These are films that made you wonder, who watches them? Answer: Everyone!
Comedy is tough to do. Every year Bollywood makes hundreds of movies. Some aim directly for our funny bones. Some like Welcome to Sajjanpur and Rocket Singh are bang on the money. Some miss the mark (Life Partner, Do Knot Disturb).
Then there are some movies that fail on all aspects. Either the film-maker is trying too hard or he is not trying at all. These are the movies you want to watch over and over again. They are not meant to be comedies. They just are so insane and completely senseless, you marvel at them.
“That’s the law of inverse goodness,” says Suresh Venkat, executive producer at Network 18. “They are movies so bad that they are good. It’s like light travelling in a black hole. Usually light travels in a straight line but the power of gravity in a black hole is so strong that it curves on itself. The movies can’t be moderately bad. Any film Fardeen Khan acts in, it’s bad. They have to be really bad. These are the Rajnikant movies like Sivaji,” adds Venkat.
You don’t tell anyone you watch these movies unless, of course, your friends enjoy these guilty pleasures as well. You wouldn’t go out and buy the DVD but if it plays on television, you’ll watch it. Again and again. You laugh out loud and it gets contagious. Soon, you can recite the dialogue along with the actors. It’s illogical, preposterous and improbable. Pretty soon you have your whole family watching with you.
“Look at Partner. Now Govinda and Salman Khan have a great sense of comic timing,” says Neha Sareen, TV show host and film critic. “The characters are completely cuckoo. As long as the film is ridiculous for its entire duration you can navigate through the movie. Salman Khan teaches Govinda how to dance. It can’t get more illogical than that.”
Actually it can. There was a film called Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahaani that was written, produced and directed by Rajkumar Kohli. Made in 2002, he used the film to re-launch his son Armaan Kohli. The movie had a star cast a mile long: Akshay Kumar, Suniel Shetty, Sunny Deol, Arshad Warsi, Raj Babbar, Sonu Nigam, Rambha, Manisha Koirala and of course Kohli Jr. The movie lived up to its name. It was so anokhi that the actors could not understand what the hell was going on. One minute Akshay Kumar is in the hospital after a bad car accident, the next minute he’s piloting a boat on the high seas behind Armaan Kohli who, believe it or not, is running on water. Continuity, logic, even science or common sense be damned.
(This story appears in the 19 February, 2010 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)