When most of the characters in your film are shambling, stomach doped out fiends in various stages of decomposition, then there’s a lot of cinematic pressure on the few human beings left on screen. If the plot too starts shambling around, then the movie itself is going to stink badly.
Go Goa Gone is supposedly India’s first ‘zombie-comedy’ film, directed by Raj Nidimoru and Krishna D.K and produced by Saif Ali Khan and others.
Hardik (Kunal Khemu), Luv (Vir Das) and Bunny (Anand Tiwari) are three blokes who travel down to Goa, go to a rave party organised by Russian mafia on an island and encounter zombies. This zombiefication has been caused by a powerful drug served at the party by the mafia, a drug which suppresses all human faculties except the desire to feast on live human flesh. Saif plays Boris, the Russian mafia boss, with dyed head and facial hair and a thick accent. Luna (Puja Gupta), one of the unaffected partygoers provides a bit of oomph, but sadly not enough. Whatever happened to good old Ramsay style horror flicks with terrified wide eyed babes!
“What a waste of time!” said Cecil Pinto, a Panjim-based satirist, when we met outside the theatre. “Why do they use the word Goa to sell a movie when there’s nothing specifically Goan about the movie and it is supposedly set on an island off Goa which might as well have been Timbuktoo!”
He had more to say, and I wholeheartedly agree ? “The movie makers seem undecided whether they want to make a horror movie or a comedy movie. A good parody of the zombie genre would have gone down well but they get all serious and moralistic and that ruins even the little comedy that occurs between the constant curse words.”
Cecil’s favourite zombie flick is Resident Evil with the sexy Milla Jovovich. My favourite is Night of the Living Dead, the 1968 George Romero classic. And the 1981 version of Evil Dead, of course.
Nobody has any sex in this film, poor chaps, not in the city where the three yuppies are chasing their lady loves, nor in Goa where the zombie babes are more interested in literally eating them. Except for Luv who does it with a Russian girl who later turns zombie. Everyone gangs up on him and makes him answer questions to prove he is not a zombie. Bunny the geek among the trio asks Luv to recite ‘14 times tables’. Hell, even I can’t do that, and I am not a zombie. (Or am I?) That was a good joke, and many like these abound in the film.
You will have to endure lame ‘I’ll be back’ quips from the muscle bound Boris and predictably, a Russian reveller being introduced to Hardik and saying ‘Hard what?’
There are nice subtle touches here and there. A canoe by the riverside has the name Tatinic painted on its side. Boris the Russian’s jeep has gullwing doors. And shooting coke takes on a whole new ironic meaning in the dramatic finale of the film.
The sound track by the Sachin–Jigar duo is pretty good, with catchy numbers like Babuji Ki Booti and Slowly Slowly.
The first half is quite good, quick paced and very funny, but loses steam and original content after the zombies move in. Quite naturally, you may say. The film had potential, but it is all wasted. Kunal Khemu as Hardik outstrips Saif Ali Khan in comic timing, style and looks. The rest, as we mentioned earlier, shamble on.
I amble out of the theater and see men and women stumbling around Panjim’s streets. We are all zombies anyway, to some extent or the other. As Boris/Saif says, in one of the best lines of the film, in a thick Russian accent ? “Karma is beetch, my friend.”
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