Le Jeu maudit

I am a huge fan of Q. Huge is an understatement but Ludo did not meet even 20% of my expectation. When I found Ludo was on Netflix I was elated and I spent my Thanksgiving afternoon glued to the screen. I have never felt so disappointed. Rii is as usual amazing but whoever did her voice for the movie ( I assume it was meant to be a Sakchunni - Bengali married woman's spirit) sounded ridiculous, raspy and horrendous. The four main characters are shallow and by shallow I mean not an ounce of depth. I grew up in Kolkata and I can vouch for the fact that we don't use so much of swear words in our daily vocabulary. I Know impressionable men and women feel that using swear words would be cool but it was a bit of an overkill.

Tilottama Shome as the Shaman could have been explored much much more. I was left with a palate of bile after the movie. It could have been so so much better had some of the background story been omitted and stress put on the present day scenario of the Shaman's existence. Over all, I think it is a mess.

Two teenage girls, Ria (Subholina Sen) and Payel (Ananya Biswas), meet up with Pele (Soumendra Bhattacharya) and his brother Babai (Ranodeep Bose) for a night on the town, after which they plan to find a hotel for some casual sex. This being India, however, where sex before marriage is a big no-no, they are unable to find anyone willing to rent them a room, so the horny foursome hide in a shopping mall until after hours instead. Once the lights all go off, the teens find themselves face to face with a weird elderly couple who entice them into playing an ancient, evil version of the popular board game Ludo that feeds on blood.

Not being well versed in Indian horror flicks, I am unsure as to whether a shopping mall is a popular setting for such movies, but it's the second in a row for me, my previous Indian horror experience being the absolutely lousy Darr @ The Mall (2015). Ludo isn't any better. Darr's highlight was an energetic song and dance routine (which says a lot about the rest of the film); Ludo's strongest point is its occasionally rather nasty gore, which includes eyeball gouging, gut ripping and tongue tearing. But both films suffer from a plot that makes very little sense.

Ludo's 'Hellraiser meets Jumanji' evil board game is a neat idea that offers plenty of scope for scary moments, but co-directors Qaushiq Mukherjee and Nikon fail to make the most of their concept, instead offering up lots of random creepy imagery without much of a coherent story-line; when the narrative is so confusing, it's hard to engage the viewer, and even harder to scare them silly. Worse yet, the second half of the film changes tack completely, forgetting about the teenagers to focus on the backstory of the game and its original victims, resulting in a horribly disjointed mess of a film that makes for a very frustrating experience.

This is easily one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Tedious; unnecessary gore and imaging; stupid plot. Avoid at all cost.

I am fan of the foreign horror genre, so needless to say i was excited to view this film. Foreign horror films often contain more in depth mythos and psychological scares than the mainstream films. The idea of this film was very interesting yet failed to deliver. The pacing was too slow and scattered and despite the typical gore, Ludo failed to grip me. The scenes combined with the soundtrack felt solely for shock value ( a la Martyrs sans story line).

The first act was, albeit too long, supposed to flesh out the characters. Which it did. It gave the viewer a sense of the environment and what is culturally accepted and not. Then, it switched from being a 'slow-burn'into a music video that bombards your ears with industrial type beats and seizure inducing lights. From here you are magically whisked away to a non-nonsensical time shifting quick explanation of the cursed game complete with gore and not much else.

To say more is really irrelevant. Many will disagree, but if you are curious in viewing this, it really wouldn't hurt skipping some scenes and just skimming through the rest to arrive at a flat ending.

Like watching 2 separate movies! The 1st some sort of low budget hand cam slice of life from India, which was fairly interesting, but the characters were hollow and pointless. The 2nd was extremely interesting, a story about a game, similar to the game box in Hellraiser, which begs you to solve it, and if you don't, your body is forfeit, if you do your soul is. The board, like the box mesmerizes you, and you must play. If the 2nd half was more developed and a movie on its own, it would be a GOOD movie, but the first half, and the end, which happens in LITERAL FLASHES, and up close shots of faces, so you can't tell which of the 3 women you're looking at, what time you're looking at, it RUINS the end, because you DON'T know what happened!!! BOO!!! I even went back and watched it in slow mo, and if what I THINK happened happened, it would make no sense, because it would mean things in the past would make things in the future different....

Watch if you dare, because it will only leave you confused.