Bollywood’s first significant attempt in years at a ‘rom-zom-com’ is more ‘Shaun’ than ‘Dawn of the Living Dead’. Unlike previous cheesy soft-core porn zombie movies from the ’80s that attempted to scare audiences, directing duo Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK go for a blend of laughs and scares. They largely succeed.
Three Mumbai lads, Bunny (Anand Tiwari), Luv (Vir Das) and Hardik (Kunal Khemu) head to Goa for a break. Luv meets Luna (Piya Gupta), who invites the lads to a rave party on a remote island where they soon realise that the spaced out cokehead fellow partygoers may in fact be zombies. As they attempt to escape, they meet a mysterious Russian blond Boris (pronounced ‘Ba-ris’), played with relish by A-lister Saif Ali Khan, a kick-ass zombie hunter.
Despite spending a good deal of time explaining zombies to the audience (rural Indians may be unfamiliar with flesh-eating creatures) and setting up the simple plot, this is largely a fast-paced fun trip. Some of the humour is juvenile (guess why one of the lads is called ‘Hardik’) but it is still genuinely funny in places and stuffed with sharply observed witty one-liners. This bad-taste comic fantasy gore represents and knowingly spoofs the casual attitude to sex, drugs and booze increasingly prevalent in today’s Indian male middle-class.
Stick around for the obligatory twist at the end. It will make you think twice before booking that cheap charter flight to Goa.