The cat came back

This month, the hairless apes over at M.O.S.S. -- of which I am a proud member -- are paying tribute to hairy beasts in the world of cinema. My first modest contribution, just posted over at Teleport City, is a newly revised version of my 4DK review of Da Khwar Lasme Spogmay, aka Cat Beast, that incontestably classy treasure of Pakistani cinema starring Shehnaz Begum as a ferocious feline avenger who uses rapists for a scratching post. Check it out, won't you?

Loor Da Bala (Pakistan, 1999)

I keep telling myself that I’ll eventually reach some kind of tipping point where these Pashto language horror films won’t seem so strange to me anymore, but Loor Da Bala most definitely isn’t it. In fact, Loor Da Bala brings the strange on a couple of different levels. It’s guaranteed to be just about the most violent, grotesque and sleazy thing that you’ve ever seen, which would make you think that it at least wouldn’t be boring, yet it somehow manages to be that as well. Thankfully, those who are easily offended can occupy themselves during the slow bits by making angry phone calls to the VCD’s distributor, Sangar, whose phone number is helpfully plastered on screen for most of the film’s running time. I’m sure they’d love to hear from you.

To give you some sense of what we’re dealing with here, Loor Da Bala makes something of a theme out of people being sexed while supine. A woman is raped while unconscious, then turns into a monster and tears her attacker’s intestines out. A male protagonist is subjected to similar treatment by a “comic relief” gay character while he lies in a drugged stupor. A trio of globular college girls innocently knead at one another’s breasts while sleeping (as you’ll do). And finally, in a sequence that really puts Loor Da Bala on the world cinema map, a voluptuous female sasquatch-like creature lies chained to a table, moaning and writhing in a combination of fear and ecstasy as a pair of bears (i.e. men in matted looking bear costumes) nuzzle at all of her areas, until she finally breaks free to kung fu kick both of them into the middle of next week. This last was literally the weirdest thing I’ve seen yet this year -- and, yes, I know it’s only February.

The film features a duo of male protagonists played by Shahin Khan and, of course, Badar Munir. I say “of course” because Munir’s career as a star of Pashto cinema goes all the way back to 1970’s Yousuf Khan Sher Bano, the first feature ever produced in the Pashto language. In the ensuing years he came to fulfill the same role in Pashto cinema that Sultan Rahi did within Punjabi films, that of being the beefy, angry, yelling guy who stars in every movie, with a body of work that ultimately came to total over 400 films. Munir also worked in Urdu and Punjabi movies, and reportedly starred alongside Rahi on a number of occasions -- in films that immediately pushed their way to the top of my “must see” list the moment I learned of them.

As far as plot, the movie seems to have a couple of parallel narratives going on which I can’t say for sure, without the aid of subtitles, really interweave or relate to each other in any way. It could just be that, despite its horror trappings, Loor Da Bala couldn’t escape the requirement that it include, like most Pashto films, a storyline involving wounded masculine honor and corresponding bloody vengeance. Thus is provided a gang of scurrilous thugs who, in the course of terrorizing Khan and Munir’s village, kill off some of their woman folk, as a result setting the stage for much gunplay and scenes of men piercing, puncturing and perforating each other with various swords and daggers amid aggrieved throaty screaming.

But, of course, those are all things that you can see in any Pashto film. What you can’t see in any Pashto film is a pair of hirsute, mother and daughter (I think) hellbeasts who transform into dog, bird or human form by way of a variety of deeply bizarre psychedelic optical effects. Said hellbeasts then feast on the entrails of their victims -- that is, until Badar Munir slices off the head and hands of the younger one, who nonetheless fights on for a good few minutes despite being reduced to little more than a collection of blood squirting stumps. This affront puts the snaggletoothed mom-beast on a personal mission of vengeance against our heroes, one that can only be stopped by liberal applications of equal parts portly man martial arts and forceful readings of Islamic scripture.

In those moments when none of the admittedly exciting events described above are taking place, Loor Da Bala puts an earnest effort into becoming tedious through the application of a truly mindboggling number of not at all interestingly staged musical numbers featuring the usual assortment of rump-heavy women. And where that fails, the film courts inertia through sheer repetition. One or two crazed fight scenes might be plenty entertaining, but when all are pitched at the level of an apocalyptic final confrontation, it becomes a bit dismaying when they are followed by a dozen more. The same can even be said of the monster attack scenes, as wonderful as each is in itself. During the last hour, I on numerous occasions thought that the beast had been vanquished, only to have it come around again five minutes later like a bus on rush hour schedule.

Yet, as sleepy as things may get,  Loor Da Bala can always be relied upon to snap us to attention with one of its frequent moments of truly stunning seediness. Such is the scene in which the beast, having taken fetching womanly form, fellates the barrel of Shahid Khan’s pistol, sucking the bullets from the chamber as he sweatily derps out watching her. Also promoting wakefulness are the movie’s many aforementioned reminders of all the unsavory fiddling that might befall us should we nod off. The end result is a type of enforced sleep deprivation that might just make Loor Da Bala the rare film that violates international torture conventions. You have been warned.

 Again, that number is…

Balaa (Pakistan, 1992)

Balaa has been scientifically determined to consist of 89% zoom shots, with 77% of those accompanied by thunderclap sound effects. Of course, if you are someone who is at all familiar with the Pashto language cinema of Pakistan, the scientific odds of you being surprised by that fact are precisely 0%. Look, then, for novelty in the film's conspicuous lack of wet spandex and insistent taxidermy motif.

Like so many Pashto films of its day, Balaa centers on a feuding pair of he-men in which one of the pair is played by Badar Munir. The other half of the pair is our villain, the demonic warlord Kublai Khan, who has a penchant for yanking small children from their parents' arms and gleefully tossing them into a huge bonfire that always seems to be burning in the center of his gang's campground.  Badar Munir, for his part, plays a tribal leader who is intent on ending Kublai Khan's reign of terror. In this he has a partner, a just as generously mustached fellow capable of gravity defying feats of kung fu that belie his somewhat cherubic stature. This character may be played by Shahid; I'm honestly not sure, though the build-up he gets -- serial shock zooms, a ground-up pan that makes him look the height of Konga, LOTS of thunderclaps -- suggests that he's quite a big deal, whoever he is.

Alongside these vociferously warring mortals, Balaa also presents us with a gaggle of snaggletoothed witches. These consistently walk the fine line between laughable and disturbing, with the hags and their creepy milieu actually providing a few genuine scares here and there. Elsewhere, their carryings on will merely be a source of confusion for those who, like myself, are trying to parse Balaa without the aid of translation. Such a scene is the one where Kublai Khan's lady friend (Chakori), seemingly  bewitched herself, digs up a corpse and then starts to maniacally knead dough on it's bare chest.

Not surprisingly, it is the witches -- and Balaa's horror elements in general -- that provide the most interest, as well as the most fun. As in the previously reviewed Adam Khor, a lot of effort is put into ramping up a cheesy, funhouse atmosphere, with obscene amounts of howling wind, ominous cackling, and closeups of leering skeletons put to the task of cluing us in whenever something spooky is about to happen, has just happened, or simply may happen. Unfortunately, the intervals between such "boo" moments are generous in length, and tend to contribute to Balaa being dispiritingly tiresome at times. This, however, may be more my fault than director Qaiser Sanober's, as the film comes with a surfeit of characters and subplots that make it a somewhat unfriendly watch for a viewer ignorant of the language.

Also filling out Balaa's non-supernatural moments -- alongside, of course, a lot of throaty yelling back and forth between our two leads -- are a literal shit ton of musical numbers. These, as I indicated above, are relatively chaste for a Pashto film (or at least they are in the cut of the film I saw). This is not to say that the posteriors of the female dancers go wholly ignored by the camera, mind you, just that the crotch cam is kept at a comparatively discreet distance, and that there are few scenes in which any dancer appears to be on the verge of literally sitting upon the lens. Relieved of such preoccupations, Sanober even seems to have put a little thought into making these sequences look interesting, as is evidenced by one dance number that employs a nifty split screen effect. I also have to point out that I think this is the first time that I've actually seen a song picturized on Badar Munir himself, and that, having now seen him dance, I can imagine why it might not have been a frequent occurrence.

Stepping up to balance the sleaze deficit left by Balaa's less porny approach to the balletic arts, Sanober piles on the blood and guts, delivering a series of gore sequences that are stunning in their audacity. At one point, a female captive of Kublai Khan's caresses and smooches the severed head of her lover, at another, Khan cuts gory chunks off of a bound captive and then gleefully holds them up for the victim's inspection, and finally, a puppet dog's head gnaws at a bad guy's abdomen until his entire intestinal tract is torn out of a piece.  As you might have guessed, none of this looks at all realistic, and instead suggests frequent trips to the butcher's shop for remnants. But if you're a fan of thrift store Grand Guignol with an obnoxiously in-you-face attitude -- as I most certainly am -- there is much to adore here.

There is enough that is enjoyable about Balaa that I'm a bit sad that I can't more wholeheartedly recommend it. There are, in fact, some parts of it that need to be seen, though at the cost of also slogging through many parts that don't. To deal with that, I suggest you tend to some household chores while it's on, and only snap to attention whenever you hear echo-y cackling, rattling bones, or howling wind on the soundtrack.