Your Daily Dracula – Harinam Singh, Khooni Dracula (1992)

Your Daily Dracula – Harinam Singh, Khooni Dracula (1992)

The Bollywood equivalent of a poverty row horror flick – choppy, repetitive, monotonous, lurid, ugly-looking, very poorly edited and shot, and yet kind of fascinating in its sheer random goofiness.  Of course, I watched it in unsubtitled Hindi so I might conceivably have missed some subtleties, but if the dialogue is on a level with everything else in the production I suspect not.  Harinam Singh directed, co-wrote and stars in the movie, which seems for at least of its running time to be a random assembly of scenes in which the title monster stalks and gnaws on women who are taking showers with swimwear on or splashing about in pools or dressed in a weirdly hideous take on the Wonder Woman costume for a disco where the music and dancing are certainly not up to Indian blockbuster standards.  The monster is a shapeshifter of sorts – manifesting first as a robed, hooded fiend type whose distorted face looks like a papier mache Rondo Hatton head mask that’s been runover by a truck (and has what looks like a baboon’s arsehole slap in the middle of its forehead like an oversized caste mark), then as a chubby, moustached creep with protruding underbite fangs and a ridiculous cardboard top hat (maybe modelled on the vampire from the Bugs Bunny cartoon Transylvania 6-5000?) … and, finally, as the same chubby, moustached creep without fangs acting like an agonised swain and perhaps very distantly channelling Alex D’Arcy as one of the screen’s least noteworthy Draculas in Blood of Dracula’s Castle.  At mid-point, a flashback explains the monster’s origins – a plump, smooth, white-suited gangster-type raped and killed a servant on KD’s grave and her blood revived him.  In the end, a harrying mob of god-botherers wielding symbols of several religions pursue and corner the Dracula and duff him up to death.  The rapist villain gets shot in the head earlier, so justice is done.  It may be the weakest vampire variant from India, but I’ve more research to do in this field.

It has a catchy theme song, though.