Virupaksha - Mid-day Shyamalan

Virupaksha

2023, Telugu

Produced by B. V. S. N. Prasad and Sukumar

Directed by Karthik Varma Dandu

Cast - Sai Dharam Tej, Samyuktha Menon, Brahmaji, Ajay, Rajiv Kanakala, Sunil

Mohan's Measure ⭐

Now don't get me wrong. It has got to take some intelligence to adapt Western horror cinema to an Indian audience. Unfortunately little if any intelligence has been use to make this movie. 

Virupaksha is a compendium of mediocre recreations of scenes from Western horror films. All the worse, the scenes have been plagiarized mainly from films made by M. Night Shyamalan, who, himself, at best, is a mediocre movie maker. 

The ridiculous acting notwithstanding, the movie fails to make any effort to adopt Shyamalan's Western Goth symbolism. I mean, why would an old town in the middle of nowhere, India, have pentagrams, Masonic characters, along with an old leather-bound book of spells as key elements ?  Add to this crows, cornfields, scarecrows...I was waiting for a kid to jump out and yell, "trick or treat." 

The advertisers and the critics they paid off tricked me into believing this film would be another Arundhathi, an acclaimed horror masterpiece. The actual horror lies in the fact they could make such a claim.