134. Ooru Peru Bhairavakona; movie review

 

OORU PERU BHAIRAVAKONA

Cert 12A

133 mins

BBFC advice: Contains moderate bloody images, violence, threat

It would take an extraordinarily good zombie movie for me to endorse the genre and Ooru Peru Bhairavakona is far from that.

I am sure that its storyline would have been easier to follow if I had been a native Telugu speaker, but I found it confusing, and if there were any cultural gags, they went over my head.

Vi Anand's film reaches for too many spoof horror cliches amid the shrieking, which gave me a headache.

It stars Sundeep Kishan as Basava, a movie stunt double who steals dowry jewellery from a wedding because of his desperation for money.

His pal, John (Harsha Chemudu), is the getaway driver, but as they are escaping from the incompetent cops, they are stopped in their tracks by an injured young woman (Kavya Thapar) at the side of the road.

They pick her up and look for a doctor to treat her in the first village they find, the mysterious Bhairavakona.

And it transpires that, in the words of the famous song Hotel California: "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."

This is Spooksville, and all sorts of shenanigans with the living dead are pursued.

There are lots of questions that need answering in Ooru Peru Bhairavakona, not least about Basava's motivations to steal and his romance with the Bhoomi (Varsha Bollamma), who is regularly on the edge of the action.

Meanwhile, there is bafflement over the village and its aggressive leader (P. Ravi Shankar), who never appears in daylight.

As said, so much is going on that the plot becomes increasingly incoherent. In addition, the lead character didn't chime with me at all.

It is a movie that I will have forgotten in a few days.

Reasons to watch: Plenty of action

Reasons to avoid: Confusing

Laughs: None

Jumps: None

Vomit: None

Nudity: None

Overall rating: 3.5/10

Did you know? Sundeep Kishan owns a restaurant chain in Hyderabad named Vivaha Bhojanambhu.

The final word. Vi Anand:"The principle of Karma undergirds the story of 'OPBK'. What goes around comes around." Ragalahari

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