Apart from this momentary involvement with the heroine, you are left pondering over the various oddities that keep springing onto the screen. For example, Freckly, who has the much-desired talent of walking through prison bars, suddenly finds himself behind closed doors when the heroine slams the door on his face (or what's left of it), and this makes you lose some of any respect you might have picked up along the way for him. More like these, but let's conserve space.

So? Oh well, at the end of the day all I can say is that an '80s flick is best watched in the '80s itself. Particularly a horror flick. Yet, this movie was a cult classic. So if you are a Wes Craven fan, have an afternoon to destroy, and don't mind outrageous Telugu dubbing, then you can still go right ahead and be a part of The Elm Street Nightmare. The rating is for this version, not for the original.