Editorials
5 Hilarious Moments from Bollywood’s ‘Evil Dead’ Rip-Off
While Bollywood has a thriving movie industry in its own right, its not above blatantly ripping-off American successes. The weird thing about Bach Ke Zara is that, unlike most foreign exploitation pictures which aim to capitalize on a timely craze, the film was produced in 2008, nearly 30 years after Sam Raimi’s original. Though you wouldn’t know it to look at it.
Like Evil Dead, Bach Ke Zara follows a group of teens who uncover an evil book of the dead and unleash an ancient evil. Also like Evil Dead, well, everything else.
The following are my favorite moments from this oddity of foreign cinema.
Shut up, you rascal!
In this scene, one of the film’s supporting players has had it up to here with a Hindi Deadite.
So much crying
Just like Ash, Bach Ke Zara‘s main character gets real emotional after killing his possessed girlfriend. Like, really, really emotional.
The slap
It’s at :26. You can’t miss it (get it?).
Tree Attack
Hmmm. Bach Ke Zara‘s replication of Evil Dead‘s most notorious scene doesn’t quite live up to the original. Having said that, some of the film’s best visual effects are on display here.
Break it down!
Since it’s a Bollywood movie, you know the characters are going to break out in song, right? Wrong. In Bach Ke Zara the filmmakers just inserted a pop hit in the middle of the movie. None of the characters or locations appear.
That’s all, folks!
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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