Live Telecast - A lightweight horror comedy that is too light to make an impression!

Bharath Vijayakumar

The first episode of Live Telecast gives ample evidence that this isn't going to be as scary as you want it to be. It is clear that Venkat Prabhu is going for something in his trademark lightweight style. But what is surprising is that the lightweightedness we see sometimes borders on being amateurish. So what we get is a series that is partly spoofy. But the issue is that some of the spoofy bits actually come across as unintentional!

The premise is pretty straightforward. A TV crew comes up with an idea to get inside a haunted house to capture ghosts in a live telecast. You can sort of guess as to what happens next. Venkat Prabhu follows the regular horror comedy tropes and isn't trying to do something new. His strength is in making fun films and you can see glimpses of that in Live Telecast but overall what we get is the feel of a disinterested filmmaker behind the camera.

The biggest dampener of Live Telecast is the performance of the cast. It isn't even perfunctory and is laughable at many places. The idea might have been not to scare but to have fun inside a haunted house. But it is the audience that should be having fun and not the characters on screen. What we have here is a bunch of characters who seem to be on a picnic cracking silly jokes. And there is not an ounce of credibility in the performance. The meter of the performance is of the kind that you get in TV serials. It is only Vaibhav (and to an extent Anandhi and Selva) who atleast gets it a bit right with his trademark deadpan humour. And Kajal Aggarwal throwing the F-word as a response to almost everything is laughable at first and becomes annoying after a point.

There is some excitement and urgency from episode 4 and the crisp nature of this series ensures that it remains tolerable.

Bottomline:

A cheesy horror comedy that might have worked had it got few things right. But what we get is a predominantly silly affair with very few glimpses of Venkat Prabhu having a hold over the proceedings.

Rating: 2.25/5