With my internet connection at home being down for a long time and sundry other issues, it's been a good while since I plunked in a review. Allow me to make up for that drought with a double-bill of two recent releases, to both of which I happily award my seal of approval and urge you to check out before they are lost to the deluge of the idiots.

I had my reservations about Bolo Raam as its premise, a man called Raam (newcomer Rishi Bhutani) accused of brutal murder and refuses to speak, made it sound like a poor man's Aakrosh. In fact the original intention had been to extract whatever camp value the promos of the film promised. But as it turns out, BR is despite its weaknesses a nifty piece of work worth catching up with on the screen.

The film's structure is that of a police procedural, its characters and events unfolded in the course of the statements of several witnesses. The murder victim is Raam's mother (Padmini Kolhapuri, who has done some of the most demented roles in Hindi films and is criminally under-rated for her contributions to the cause of subversive cinema). Over the course of multiple flashbacks we get the picture of a relationship that's as incestuous as you can get this side of Taboo. Raam is arrested as the immediate suspect for the murder, although strangely no one suggests mother-fuckery as a possible motive. Naseeruddin Shah in a hilarious cameo as a loopy psychiatrist actually manages to convince the investigating policemen that there may be more to Raam's silence that meets the eye. Thus begins a circumlocutory investigation wherein a whole slew of characters give their view of the circumstances that may have led to Raam's alleged deed of murder.

The investigation bit (save an immensely annoying segment with Rajpal Yadav) is handled well, with each subsequent testimony revealing new facets to the various characters in the film. Veterans Govind Namdeo and Om Puri have done an excellent job here and their relish for the script's possibilities is plainly apparent. There are some silly song moments and Raam himself comes across as a bonehead brickwall, but the rest of the film is, despite what most of your mainstream newspaper shills have been telling you, sufficiently interesting to reward your trip.

Accident on Hill Road (dir. Mahesh Nair)

Unlike most of even the bigger budget Hindi films whose so-called “original” scripts are the unholy result of the director watching some foreign flick while downing vodka shots / cocaine snorts, AoHR admits to being an adaptation of a film called Stuck. I hadn't heard of this film before, but a search on the internet informed me that Stuck was made in 2007 by Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator, From Beyond, Dagon).

Here Celina Jaitley, whose career profile is otherwise restricted to the pages of Bombay Times, does a surprisingly entertaining job as the cause of the titular accident. By day she is a nurse at some uber-swanky old age home with an uber-bitch boss, and by night she is a trip-happy party animal with a drug pusher boyfriend (Abhimanyu Singh aka Ransa from Gulaal). While returning from an orgy she smacks her vehicle straight into Farooque Shaikh playing a dejected old geezer wandering about after his wife's passing away. Horrified by the incident and its possible implications on her career, Celina panics (with an impressive display of hyperventilation and squeaking) and actually drives back to her place with the old man's body stuck halfway through her windshield.

Come the next day, and the elderly gent is still stuck in the car but it turns out he's not quite dead (in fact, as time passes he shows an almost Wolverine-like healing ability). By this time she has pretty much decided that he's too much of an inconvenience for her future plans and bashes him over the head with a cricket bat....but it's still not the end of old Farooque. The remaining narrative has her doing a juggling act between repeatedly attempting to finish off the old guy and hiding the evidence of her mishap from the world at large.

AoHR has both genuinely intriguing story moments as well as plenty of lulz factor. In particular, the ability of Farooque Shaikh's character to withstand practically any number of blows to the head and still come out alive becomes an object of continuing hilarity. It also helps that the film works at a consistently tight pace and ends not a moment later than it should.