Recently returned from India with a suitcase full of desi schlock horror feeling very pleased indeed. Most of the fodder looked dire at the very least but somehow memories of the last atrocity fade quickly when confronted with the lurid cover of a film like Khopdi for instance.

Everything about Khopdi VCD suggests that within lies yet another turd of celluloid excrement featuring fat men wearing masks from the local Wal-Mart Halloween costume section chasing brain dead chubby girls in and out of showers and bedrooms.

The film begins with a respectable, middle aged housewife being overcome by a gang of very ugly greasy people including for once a woman. They ransack the house for money and gang rape the elderly housewife just for fun though sadly the one female in the gang doesn't join in.

The frumpy old housewife dies of her rape wounds and the gang decides to throw her in a shallow grave. Its not long before a mysterious woman starts seducing the rapists one by one but the twist is that when she makes her final vengeful move, she happens to sprout an unsightly mixture of porridge and rice which sprouts specifically on her face and hands exclusively. The woman then apparently frightens her victims to death or with the stench of the porridge because no violence is ever committed.

Later in the film she reappears wearing a bad cut price rubber mask featuring a particularly un-frightening skull – the type bought by retarded budding horror geeks at the age of 5 maybe. And thus the title of the movie – Khopdi – due to the rubber mask worn in one of many atrocious scenes. To give credit where due, the film is truly frightening though, even terrifying maybe due to its sheer awfulness and perhaps the most horrifying aspect of all is that Khopdi is just one of tens of such hideous desi horror that has spawned in the wake of the demise of the Ramsay Brothers.

Ram Gopal Verma's new breed of horror is too dependent on recent Japanese and Korean chillers and are rapidly becoming as redundant as Grudge 2 was. Indian horror is in need of a new direction. Khopdi is a painful experience that only sadomasochists could derive pleasure from. Not perhaps the worst ever film but not too far off either.