Alone review: More comedy less scares

Ameet Bhuvan

Adaptations in Hindi cinema almost always means moulding marauding the original into something far far removed from the genre it was meant to be in. With Alone, director Bhushan Patel “adapts” the Thai horror film of the same name by adding an overdose of titillation and sleaze. The end result is a film that is all about chiselled abs and toned legs in the name of a horror movie. 

Sanjana and Anjana are conjoined twins, one of them dies when the other decides to operate and separate for love. The living one and her love settle down, but are pulled back to the ancestral home where the dead sister tries to reclaim what was hers. What ensues are a lot romantic numbers, kisses, undressing and between the sheets action. Why? God alone knows. 

Director Bhushan uses his now trademark tropes to scare, many of these fail to evoke any shiver in the audience since they are done to death. With dialogues like “yeh bhoot tumhaare dimaag mein hai aur woh khaali hai” even attempts at fear fall flatly into the unintentional hillarity zone. Then there are jargons like Bhootpuran that is invoked to cure the posession and one knows this movie has nothing left to redeem it. 

Bipasha Basu looks desperate to recreate her Jism days, with ample skin show and loads of sleaze - she practically spends half the film getting in and out of lacy short numbers and into beds with the equally uncomfortable-with-clothes Karan. Any attempt at actually acting or creating a sense of terror is put aside as all we see are romps in beautiful locales.  It  would have helped if the songs had been decent but that too is not much of a good thing here. 

To make a decent horror flick seems impossible for mainstream Bollywood. Alone, like others before it, are mere excuses to make cheap bucks from titillation with no sense of reason or story. If that is what you are looking for, this film is passable. If it is a good horror film you are looking for, download the Thai original instead. 

Rating: 1.5/5