With Hollywood horror turning increasingly Eastwards for inspiration (and profits) in the form of Ringu, The Ju-on’s, Phone, The Eye, Dark Water, Pulse, A Tale of Two Sisters and so on, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that the more savvy Bollywood producers (namely Ram Gopal Varma) have been quick to follow suit. Already Varma’s 2003 hit Bhoot proved heavily influenced by Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water and this years entry directed by one of Varma’s growing coterie of protégé’s Vaastu Shastra is another that leans to the East for “inspiration”.

Though the film’s promo’s hinted that the film was to tread similar turf as The Sixth Sense with a bit of The Omen and a dash of The Shining thrown into the mix it actually follows a path much closer to recent Japanese horror hits namely the Ju-on films, Dark Water (Bhoot) and also the lesser known Korean chiller Acacia. Stylistically the film is very similar to Bhoot with the camera presenting images from an array of unusual, often silhouetted angles with objects, most often gnarled thorns or bushes in the foreground of the frame. The camera glides menacingly around the house in which the film is based in an identical manner that it did in Bhoot and Dark Water before it and the sound mix is loaded with recycled Evil Dead growling and cackling sounds to hammer home the point that the roving camera equals menace.

There is a bewildering prologue involving a lost traveller discovering a mysterious sobbing woman in the middle of the forest. After he meets a nasty end the film picks up the thread some time later. An affluent and seemingly successful couple move in to their dream house in a sparsely populated area somewhere on the outskirts of Pune. Sushmita, a doctor by profession tells her husband the novel writer that she adores the house and finds the physical layout perfect for Vaastu Shastra – the perfect living environment according to Hindu cosmology. And so they settle down with their 4 year old son who alas soon starts to see dead people though typically the grown ups wont believe him. An old tennis ball mysteriously rolls up (perhaps from the sets of The Changeling?) and starts to behave very strangely indeed, bit like one of those lop sided trick golf putting balls....all this for no apparent reason.

Soon it becomes very clear that the house is infested with ghosts; otherwise each time the camera roamed the outside of the house we wouldn’t be inundated with menacing gurgling and cackling sounds! Yet to be fair at first some of the ghosts appear to be quite benign even though later they turn distinctly inhospitable. The parents of young Rohan grow increasingly concerned by their son’s overly vivid imagination as he continues to talk about his friendship with Manish and Jyoti, the two dead children but later he also mentions that there is a “bad man” lurking around the house as well as a “bad aunty” who is in a particularly vile mood.

The parents realization that there is something fishy going on in their Vaastu Shastra comes a little bit too late as the evil spirits get down to business. One of them is a ghostly child, an Indian cousin of Toshio from Ju-on who has the giggles and drifts in and out of the house at will, day or night. Worse still there are a bunch of gnarled old trees (or is it just the one extended tree maybe) that seems to growl and snarl with seriously malicious intent every time the camera delves lovingly on it – which it does every few minutes throughout the 104 minute song less film. And for good measure there is a resident lunatic scampering around who seems to be the only one who knows the dark secrets of the area and warns of doom not unlike Crazy Ralph from the Friday the 13th flicks.

The film follows in what is rapidly turning into a staple for the new wave horror from Varma’s set up – basically a rehash stylistically of Bhoot with an enormous overemphasis on sound design and very deliberate and therefore stagy feel to the atmosphere the film strives so hard to conjure up. All the tricks of the trade are on display and efficiently carried out but without the slightest flair or feel for the genre. There are a succession of mechanically orchestrated shocks and a hideous overuse of the suddenly darting image in the foreground to create a jolt. The technique was used brilliantly in the Texas Chainsaw remake when Leatherface’s movement in the foreground (the first time the audience catches a glimpse of him) comes as a true jolt – but the technique like most in the horror film armoury of techniques and tricks is only effective when used very sparingly and sadly in this film every second scene has a figure darting across the either the background or the foreground and what’s supposed to be an effective shock is rendered no more than a cheap and annoying gimmick.

The other trick, as old as the hills but employed in the Ju-on films among others in recent times is to have the main character on screen move and reveal behind them a ghostly figure, often (as in Japanese and Korean movies) with a pallid chalk white face standing in the shadows. This technique is also overused to the point that it loses all its power to shock.

The film totally loses its grip when it comes to nearing a conclusion. The catalysts of evil are eventually shown to have no motive at all and suddenly, with the script writer floundering to provide a fittingly spectacular finale, we now turn to the recent Hollywood Zombie revival for inspiration. The film lurches from one ridiculous scenario to the other and all pretence at any sense of logic is abandoned for a barnstorming climax which sadly doesn’t quite materialize as hoped. Then perhaps feeling insecure, the director has added not one but two final cheap parting shocks and the obligatory open ended ending.

Though promising to begin with and containing a strong performance by Sushmita Sen, the film deteriorates into an exercise in style over substance and the plot, seemingly cooked up from so many borrowed sources fails to find a conclusion that is even remotely satisfying. The performance of the child is less than compelling while the husband is decidedly putrid.

The movie is fairly entertaining but more than a tad silly, low on logic like its mentors Ju-on and Acacia and really not very scary despite the valiant, unflagging attempts of the sound designers and the camera crew. The film is efficiently pieced together but its undoing is in its script that doesn’t quite know which direction to take after the initial hour and also because the director has incorporated loads of great techniques and tricks he has seen used in other films yet hasn’t displayed the ability to leave his own mark on it. Bhoot, despite its serious shortcomings, was superior.

Pity that the actual Hindu aspect of the Vaastu Shastra was not built upon which may have given the film the Indian-ness it required to make it more than an amalgam of rehashed and borrowed ideas.