Shoktir Lorai (Review)
Shoktir Lorai
aka শক্তির লড়াই
????
Written by ???
Directed by ???
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Still better than the remake
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Robocop gets remade by Bangla cinema, and the result is far from the worst Robocop film. Shoktir Lorai (শক্তির লড়াই) takes the basic premise of a murdered man being rebuilt into a robot who fights for justice, adds an evil counterpoint built by the villains, and throws in as many other Bangla tropes as they can to bring about a movie that is amazing and ridiculous while still being as Bangla as possible.
Bangla cinema is full of over the top characters and over the top action films, and it’s amazing just how naturally science fiction fits right in. We’ve seen a prior example of Bangla robots battling it out with Machine Man, and that film even stole some of the same parts of Robocop that Shoktir Lorai did! (though it was mostly stealing from Terminator franchise!)
As usual with these rarities, the review is a longform synopsis with commentary and we’ve included plenty of pictures and animated gifs. Thanks to Bangla cinema being so rarely written about in English, the cast and character names are partial guesses, and there are no subtitles to speak of. But at TarsTarkas.NET, we don’t need no stinking subtitles! I can’t seem to tell if this film was originally made for television or if it had a theatrical run, but television is where it first caught my attention as someone uploaded a clip to YouTube, and after that it was only a matter of two years of searching before I located a copy. Basically, any rare film you can’t find in less than an hour will probably take years to locate, that’s the disparity of rare cinema. So if people can fill in the blanks on who Shahin Alam and Notun are as well as all the actresses/actors who are nameless, it would be a great help!
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Categories: Movie Reviews, Ugly Tags: Bangladesh, Danny Sidak, Munmun, Notun, Robocop, Shahin Alam, We don't need no stinking subtitles
Rokto Pipasha (Review)
Rokto Pipasha
aka রক্ত পিপাসা aka The Vampire
2009BMDB Link
Written and Directed by Rubel
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These vampires know how to have fun!
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Bangladesh does their own version of Blade, all Bangla-ed up with plenty of fighting, yelling, dr4ama, people with giant swords, singing, child endangerment, ridiculous vehicles, cheap effects, scratched film, excitement, and only lacking in the budget. Rokto Pipasha is amazing cinema, and deserved a larger audience, especially in the West. Since the current audience in the West seems to be just me (There is currently literally nothing about this film written in English!), it’s time for TarsTarkas.NET to do what it does best, exposing obscure foreign fun to the masses. And as Rokto Pipasha is all over YouTube in a format where it doesn’t look too bad, there is really no excuse not to track it down. Rokto Pipasha does not have subtitles, but at TarsTarkas.NET, we don’t need no stinking subtitles! You also don’t really need them to figure out what is going on. There are some vampires, some vampire hunters, and a lot of fighting. The villains are obvious, the heroes spend much of their time tracking them down or arguing amongst themselves, and the action sequences are rather well choreographed.
For those of you uninitiated with Bangla cinema, their action movies feature a lot of the things common in action cinema in India, Pakistan, and the Middle East. There is a lot of yelling and boasting by heroes and villains before they fight. There are dramatic zooms. A lot of dramatic zooms. In one sequence, vampire hunter Mr. T argues with four other vampire hunters, and we get a reaction zoom to Mr. T, then the first hunter, then Mr. T, then the second hunter, repeating for all. This happens multiple times throughout the film. The action is over the top, bringing in elements of martial arts and super heroes. The characters do punches and kicks that would kill normal people, but because they fight others who are super powered, they often do little damage, except for on whichever character is slated to die in that fight. All the main vampire hunters have a huge weapon, either a ridiculous sword or a scythe or something, and they walk around carrying the giant hand weapon in a world where guns exist. The soundtrack is packed full of stolen music. Rokto Pipasha came out in 2007, so there is no excuse. It’s yet another movie with the James Bond theme, as a weird remix pops up randomly during scenes where characters are looking cool. I also recognized tracks from Gladiator, Star Wars, Jaws, and various Westerns.
Most of the action either takes place in the middle of nowhere or in giant warehouse studios with large hand painted murals as set decoration. There are one or two actual sets that might be part of a hotel or something, unsurprisingly some of the musical numbers also take place here (as those parts will have higher budgets than the rest of the film). And even those locations have walls covered in huge paintings. I would also wager that if I watched more low budget Bangladeshi films, I would recognize some of the paintings.
One thing that isn’t common in Bangla cinema is the characters drive around in ridiculous custom monster vehicles. The cars would be 1000% not street legal in the US, and the vehicle choices make you obvious targets for whoever is hunting you. They also look ridiculous, even though they are awesome. Just check out the wealth of images I took of these monstrosities and try not to instantly want to watch Rokto Pipasha! Another thing that is rare is Western-style monsters like vampires, though films “borrowing” plots from American cinema isn’t that rare in Bangla film. Rokto Pipasha has concepts lifted directly from the Blade movies, but follows enough of its own path that it isn’t a straight ripoff, it just owes a heavy debt.
As Rokto Pipasha is obscure as heck, this will be another classic TarsTarkas.NET longread where I go over everything. Those of you who hate reading will enjoy the large amount of photos and gifs, and everyone will have a good time. Or else I’ll stab you with my vampire sword! The lack of subtitles means the character names are guesses, though I’m pretty sure I’m right about the main vampire hunter Blade ripoff played by Rubel being named Mr. T. The villain vampire in love is definitely named Romeo.
Rubel aka Masum Parvez Rubel stars and also directed and co-wrote the film, along with some writers that I couldn’t find names for. He also delivers the explaination in the beginning and seems to be a big fan of the Blade series. According to a text blurb he put in the film, he “committer himself to give you a good commercial film”, so few films declare their intentions nowadays. Besides Rubel, actor Shakil Khan has a featured role as a villainous vampire in love. Actor names I couldn’t connect with roles include: Bipasha (is this Bipasha Hayat?), Moumita, and Elys Kobra. There is also a cameo appearance from Bangla action star Sohel Rana. The lack of English information in general on Bangla film is a big problem that I hope gets solved someday, and it is made exponentially harder by the few cast members that are mentioned in talk about the film just having a single name. I am eagerly awaiting someone to chime in down in the comments for who is who.
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Categories: Movie Reviews, Ugly Tags: Bangladesh, Bipasha, Elys Kobra, Moumita, Rubel, Shakil Khan, Sohel Rana, vampires
Machine Man
Machine Man
aka Banglar Machine Man
????
Written by ???
Directed by ???
The most advanced bullet-time ever!
Bangladeshi science fiction cinema is not something you hear too much about, for two main reasons. One: there isn’t much Bangladeshi science fiction cinema. Two: what little there is, is as hard to get a hold of as the rest of non-mainstream Banglar film. Which means you are resorting to badly encoded vcds showcasing leprous prints that are seconds away from disintegrating into dust. The print of Machine Man looks like it is projected through a jar of drugged out hobo pee, and the camera randomly loses focus and frames weird. There are even two different prints on vcd, a full screen version that you can tell what is going on, and a blurrier widescreen version that shows the whole picture, but at such low resolution it’s not worth it. The joys of vcds! Heck, even recent Bangladeshi films look like they were ran over by a heard of giant apes!
Machine Man is basically a Bangladeshi version of Robocop Terminator vs Evil Robocop T-1000. The hero cop is reborn as a cyborg Machine Man that destroys crime and has occasional flashbacks to his whole family being massacred. After thoroughly trouncing the villain to near death, the villain then becomes a Bionic Man of his own, more advanced and more powerful. When these two get together, let’s just say sparks will fly. In Banglar tradition, there is a ton of crazy violence and guys yelling at each other.
What Machine Man isn’t, is original. The Machine Man dresses as Terminator right after he’s made, complete with black leather jacked and sunglasses. But all of his experiences are straight from Robocop. The prototype cyborg malfunctioning, the cop being shot up by the villains, flashbacks of his family while walking through his abandoned house, and even a few of the action scenes are completely lifted from Robocop. The villainous Bionic Man, however, is the liquid metal T-1000 from Terminator 2, complete with holes getting blow in him that heal up just fine. The fun part is seeing pop culture hijacked and transformed into a new media, and how easily it melds into Bangladeshi action cinema.
You might wonder why even bother to make these characters robots. After all, their fighting powers are hardly out of place in normal Banglar action cinema. Heck, even compared with Banglar Hero, which also stars Manna, if you were to pull random scenes without knowing which film it was from, the only real telltales would be the sunglasses and the animated sparks that occasionally are put in. The action heroes are already superhuman. Now they’ve evolved, beyond superhuman. Heroes and villains, gone hyperdrive.
Machine Man has never seen an explosion despite walking slowly away from thousands of them
Once the bionic has been installed, things get nuts. The effects are up to par with your Halloween costume from 1983, including bent pieces of sheet metal representing a character’s robot pieces. Of course, this means everything is a whole lot of fun. Machine Man has a healthy dose of action, and keeps the pace moving a long rather nicely.
As Machine Man is a rather unknown film (I can’t even pin down a year of release!), I’ll be dropping a full recap after the break, so you too can live the magic of Machine Man in the comfort of text form interspersed with images. Thanks to spending lots of time on Google, I have determined who like four cast members are. The rest are just names that could be anyone. Perhaps someone will be good enough to stop by eventually and help ID people – Mousumi, Bristi, Kazi Hayat, Shiva Shanu, Nasrin, Miju Ahmed.
He forgot to drink milk. Milk. It does a body good.
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Not my white suit!!
Read more…
Categories: Movie Reviews, Ugly Tags: Apu Biswas, Asif Iqbal, Bangladesh, Bristi, Kazi Hayat, Manna, Miju Ahmed, Mousumi, Nasrin, Shiva Shanu
Banglar King Kong (Review)
Banglar King Kong
2010
Directed by Iftekar Jahan
The movie. The myth. The legend. Banglar King Kong! Yes, folks, we have an awesome treat for you today on TarsTarkas.NET! Straight from the heart of Bangladesh comes this Kong-tastic take on everyone’s favorite giant ape. The story of King Kong is timeless, and Kongs have appeared throughout the world, some more official than others. Is Banglar King Kong licensed and legal? Hell no! But it exists anyway and mirrors the plot of the King Kong films so closely that even without subtitles, you know exactly what is going on. The tale of King Kong will be one of those things that people 300 years from now will know. In future digi-hologram movies, Space Kong will climb to the top of the Space Elevator and toss around Starship Enterprises, and you know things will play out just like the 1933 classic. And it will be glorious.
Unofficial King Kong knockoffs have existed in foreign markets since 1933’s Wasei Kingu Kongu (和製キング・コング aka Japanese King Kong), which along with the 1938 King Kong Appears in Edo (江戸に現れたキングコング aka Edo ni Arawareta Kingu Kongu) are pre-WW2 tales that have not been seen since their initial theatrical runs. As we all know, Japan made two real King Kong films much later. Giant apes and Kong-ish story lines appear in such cinema classics as India’s Shikari, the Korean film A*P*E, the farcical Queen Kong, and the microbudget The Mighty Gorga. There might even be one in India’s 1953 film Gorilla. As far as I know, this is the first giant ape in Bangladeshi cinema.
The costume for Banglar King Kong is among the worst ape costumes ever put on film. I say among the worst, because there is no doubt a low budget Indian horror film (probably by Harinam Singh) that will have a worse ape costume. But it is by far the worse King Kong costume that ever existed. From the sneering mask to the visible spaces for socks, the whole thing is a Halloween disaster. Though I do give them props for the blinking eyes, that was a nice touch and made the ape have some actual feelings on display. We give credit where credit is due on TarsTarkas.NET.
The director Iftekar Jahan has directed several other films, of which I can find little information thanks to a billion sites copying the same Banglar King Kong article and clogging up Google. The actors is even a bigger mess, despite some of them having names spelled different every time I saw it typed out, I can find little information on any of them. What we do know is that Banglar King Kong was produced by Sharmin Osman for the Bangladesh Film Development Corporation (BFDC), the main government body that overseas much of Banglar cinema, so this is some government funded B-grade fun! TarsTarkas.NET has encountered Banglar film once before, the actionfest Banglar Hero. And one of the stars of Banglar Hero, Tubby Buddy, has a role in Banglar King Kong playing another comic relief character. I still cannot figure out who is playing him. Of the cast list: Munmun, Danny Sedak, Shamim Osman, Afzal Sharif and Kazi Hayat, I was only able to identify Munmun as Milly and Kazi Hayat as the lead female tribeswoman Tubby Buddy pairs up with.
When you watch Banglar King Kong, try to keep in mind this film was made in 2010. But between the scratches on the print, the mistimed dubbing, and the blue screen effects that fan films put to shame, you could swear up and down that this is a product of 1961. Only the musical numbers, which were shot with some sort of HD camera and with professional lighting, look modern. But even those snippets are transferred from a film negative, and have scratches – though not nearly as much as the rest of Banglar King Kong, which looks like the print was shot up by helicopters and dumped off the top of a random tall building.
The non-singing soundtrack is 100% stolen. I recognized the themes from Gladiator, Empire Strikes Back, James Bond, King Kong 1976, Last of the Mohicans, and 2001 among those that were playing. I’m guessing they weren’t banking on an international release… The vcd must have been encoded by the anipal monkey Buntoo himself, because it is rife with errors and digital trash. The images suffer as well, with this 2 1/2 hour film compresses to just two vcds. I did my best to get clear shots, but as you can see, there is no refined BluRay clarity. Sometimes the discs have sounds problems so bad we might as well be getting the audio from the next theater over!
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Banglar Hero (Review)
Banglar Hero
1989
Directed and Produced by Ahmmad Nasir
It’s time to crack open a big can of Bangladeshi cinema!
Bangladesh was once part of Pakistan, known as East Pakistan (and Pakistan was part of India under the British…) but a civil war in 1971 got them their independence. Bangladesh is a Muslim country, and due to close cultural ties with both Pakistan and India, Bangladeshi cinema resembles both of the neighbors. We have strong he-man characters with mustaches yelling at each other like Pakistani cinema. From India, we have songs, dances, and tragedy happening to the hero.
Bangladeshi cinema is based out of the city of Dharka, and thus is known as Dhallywood, because every region needs its own “-ollywood”! There is also Bangladeshi cinema produced in India for the large Banglar population there, based out of the West Bengal city of Kolkata, and known as Tollywood. This was actually not only the first Tollywood, but the first “-ollywood” as it is a play on the neighborhood of Tollygunge in Kolkata where many of the movie studios were located in 1932. Blame Wilford E. Deming of American Cinematographer for all these “-ollywood”s you can’t keep straight!
Banglar Cinema was already going strong under Pakistani rule, but after independence production exploded. But by the time the 1980s were in full swing, Banglar films were on the decline. Now, with increased competition from TV and satellite shows, Banglar cinema has more problems than ever. But it also has undergone a rebirth, with the latter half of the 2000s producing a lot of new films and new talents. Where will these talents take Banglar film in the 2010s? We shall find out as you do.
In what is sadly common in a lot of foreign vcds, the vcd company advertises their name throughout the film. In addition, they seem to either be covering up a previous company’s logo because they took over the distribution rights OR they are straight bootlegging it. So we got annoying logos pasted over annoying logos with annoying scrolling text pasted over annoying scrolling text. The key word is annoying. This is pretty darn common in vcd releases from the region, because deluxe edition DVD boxed sets with director’s commentaries and lame behind the scenes extras are not the economic model of cinema in many countries. Pumping out dozens of films a year as fast as possible for theatrical run and then saturating the area with vcds making sure everyone knows that Famous Person is the star is the way to go.
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How ’bout that scrolling text graphic?
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Inspector Abu, the Banglar hero, is played by a guy named Manna. Manna was born SM Aslam Talukder in 1964 and entered acting at age 20 under the name Manna. Over his lifetime, Manna acted in over 350 movies and became one of the biggest names in the industry. As General Secretary of the Bangladesh Film Actors Association, he lead efforts to reduce vulgarity in Banglar cinema. He died in 2008 of a heart attack, probably from the stress involved in ripping off yet another guy’s arm.
I am pretty sure that Dr. Masutke is played by Omor Shani (aka Omar Sani) – who is married to Mousumi who probably played the sister Asti. I am not 100% positive, partially because there are very few good pictures of Omar Sani online, and in the ones that are, Omar has changed his weight and look considerably. At some point it looks like he wanted to try out for a Nutty Professor The Klumps sequel, not realizing it was all makeup on Eddie Murphy. But I guess he kept the local restaurant industry afloat…
I found even less information on director/producer Ahmmad Nasir. Besides a few references to this film, there is nothing out there at all in English.
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Categories: Movie Reviews, Ugly Tags: Ahmmad Nasir, Bangladesh, Clowns are the devil, Manna, Mousumi, Omar Sani
HALKa – Banglar Hulk
Bangladesh is becoming the new Turkey. We got Banglar King Kong, and now Banglar Hulk. Just waiting for Banglar Star Wars, as it will be the greatest movie of all time. Sohel Afgani Rana directs this.
Categories: Movie News Tags: Bangladesh, HALKa
