If there’s a formula for mass entertainers, there’s another for horror comedies. Creaky doors, a deserted bungalow laden with cobwebs, music that’s supposed to add to the creepy effect, actors with faces painted in shades of black, white or ash, and at least one ghost in flowing white robes. Dora , the Telugu dubbed version of the Tamil film Jackson Durai , befits this stereotype.
Moving away from the many recent horror comedies, Dora has an amusing idea. Apparently, the spirits of Indian freedom fighters and a ruthless British officer and his family, all of them who lost their lives in an accident that followed a battle, still haunt a bungalow. The villagers in the present era don’t know the mystery of the bungalow, barring the fact that they’ve lost a number of innocent villagers. Officers investigating the place don’t return alive.
Dora unfolds at a leisurely place, slowly setting the mood for the horror. A wastrel of an officer who has never solved a case, Sibi Sathyaraj, is sent to this village. Yuvraj’s cinematography sets the mood in the obscure hamlet and the deserted house. A few scenes deliver the spookiness and humour early on.
When Sibi and Karunakaran are sent to the ill-fated house to spend a week if they want to win the hand of a girl (Bindu Madhavi), we wait, just like them, to see how they will cope in the house.
Director Dharani Dharan doesn’t up the tempo after all that ‘build up’, as they keep repeating sequences in the film. At the halfway mark, the core plot is yet to be revealed. What you learn till then is that the ghost house reads an English newspaper and Karunakaran wondering if the British officer was Jackson, was his wife Amy Jackson? So much for a PJ! And he calls their young son, a ghost of course, Harry Potter. The only howlarious scene is Karunakaran pulling the child ghost off his shoulders and having a chat with him.
Sathyaraj arrives much later, leading a motley group that still wages a war against the Brits, unaware that the country has won its Independence. Beyond this one-line story that sparks some interest, nothing else works. The characters are poorly etched. The British officer Jackson, the girl who plays Sathyaraj’s daughter and Sathyaraj himself appear caricaturish. It’s as though the team came up with this idea of ghosts stuck in the past, patted themselves on their backs, and thought everything else will fall in place. It doesn’t.
Forget the chills, even the humour is downright silly. None of the ghostly characters send a chill down your spine. Even Mottai Rajendran in a character called Bradlee doesn’t entertain.
At one point, witnessing the repetitive battle between warring ghost groups, Karunakaran exclaims ‘Inka navalla kaadhu’ (I can’t take it anymore). That pretty much sums up what we felt about the film. The sad part is, even the patriotism seems forced in this amateurish costume drama.
Dora
Cast : Sathyaraj, Sibi Sathyaraj, Karunakaran, Bindu Madhavi
Direction : Dharani Dharan
Music : Siddharth Vipin
Rating : 1.5
