Customer Reviews

Bhool Bhulaiyaa [Blu-ray]

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is not your typical traditional Bollywood movie.

The characters are a hoot.
My friend was ROFLHAO!
;)

funny characters ... drama ... comedy ... WHODUNIT?

This is not a kiddy movie.
There are adult topics.
A family could watch it as the sex & violence are minimal.
The DVD was well packaged with kiddy stuff which made me thought it was going to be childish ... UH HUH

2 discs: 1st > subtitled, 2nd > not

There was one scene that left you wondering what was occurring.
You'll know when you get there.
;)

the movie was very different from what I expected. it keeped me in suspence because it always made you wounder who exacly was doing all things around the house was it really a ghost or someone around the family.

H.Bala,apparently you don't know good acting when you see it.Obviously,you are too narrow-minded to see the full embodiment of the film and simply never will.

Any way,this was a great film.It went in-depth into the human mind and the recesses in which the things that make us tick reside.It was also hilarious and full of affection.To me it gave the image of two worlds binding together,traditional paranormal and modern psychology.And the dancing is awesome!

I give it an:

A+++!!!!!!!!

Akshay Kumar was a very mediocre actor during his early movies and has slowly blossomed into a great actor. He's very good to watch whether it be in a comedy role or a more serious role. This brings out the best of both these roles from Akshay.

Excellent movie with suspense and drama and with a small dose of psychology. Good research on multiple personality disorder. the characters are wonderful and fun. It grips you from the beginning :) Wonderful classical dance by Vidya Balan

The story is rather silly (psychologists will be wincing) but it's a lot of fun. The songs are enjoyable and the dancing is amazing!

It begins with Siddharth returning home to India on a visit, and accompanied by his newlywed wife, Avni. Siddharth, descended from local royalty, intends to occupy the long-deserted ancestral manor, even though his rustic relatives deeply fear that it's haunted. But Siddharth and Avni are a modern couple and brush away the warnings as superstitious nonsense. There's a door in the manor which has been kept sealed off, the locals believing that two restless spirits are imprisoned behind it. A curious Avni opens the door, and, immediately, spooky stuff starts to happen.

But, despite the mounting paranormal assaults, Siddharth and Avni continue to be skeptical and dismissive of the rural legends. Siddharth proposes a theory which blames all the weird events on a mentally unbalanced culprit. He attempts to get in contact with an old friend, a renowned psychiatrist. Which is where Akshay Kumar comes in, halfway thru the film. He plays the unconventional Dr. Aditya Shrivastav, and right away enlivens the movie screen. And, believe me, at this stage, it needed enlivening.

Sometimes, you flip a coin when you watch a Bollywood film. Most of these pictures tend to make for lengthy viewing, and, sometimes, with two and a half hours to fill, you get copious fat with the lean. BHOOL BHULAIYAA, like most of Bollywood cinema, spans several genres. It's a supernatural thriller, only with the thrills mostly absent. It explores the film's psychological underpinnings, and has some fair success at it. And, because the filmmakers somehow thought this would be seamlessly appropriate, BHOOL BHYLAIYAA is also a slapstick comedy. Check that, it tries to be a slapstick comedy. Me, I winced a lot.

And, really, when Akshay's character was explaining his theory to his highly educated audience, did he really need the visual aid of a Wikipedia fact sheet on the computer? *Cough**cheesy**Cough*

The "scares" are cheap and toothless, predicated on time-honored horror cliches. The sudden discordant noises. The menacing shadows scurrying along the wall. Fleeting and murky reflections glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. Stuff crashing to the floor or flying across the room. The film does salvage itself near the end, and I do like how the psychiatrist manages to bring clarity and effect a resolution, even if the resolution is a bit unsettling. However, the constant, jarring shifts to silly comedy undermine what possibly could've been a more atmospheric horror-suspense flick. And, surprisingly, for a Bollywood venture, the movie falls down on the romantic arcs. I was underwhelmed by the chemistry between Vidya Balan (Avni) and Shiney Ajuja (Siddharth), while Akshay and Amisha Patel barely share the camera.

But the cast is okay, with the lovely Vidya Balan and Bollywood superstar Akshay Kumar turning in the performances worth mentioning. I thought that the songs (Oh, yes, this is Bollywood, so there are songs!) were bland, excepting the track at the end, "Hare Krishna Hare Ram," which had a hip hop flavoring. This dvd also comes with a "Making of BHOOL BHULAIYAA" featurette, which is 21 minutes long and partly in English. BHOOL BHULAIYAA, released in 2007, made a lot of money in India's box offices, and, really, I can only attribute that to Akshay Kumar's star power. Sporadically funny, hardly frightening, and ploddingly paced, this film is just about bearable. I didn't mind watching it, and the last half hour is pretty good stuff. But I probably won't see this again. Two and a half stars.

Purchased blu-ray version and after inserting the disk in the player, a standard blu-ray info type screen came up but it wouldn't proceed to the next chapter/movie root menu. Even skipping chapters or forwarding did not help. Tried on a couple of players (PS3 40GB and BDP-S360) with same results.

update: Jun 14 2010. I purchased this movie in blu-ray one more time and to my dismay, the same thing happened again... the movie would not play nor will it come to the main/root menu. After some researching I found that apparently there is a compatibility problem this disk has with at least the 2 Sony players mentioned above. The workaround is to click on the Options button (the triangle shaped icon on the remote), select 'Go To' and then go and change the Chapter from 1 to 5 and click on the OK button. It will work! The picture quality isn't the sharpest but its still better than DVD quality.