Producers Maddock Films are tapping successfully into mankind’s most beloved sensation: the fear of the unknown. Those creatures lurking in the forests, almost like God’s unchosen ones, steal into the limelight like a moths in a gauntlet of flames, as the makers unlock the bolted vaults of the audiences’ primeval sensations.
Thamma is custom-built for the audience which loved Stree and Kantara. A fierce mythological passion underlined by a trenchant penchant for tribalism cuts through the product. There is an ironic subversion of historical data in the passionate repudiation of all rationale explanation to the weird goings-on.
Thamma opens with Alexander (The Great) stalking the jungles with a colonial sneer. Alexander is played by Alexx O’Nell, the new Tom Alter , dial-ready for every Caucasian part in Hindi potboilers. Alexander dies a sticky death in the preamble leaving the field wide open for a primeval love story between a comely vampire named, hold your breath, Tadaka and a clueless news reporter Alok Goyal.
Admittedly, they meet under stressful circumstances. She lives in an abandoned aircraft in the jungle which, it seems, is fully equipped with a beauty salon. Tadaka is immaculately beautified 24/7, her chocolate-brown painted nails remain steadfast in their resolution. Unlike the screenwriters, the varnish never vanishes.
Alok Goyal who dances to Shashi Kapoor’s ‘Keh doon tumhe’ from Deewaar in Dev Anand’s style (poor research or cocky improvisation?) in the jungle, brings Tadaka home to his parents, played by a super-hammy Paresh Rawal and a more restrained Geeta Aggarwal Sharma.
Loads of vampirical jokes ensue. None very funny. But I giggled nonetheless, just to be polite. At some point a vampire cop named Yadav (Faisal Malik) joins in the ostensible fun. But the laughter challenge soon fades to bring in its wake a Kantara styled set which looks like Gabbar’s ‘Jab tak hai jaan’ location after sunset.
The on-location detailing is painfully abstruse. Rocks and boulders and hordes of men in fake Dracula denture, do not make for a riveting adventure. Beyond a point, Thamma is as exhausting as a Halloween party with the guests so drunk they can’t tell the difference between a scare and a snigger.
The dialogues between the human characters and their deathless counterparts border on the burlesque. English colloquialism merge casually into mythological references.
“It’s meeraykal, it’s a meeraykal !” shrieks Nawazuddin Siddiqui playing the funniest villain since Pradhuman Singh (I kid you not) in Tere Bin Laden. Siddiqui plays Yakshshan who has a craving for human blood (I am not of this, as the drinking habits of the various levels of vampirical hierarchy needed a proper listing).
Yakshashan cackles hard, and makes cosmopolitan references while being chained in a cave. He is the kind of insufferable beast who, as Woody Allen famously said about someone else, wouldn’t want to be a member of a club which has him as a member.
Yakshashan’s posturings would have been funny if only writers Niren Bhatt, Suresh Mathew, and Arun Falara and director Aditya Sarpotdar were sure of what they want to serve up, comedy or horror. In trying to be both eerie and airy Thamma ends up being neither. Some of the visuals especially a lengthy paw-to-paw combat between the vampire hero and a wolf-man feel like out-takes from the Chandamama fables.
Thanks, but no thanks.
