Raat Shikhar (Last Gasp) Movie Review

Once in a while comes a horror film that puts you to sleep. But that is too good to be true. So the theatre guys turn up the volume, each time something scary is supposed to be happening on screen, to give you the scare of your life. This movie would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic. To top it all, it has been dubbed in the most atrocious manner into our national language, Hindi.

This movie is built on the urban legend of a guy who is possessed by the spirit of a Red Indian (read adivasi) going around hacking people just for the heck of it.

Teja, is a real estate guy who accidentally happens to kill an adivasi. He is possessed by his spirit and the spirit proceeds to destroy this guy’s life systematically, by making him hack people to death. Of course, the ghost is a traditional type and so is active only at night. So you have Teja running amuck at night, in a grass skirt, his face streaked with war paint, with a knife in his hand.

Then you have two females called Jyoti and Nisha. Jyoti falls for our possessed chap. But Nisha knows all along that he is the serial murderer (God alone knows how... call it feminine instinct). Then Teja kills Nisha’s husband, and Nisha takes it upon herself to kill Teja, to avenge her husband’s death and save Jyoti from an imminent death.

But she forgets the legend that the spirit passes on to the person who kills the possessed man (she reads this legend from a comic book!). So you have Nisha donning the war paint in the last scene after finishing off Teja.

This movie was called Last Gasp in its original English version. I recommend you see the original movie if you want to make any sort of sense out of the movie. The dubbing is bad, and there are so many cuts, half the movie is missing. Robert Patrick (of Terminator 2 fame) looks tired and literally possessed, though in a different sense. But you can’t blame him. With a name like Teja, he never stood a chance. The girls are just taking up space. Anything else they do in the movie, has been clipped by the scissor-happy censor board.