Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani. That some of Bollywood’s worst sins have been committed in the name of nepotism is a fact which anyone who has borne witness to Karisma Kapoor.
There are no critic reviews yet for Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani. Keep checking Rotten Tomatoes for updates! Audience Reviews for Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani. Jaani Dushman Ek Anokhi Kahani (2002) Home Movies Jaani Dushman Ek Anokhi Kahani (2002) Rakib Hassan, December 19, 2015 December 19, 2015, MOVIES, Hindi Movies, 0. Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani boldly puts its worst foot forward with an opening scene containing computer effects of astonishing ineptitude. Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani / Haatim Tai / Bees Saal Baad DVD. Ek Anokhi Kahani / Ek Se Badhkar Ek DVD For the Hindi film industry’s directors, stars and producers, dynasty building seems to be a top order of business, right alongside the practice of their chosen craft. For a fearsome reminder of this, one need look no further than director Raj Kumar Kohli’s 2. Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani, as terrible a monument to a father’s love for his son as has ever been erected. Kohli made his initial mark on Bollywood with a pair of supernaturally- themed blockbusters during the seventies. The first of these was 1. Nagin, just one in a long line of Bollywood movies concerning the dark escapades of snake spirits who are capable of taking human form. Reena Roy starred as a female snake whose lover is mistakenly killed by a group of hunters. Vowing revenge, she sets about eliminating the hunters one by one by seducing them under a variety of human guises before killing them. Under Kohli’s guidance, the film came to exemplify two prominent strains in 1. Bollywood cinema, both of which the director seemed to have taken very closely to heart. One is the trend for “multi- starrers”, which was in full force at the time (and which, in America, resulted in the type of films whose posters featured pictures of the stars lined up in little boxes along the bottom). To this end, Kohli packed Nagin. In addition to that, Nagin seemed to take 1. Bollywood’s tendency toward fanciful design and blinding displays of color to a retina- rending extreme, adopting the look of a lurid cinematic comic book, complete with dreamily artificial- looking sets cast in florescent primary hues and woozily melding pastels. For his next big hit, 1. Jaani Dushman, Kohli followed much the same pattern, stuffing the cast with as many big names as it could take — Sunil Dutt, Shatrughan Sinha, Rekha, Reena Roy, Sanjeev Kumar and Neetu Singh among them — and adopting a similarly narcotic palette. This time, the film focused on a werewolf- like creature who murders brides on their wedding day. While not quite as much fun as Nagin, Jaani Dushman was not without its moments of effectively creepy atmospherics, and boasted the added attraction of featuring a young Amrish Puri as its monster. The hits kept coming for Kohli throughout the eighties, but the dawn of the following decade would see the director take on a project that, in retrospect, seems to have sent his career careening irreparably off the rails. That project started with 1. Virodhi, and had as its goal the elevation to stardom of actor Arman Kohli, who also happened to be Raj Kumar Kohli’s son. Virodhi, unfortunately, was an utter failure — both in terms of box office receipts and as a vehicle for Arman — and two successive attempts at the same prize, 1. Auland Ke Dushman and 1. Qahar, didn’t fare any better. Kohli, however, remained committed to furthering his son’s career — to the extent of limiting his directing output exclusively to films starring Arman — and, by 2. To this end, the story of Nagin was updated, but then, in a curious touch, fitted with the title of Kohli’s other big seventies hit. The result, Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani (translation: “Beloved Enemy: A Strange Tale”), turned out to be not only a resounding box office dud, but also a film that would come to be widely considered one of the worst ever produced by Bollywood. I recently found myself trying to defend Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani against this particular judgment, arguing that, while the film was indeed searingly bad, it was also very entertaining, a fact which I felt should place it above other Bollywood films that were comparably bad but also boring. On second thought, though, I had to reconsider that opinion, because the truth is that there is not one element of Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani that is not misjudged — a pretty impressive feat that makes an extreme distinction like “worst ever” well earned. This is not the only thing that makes the movie special, however. For one, it accomplishes the seemingly impossible by achieving a sort of surplus of deficit — by which I mean that it abounds with so much evidence of poverty of imagination on the part of its makers that its very unoriginality comes to take on a kind of uniqueness, and its insubstantiality a kind of heft. Kohli’s approach to making JD: EAK seems to have been to simply make the same movie he would have made back in the seventies — complete with cartoon color scheme and outrageously phony- looking, stage- bound sets — and then update it for a young audience by awkwardly grafting onto it elements taken of a piece from every major Hollywood action blockbuster of the last ten years, regardless of how those elements did or didn’t fit in with the story that he was trying to tell. What saves the film is how Kohli so often spectacularly stumbles in duplicating those elements. After all, if executed competently, Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani would have ended up being just one of many bloated, special effects- driven blockbusters with a cast of blandly attractive but ultimately unlikeable young stars. As is, it works as a brilliant parody, lampooning all of those Hollywood excesses that it seeks to carbon copy with an effectiveness far beyond that of any of the Scary Movie- type films currently being turned out by the American studios (or, for that matter, Tropic Thunder). In fact, I firmly believe that, if every producer in Hollywood were forced to watch Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani, many would be shamed away from ever using any of the tropes that it so clunkily borrows again. Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani boldly puts its worst foot forward with an opening scene containing computer effects of astonishing ineptitude. To be fair, not all of the film’s effects will be as bad as what you’ll see here — and at times they even approach mediocrity — but it’s so difficult to wash the taste of these particular effects out of your mouth that those later scenes that rise above the bar they set end up coming across as the exceptions rather than the rule. The scene takes place after the wedding of Rajesh (Rajat Bedi), one of the many depressingly interchangeable young people that make up the film’s cast of characters, and we join Rajesh in the honeymoon suite just as he is about to lift the veil from his bride’s lovely face. Only hers is not a lovely face at all, it turns out, but rather a giant skeleton head animated with all the precision and detail you’d expect to find in a handheld video game from the eighties. As Rajesh recoils in horror, his bride morphs completely into a cartoon skeleton so lacking in any illusion of physical depth that it could have been lifted from an episode of South Park and proceeds to beat him up, all the while cackling crazily like a drunken old prospector. Interestingly, those in charge of rendering the skeleton appear to have felt that the idea of a skeleton that was actually, you know, skeletal beating up the beefy Rajat Bedi placed too much of a tax on credibility, and so made the ill- advised decision to provide that skeleton with something akin to muscle mass. The resulting creature is nothing if not otherworldly, boasting exaggerated, Popeye- like bulges in the bones of its legs and upper arms. Then again, it could just be that no one involved knew how to draw a skeleton. After sending Rajesh’s broken body flying out the window of his suite and crashing — much to the consternation of his gathered friends — onto the floor of the ballroom where his reception is still in progress, the terrifying, one dimensional cartoon skeleton makes its way jerkily to the shadowy ruin of an old fortress. Here it assumes the spectral form of Divya, a young woman played by the talented Manisha Koirala (here doing penance for god knows what karmic infraction). Divya was not always a spook with the ability to turn into a bulked- up cartoon skeleton, however, and a flashback handily appears to show us how she came to be in such a state. It seems that, not all that long ago, she was just a normal college student with a large assortment of depressingly interchangeable yet uncommonly scrubbed and blandly attractive looking friends. Two of those friends, however — specifically the aforementioned Rajesh and another fellow named Madan (Siddharth) — were also rapists, it turns out. And, as we see, they almost succeeded at raping Divya in her aspirational poster- laden dorm room, but for the fist- y intervention of Divya’s beau, Karan, who is played by Sunny Deol. Now, like the earlier Raj Kumar Kohli hits that it’s modeled on, JD: EAK is a movie in the old multistarrer tradition and, as such, boasts a large cast that features some of the most big- ish Bollywood stars of its day, not the least of whom is Sunny Deol. No stranger to the benefits of nepotism himself, Sunny is the son of Dharmendra, one of the industry’s biggest stars of the sixties and seventies. Like his dad, Sunny got a lot of mileage out of puffing out his chest, pointing a finger, and booming out defiant proclamations at people before punching them — and his brief introduction here — before summarily jetting off to London for some business that, we’re told, will take him several months — clues us in right away that, whatever the conflict in JD: EAK is going to be, its resolution is going to involve Sunny Deol coming back to town to shout and punch it into submission. Before jetting off, though, Sunny/Karan takes Divya’s would- be rapists to the dean of the school, Joseph (Raj Babbar), who tells the now penitent young men that, before he can decide on a course of action, they must ask Divya for forgiveness.
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