It’s right back to more ghosts here on Indian horror week. Having some zombies was a nice change of pace yesterday but we’re back to good old fashioned specters and haunts now. I thought maybe we would get demons because Demonte kind of sounds like demon but, alas, it’s just some dead colonizer that is still going around fucking up the locals if they touch his stuff.

Our main characters are 4 guys that all live together and all have jobs they hate. One of them, a hopeful director, is writing a horror script about the Demonte Colony. Years ago, some messed up stuff happened at the mansion of a rich Portuguese guy and now it’s haunted or cursed or both. He suggests they all head over there and check it out one night and they go exploring. Everything seems fine the next day until Raghavan, the director, reveals that he found a gold necklace that belonged to the wife of the manor house. The plan to sell it for money doesn’t quite pan out the way they want because, you know, vengeful ghosts and all.

Once again. this is a movie where you could probably cut a good half hour out of the run time and it would end up feeling so much tighter and have better tension. I was amazed that this was the first time I got a full song and dance number in one of these movies. Most just stuck to playing a song while a flashback happened but this one went full Bollywood but at least it was at the beginning before any scary stuff because that would have been a full immersion ruiner. Truly, the start of this film is so weak and tonally different from the back half of the film that after about 30 minutes in, I started wondering if I should go find something else to watch.

Thankfully, once you get past the start that first half hour, the rest of the film is actually quite good. It starts to feel claustrophobic as the setting for the 3rd act takes place entirely in a studio apartment. It sets up and pays off several different scares as the haunting takes place. I appreciate that they also attempt to watch Ju-on at one point, what with the parallels of being cursed by a spirit if you enter their house. While nowhere near a big budget production in terms of sound, effects, or anything like that; they movie has a charm all its own.

I wouldn’t exactly recommend this as there are certainly better horror films out there to watch but at least if someone else were to put it on then you could put you phone away after the first half hour and have a decent time of it.

Score: 3 out of 5