Welcome to Zombie Strains, the podcast that watches all the zombie movies. This week, it's our first film from India, Do Gas Zameen Ke Neeche, aka Six Feet Under.

You know, I've seen people act like that in pictures. What do they call them, zombies or something?

Zombie.

Zombie?

What's a zombie?

Well a zombie…there’s um... ...Mr. Bill there’s... ...the living dead.

They are the living dead.

Get me the zombies!

Against an army of zombies, no armies could stand!

The unburied dead are coming back to life and seeking human victims.

I’ve seen the dead rise.

Kill the brain, and you kill the ghoul.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to Zombie Strains. I'm John.

And I'm Andy.

And I'm Brad.

Hello and welcome from the wonderful country of India. This is kind of an exciting moment for us because our foreign films have all sort of been either European or Western hemispheres. So I feel like we're actually finally branching out a little bit.

Yeah, I'm excited. And I hope that this podcast takes us elsewhere in the world that we haven't seen so far. This is good.

This was good. Well, we'll reserve our judgments for later.

Yeah, good. Maybe not talking about the quality of the film, but you know what I mean. Yeah.

So before we get there, though, does anyone have any zombie or it is spooky season? Although I had somebody say to me the other day, it's mummy season, like it was in a Slack message, and I'd never heard that before. I like it. Anyway, so anything spooky season or zombie related, we've been consuming lately?

I love the idea of mummy season. Yes. Maybe every month needs to be a different classic monster. So yeah, mummies are, I don't think anyone has really figured out what's scary about mummies, maybe at least not since the 1930s.

Yeah. But there's work to be done there.

There's something there, yeah.

Call me if you need ideas. But I have been immersing myself in some zombie media, you guys.

Oh yeah.

It's not a movie. It's not a TV show. Are either of you guys familiar with the podcast audio drama, We're Alive?

No.

No.

I was not either. And so I was somewhat startled to learn that it's one of the kind of foundational audio dramas over the podcast medium.

Really?

It's a long, I think it ran for four-ish seasons, dozens and dozens of episodes. It's a long zombie survivor audio drama that tells, I don't remember when the Walking Dead TV show came out, probably around then, but it was in like the late 2000s it came out. And it tells the story of kind of Walking Dead-esque zombie survivor stories. It sort of follows a dozen or so, you know, survivors of different personalities with lots of tension. And as they try to make their way through, you know, zombie infested America after an apocalypse.

Oh, interesting.

I had never heard it before. I am pretty hooked at this point. It's a little rough in that like podcasts. I think everyone was still figuring out what a podcast audio drama would be. And I don't know if like the writers and voice actors all entirely understood the medium they were working in. For the first, you know, couple of episodes. But I'm enjoying it. And I think I'd recommended anyone listening to this podcast is likely in the target audience of this. We're Alive.

So does that include your mom?

Probably not. Probably not.

Andy and I actually have a secret love of audio dramas and then we exchange audio dramas to listen to. I think we're both currently big fans of Derelict, which is about to release its third season. Yeah. I think it's first, which is about the first season, I think it used to be called Fathom, but they renamed it to Derelict, but it's about a deep ocean exploration that uncovers an ancient alien artifact and then the consequences of that. And it's kind of a blast, not that we're recommending other podcasts. I want you to stay here and listen.

Yeah. Fathom and Derelict are both fantastic. And I think if you listen to We Are Alive, John, you will say, oh, this is where, this is what they are riffing on. And doing, and I think doing better, but you got to respect the people that were there doing it first.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I only have one update. I finally got in the spooky season spirit. That's right. Spooky notes. I bought a pack of a pumpkin shaped Post-it notes. So there you go.

Okay.

I'm all in.

Listeners, you can't see this, but John is dressed like a mummy right now.

Well, I want to, before we get into it, I do kind of want to do a PSA because I was reminded of this in watching this movie because it was so different for us. So we do not claim to be and are not experts on the history or international film. Part of the reason we're doing this podcast is to learn more about movies and how they work and where they came from. So we're not experts on India cinema from India or Hindu cinema or Bollywood or whatever you want to refer to it as, but we are eager to learn. So if we make any mistakes or have any, any gaffs, please forgive us and send us an email. Let us know more. If you know anything about Bollywood cinema from the 1970s, actually I would be fascinated to hear it. So that's our plug for today.

Yeah, absolutely.

All right, Brad, well, tell us all about the creation of Do Gas Zameen Ke Neeche, aka Six Feet Under.

Well, I was going to add that I've done my best to look up the phonetic pronunciations for these names and titles. So bear with me and us as we work our way through this movie.

Absolutely.

Do Gas Zameen Ke Neeche was released on December 30th, 1972 in India. As you said, a good translation is Six Feet Under. It received an A rating for violence and dark and scary supernatural themes. This meant the audience was restricted to 18 and up. It is the second movie we have watched that is set in Asia, but the first movie to be produced there. The 1936 film Revolt Of The Zombies was filmed in the US, but set in Cambodia. This was marketed in India as the first Indian horror film, but there were spiritual and supernatural films that came out before this. This time period in the US films you probably know that came out were The Poseidon Adventure, Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway, Bruce Lee's Way Of The Dragon, and Sleuth with Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier. Now the making of this film was a family affair. The FU. Ramsay on the poster is the patriarch, Fata Chan-u-Ramsey. He owned an electronic shop in Mumbai but was interested in film making. Ramsey produced three movies between 1954 and 1970 and all three flopped. The last of the three films, which I'm just going to give the translation because I couldn't find a good pronunciation, was There Was a Little Girl. This film featured a scene where a character wears a devil's mask. Tulsi and Shyam, two of FU's sons, noticed that people went to the movie theater and paid just to see that scene. They realized the audience wanted to be scared. They took the note and decided to make horror movies. This is when the incredibly strange creatures who stopped living and became mixed up zombies connects with the Ramses.

Oh dear.

The Ramsey Brothers realized they needed to learn how to make films. So, they got a copy of Joseph Meskely's 1965 book, The Five Cs of Cinematography. If you recall from our episode on the incredibly strange creatures, Meskely was a cinematographer of that film.

That's right.

He wrote this influential book about how to visually tell a story. The five Cs are camera angles, continuity, cutting, close-ups, and composition. The Ramses locked themselves into a houseboat and studied the book for three months.

Oh, wow.

When they came out, the first film they made was Do Gas Zameen Ke Neeche. Tulsi Ramsay directed. He went on to direct 26 films, often with his brother Shyam. The screenplay was written by Effy Ramsay, and it is either an homage to the 1963 Italian film, Lo Spettro, or an outright copy. The plots are extremely similar.

Though I have to say this had a very sort of Indian melodrama feel to it that perhaps that other film does not.

Yeah, I think the execution is a little different, but the points are the same. Now, to keep costs down, the whole family was enlisted to make the film. Fadachand had seven sons, and each was given a specific responsibility. Tulsi and Shyam were directors. Kumar wrote the scripts. Gangu and Keshu were camera. Kiran did sound. Not on this film, but on later films, Arjun was the editor. This arrangement lasted through most of the Ramsay films. The Ramsay Brothers, being cheap and making low-budget films, worked mostly with unknown actors. Surendra Kumar played the lead, the widower, Raj Vansh. He has only five acting credits.

Yeah, but he's a handsome man. It's hilarious how good-looking everybody is in this movie, even though they were using the local actors.

And so is basically all of the main actors in this. They all have great horror, scream queen charisma, I think.

Yes, the only unattractive ones are the uncle and Ram Dass, the servant.

Well, we'll get to them because they're the ones who have had the longest career.

Oh, interesting.

Shabhana played Anju, the scheming new wife. She has only four film credits. Pooja plays Meena, the new love interest of Raj. This is her only film. And then as you mentioned, Ram Dass, the servant, was played by Dumal. Dumal was a famous character actor known for comedies and playing villains.

Oh, wow.

And then Shat Yandra Kapoor played the greedy uncle. He was a recognizable character actor with a long career, over 400 credits.

Whoa, that's more than our boy, John Carradine.

Yeah, and I wish I knew enough about the Indian film history to know the level of his notoriety and like how famous he was, but I think people would recognize him with 400 credits.

Yes, and I assume he was also a comedian because there's a lot of slapstick involving him in this movie.

Yeah, the film abruptly switches whenever he's centered in the scene.

Do Gas Zameen Ke Neeche was made for 350,000 rupees. That's around $46,000 in 1972. The average film budget in India at the time was 5 million rupees or $650,000.

Oh, wow.

Do Gas Zameen Ke Neeche made over seven times its budget and launched the Ramsay Brothers and their horror films. They went on to make over 30 films, mostly horror films, and many are considered classics. In fact, in the 80s, one of their films was second highest grossing film of the year.

Wow.

Several brothers went on to their own projects, and they are known for pioneering the low-budget horror film in India. I think it's interesting how their productions were so similar to American low-budget films at the time. Cheaply made, no costs, filmed on location, no name actors.

Feels a lot like Night Of The Living Dead.

Yeah.

It just reminds me the influence there is not only in creating the zombie genre, but doing all filmmaking on your own and making it work, which wasn't really something before that.

Where to watch this film? We watched this from YouTube, and I think we watched different versions. Mine, the subtitles were spotty, and the songs lost the vocals, which made it hard to enjoy.

Yes. I want to go back. Well, we'll get to that, but I'm sorry. Carry on.

That's all I have. I was going to ask Andy, do you have any cultural context to add?

I do. One quick additional thing, I did a little reading up on the Ramsay Brothers, and one thing that I read was that part of their genius at this time in Indian film industry history was instead of competing with the big films that were popular in the big cities, they realized that all they needed to do to find success was just sell out theaters at smaller or mid-sized towns. So it's sort of an everyday man's filmmaking, I think, is the vibe I got from them.

Nice. Yeah, very similar to the regional horror films that we've watched where they were released to drive in theaters or small chains out in the boondocks somewhere.

Yeah, you aim your sights a little more realistically, but you can reap a lot of benefit as it turns out from that.

This still happens even in the United States. I remember and I cannot remember the name of a film, our friend Javier who was a guest on the show had a show he was running, and I asked about what happened to one of the actresses, and she's like, she was just in a movie with Toby Keith, but you won't have seen it because it wasn't released. It won't be released in Ann Arbor, right? So there's still stuff like that out there. We just don't know it because it's regional.

Well, yeah. So I can give a little bit of cultural context for this film. As Brad mentioned, this is our first film filmed in India, and I'm not going to, I quickly realized doing research for this episode, there's no way I could do justice to 20th century Indian history. Suffice it to say, it's complicated and important in ways I will not attempt to sum up, but I will try to talk a little bit about the cultural world that you would have been living in if you were an Indian moviegoer, shelling out your hard-earned cash to watch this movie in 1972. So I have a couple of points here. First, if you were watching this movie in India when it came out, you were pretty economically exhausted, I think is the way I would phrase it. India, during the late 60s and early 70s, there were a number of natural disasters and other things that hit India, which led to severe food shortages, really high inflation. For the man on the street, it meant waiting in long lines for basics of life like wheat, sugar, gasoline, etc. So if you showed up at this movie, you probably wanted something pretty escapist that would take you away from unemployment and inflation and economic distress just generally. Brad or John, jump in if you have comments or feedback at any time here.

Well, no, but to frame it for a Western audience, this is when George Harrison is doing the concert for Bangladesh and all this stuff for disaster relief. So that's how it enters the Western framework from our perspective.

Since you mentioned that, one thing that I think is a little hard for Americans in the modern world to maybe appreciate is that countries that relied for stretches of their history like India did on external support to feed their populations and keep their economies going, it had a sort of corrosive effect on a lot of people's understanding of their own country and their national pride, if you will. And I think you will find especially like in the Indian subcontinent and also in big countries like China is a big example. Large amounts of external aid can create a sort of mixed patriotic pride but and resentment or even sense of shame in a lot of cultures. And I think that manifests in some interesting cultural ways. I won't belabor that but just to get back unless you had something to say, John.

No, I just want to like one observation for example is at one point, our hero has to see a doctor and just off the cuff, Andrew says, well, he's just back from England. As if to suggest like he's had real training, he's been trained in England which is sort of a manifestation of what you're talking about.

Yeah. And maybe it's worth backing up and just in case listeners aren't familiar with English history or Indian history, India achieved its independence in I think 1947.

I think that's correct.

After a year or two of really tumultuous activism. And I mean, I think historians looking back at the 20th century singling out like five most important moments in 20th century history might point to Indian independence as one of those things.

Absolutely, because it was sort of not only, it was the beginning of independence for a lot of colonies, countries that had been colonies all over the world, and the beginning of the end of the British Empire. Well, not the beginning, but the middle of the end of the British Empire.

Yeah. And a quick aside, John, just because you're a World War II nerd, I was reminded while reading up on some of this stuff. So India played an enormously important role in World War II, enormously important.

Well, the British had a lot of Indian troops.

Yeah. So just listeners, when you are reading something about World War II and you read something like, oh yeah, the British held off the Japanese here or the British forces pushed through Italian defenses at this point, you think of maybe like a blonde-haired young kid with a British accent.

Yeah, no.

Like statistically speaking, it's probably more accurate to think of that as like a young Indian man serving in the British military and millions of Indians served and fought in World War II. All right, I'm getting off track here, but I want to say, so something else that was on your mind if you were Indian and showing up to watch this movie was the cynicism that was gripping the entire world in the early late 60s, early 70s about old systems and the realities of the modern world. So in India, just as in America and a lot of the West, in 1972, there's kind of a peak of cynicism about government and authority and institutions in general. After India achieved its independence, there was sort of a honeymoon period of intense national pride. By this time, a decade or two later, it had hit up against the reality of corruption in government and unemployment for young people and political instability. So all of that was present in India, just as it was present in America.

You can look at throughout history and find examples of this. Eastern Germans who are enthusiastic about democracy, very quickly becoming cynical about it, like every culture. Mexico became very cynical at one point about their independence. It is everywhere, I guess.

Yeah. All right. A couple more points, guys. So in 1972, in India, you probably felt a combination of patriotic pride that I touched on earlier with what you might call fatigue, which is India had a number of military conflicts in the 1960s and the early 70s. Some of them went poorly for India. At least one of them went well, but the one that went really well for India still kind of probably didn't make your average Indian feel like their world had improved because after the, I think it was the Indo-Pakistani War, there was a surge in Indian pride because I think they technically won. I think the modern state of Bangladesh came out of that. I might have to check that. But after that war, there was an influx of millions and millions of refugees from Bangladesh and it really strained an economy that was already struggling. Right. So you have sort of mixed feelings about your national, your presence as a player in the world sphere, but the reality that the war brought to your everyday life, which was more dire.

Yeah, just to make a connection like, and India and Pakistan still do not like each other. They almost went at it, what, last year or the year before? I cannot recall, but they were on the brink not too long ago. So it's still a thing.

And basically one or two more points here and then I'll be done. Just as in America and elsewhere, as we've discussed past in this podcast, Indians were experiencing that familiar tension between the loss of the old ways and the exciting, but also scary rise of the new ways, I guess.

Yes. I wonder if we'll ever watch a movie about that exact topic.

I wonder. So one thing that felt really relevant to this movie that is kind of India specific, is in 1971, the Indian Prime Minister abolished what are called Royal Stipends, which are basically the ability of, like, of traditional Indian royalty to just live in wealth off of the rest of the country. And what that meant was much like you see in England, like we've all seen a lot of movies, set in England and the countryside is dotted with all these ruins. But imagine in modern India, you're watching in real time these giant aristocratic estates and castles decaying because these living symbols of the old aristocratic elite kind of crumbling before your eyes. So we see a little bit of that. We're going to talk about it in this movie. And along with that, though, more generally, this is the era of Western culture getting everywhere, including to India. So in India, you have rapid urbanization, you have this rising youth culture with their nightclubs and their music and their rejection of traditional morality and traditional religion. Religion might be quite different than in the Judeo-Christian West, but it was just as important and is just as important to Indians as it is to us out here. And so you have that really familiar sense of like, this modern world is bringing us all these wonders and technological advancements and these new exciting ideas, but it's matched by this fear that we are losing sight of something kind of foundationally important, right? Morality and a sense of good and evil and, you know, proper respect for previous generations. And I think that is sexual mores that are changing. I think that is very much on display in this film, which we'll get to, where I think we see some really clear examples of like kind of traditional Indian religious conservative morality versus this greedy, sexy, slick, compelling Western approach. Does that make sense?

It does.

Yeah, so my last point on that one is like at this time. So if you were watching this movie, you were probably hoping to be shocked and tillated while also hoping also to see, you know, good old fashioned values win the day, which is a very familiar, I think idea if you're a horror movie watcher from basically any decade, you have, this is why you're going to see these movies, right?

Yeah.

The last thing I wanted to say is at this time, there was kind of a light censorship of Indian media. And so it did create kind of a lot of double standards in the way that censorship often does when it's applied to media. But as in the West, there were loopholes that trashy and genre filmmakers could use to exploit, which is that generally speaking, like in India, as often in the West, you could show a lot of provocative stuff as long as that stuff ended up getting defeated in the end. Yeah, so you could have it both ways. So that always makes me smile when I see it in a movie. And I guess to sum up, I would say, if you're watching Do Gas Zameen Ke Neeche in the early 70s, you were living through food cues, inflation, political instability, all sorts of societal change. You probably feared the moral decay that you perceived the West was bringing. But you also wanted to be kind of excited by modern progressive ideas. And so, but you know, at the end of the day, like audiences everywhere, you wanted cheap, exciting entertainment, right? Where the bad guys get their comeuppance. And that's definitely what you get in this movie. So I'll pass it back to, I think, John, you're leading the discussion on this one, right?

I am. And I actually, we want to wrap up the history, but I did want to say a couple of things really quick. This is actually an interesting period in Indian cinema. It's golden age is sort of considered the 1950s. And to way oversimplify, it was very much a sort of celebration of the common man sort of thing in their movies. But ending about here, but in the late 60s to here, there was sort of a romantic resurgence. A lot of cinema, like you pointed out, had entered the movies. But here we get one of the biggest Indian superstars ever, not in our movie, but Rajesh Khanna became a phenomenon. He had 17 movies that were absolute hits, and in India, the term superstar was invented for him. He was like a star beyond stars. So in a lot of ways, this is also the time when Bollywood, its modern aspect is forming in a way that maybe it didn't before. So we've got big budget, big star movies in a really interesting way. So that contrasts that with what we're watching today.

And when we get into the movie, I'm going to save it for a little bit later, but this movie actually is credited as being one of the, something that fueled a kind of genre, kind of trash culture renaissance in India. So we'll get to that when we get into this movie a little bit later.

Well, having just had you say all of that, Andy, do you want to do a 60 second summary of the plot? There's a lot of plot in this movie. I'm not going to go beat by beat. So let's, well, Andy will do a good summary for us and then we'll start talking through stuff.

Okay, I got to talk about this movie again. All right. Do Gas Zameen Ke Neeche follows Raj Vanch. Forgive my pronunciation listeners. I'm going to call him Raj. Yeah. Raj is a wealthy but also kind of naive scientist who at the beginning of this movie is mourning the death of his wife a year earlier. Through a sequence of exciting events that we will discuss in more detail, he winds up marrying the exciting and glamorous woman named Anjali.

Yes, or Anju as they call it.

Yes, that's right. But it isn't very long before he realizes that Anju is not everything he thought because Anju is doing a scam on Raj. She, guided by her uncle and to a lesser extent, her boyfriend Anand, are running a scam where she tricks Raj into marrying her so that she can get access to his fortune. A lot of incident takes place that we'll get into, at least some of it later. But what happens is Raj eventually becomes paralyzed through a freak accident. Remember, he's a scientist. Through a series of events, he drinks something that has been contaminated and he gets paralyzed in a lab accident. Unfortunately, Anju seizes the opportunity to finish him off to get access to all of his wealth. So she plots, with the help of the others I mentioned, to kill him, which they do, or they think they do, and they quickly bury his body in the nearby graveyard. And they set about looking to claim all of his wealth, the wealth that his estate has. However, Raj returns from the dead as a vengeful, reanimated zombie. He emerges from his grave to stalk and harass and haunt his murderers. And everyone gets what they deserve. And at the very end, we get a crazy reveal, which I think I'm gonna save and make listeners wait for. So how was that for a summary?

Pretty good, though you left out an important character, which is Mina.

I didn't know how to get Mina in here without being confusing.

Yeah, well, we'll bring her in. So after Raj marries Anju, he realizes this is a scam and he encounters the lovely Mina, who is the exact opposite of Anju. She's not scheming. She's not immoral. She's very pure as the driven snow, so to speak.

She's pious. She's demure. She's quiet. Yeah, everything that traditional society wants from a woman.

Yes. And he clearly falls in love with her, but he is married, so he cannot be with her immediately, but she is very devoted to him.

Yes.

So this becomes a source of jealousy for Anju throughout the film as well. So let's talk about how this starts though.

All right.

Our hero Raj is in the graveyard talking to your average happy gravedigger about the death of his wife, and they connect on that. He walks out of the cemetery and he sees a woman running. This is Anju who's being chased by some thugs. We see a sinister person looking on. We don't really understand it yet, but we will shortly. However, to save her, this is actually a great little bit. He hops in his Vauxhall Velox, which is like a 1950s English car. Think of like a Packard or a giant curvy American car from like the 40s, shrunk down in the dryer. So it's like a miniature car. It's great. Anyway, so they're running along a beach on the shore of a river. The three guys are chasing her and he is chasing them in his car. So that's how we're introduced to everybody here. It's kind of great.

This was an amazing scene.

It was. He beats all the guys up using some amazing moves, and everybody goes flying. I feel bad for these actors because they're like getting thrown down stone steps and getting the heck beat out of them. Obviously, there's no contact, but Anju begs to come home with him because he's scared.

Yeah. Can we pause for a second? Yeah. Can we talk about this fight scene?

Yes.

So, we don't get very many cool fight scenes in this podcast.

No, we don't.

But this is one of two completely over the top fight scenes in this movie that are way beyond what like a Western movie at this time would have put in. I can't help but think, John, do you remember maybe five or so years ago, there was sort of a surge of interest in sort of Bollywood action films that had come out here to the US? I saw one or two of them. And did you, Brad or John, did you watch any of these when they hit? I think like RRR, that was the one I watched.

Yes.

And I mean, just broadly speaking, one of the appeals of those films is like incredibly over the top physics defying action, right? In a way like that dial that goes even further than what, like a trashy American action film would do, right? And I definitely got that vibe here. And it made me wonder how far back that goes in Indian cinema because it's present here as Raj defeats a bunch of thugs with what I can only describe as a martial art based around slaps.

Yes.

I don't know if you had any other thoughts, but it's way more for like two minutes, we switch gears into a really goofy action movie, and then we switch back to a tense thriller.

Yes. But also in this scene, we see this onlooker and we don't know what he's doing. However, what happens when they get home is Anju sort of sneaks into Raj's bed, and they in a very sort of chaste but funny suggestion that they are making love, they get together. You don't see any skin or anything. I don't think they actually kiss, but you get like these fast cuts to like the fireplace and all this kind of stuff. It's kind of hilarious, very funny.

It felt like a film shorthand that I just wasn't used to, because this happens a couple of the times in the movie.

In any case, because they make love, they have to get married. Anju, of course, is going to pressure Raj into this. Then she says, well, I need some money for my uncle. You should meet my uncle. Who is her uncle, Andy?

Her uncle is that sinister guy who was watching while Anju was chased by those thugs at the beginning.

That's right. Apparently, this is all a setup on his part, because he knows that Dr. Raj is wealthy, and he wants to get at his money, which is easily done, because Raj doesn't keep his money in a bank. He keeps piles of cash in a vault, in a giant safe in his house.

It's like a Pirates Of The Caribbean pirate treasure chest in there. It's like a pile of gems and jewels and stuff like that.

To foreshadow the future, it's not a safe that has a combination that's in his head. It's a safe that needs a key.

Yes, it's kind of great. However, there's a wonderful actually, comic montage of her asking repeatedly for money and him repeatedly giving them money, which was pretty funny. Then this goes on, he realizes this isn't really what he signed up for. He hasn't confronted them yet. But before he does, well, we meet a couple of his servants too, Chanchal and Ram Dass, who we may mention later, but just know that they're his servants and helpers and they have some minor plot points later in the film. They're very loyal to him.

They're very loyal to him.

However, we meet somebody else. While he is out, again, he sees a woman walking through the countryside and she is singing. I missed the song and so did Brad. Andy, I have this secret hope that the song is great. So tell me, how is the song? That good, huh?

I was too mystified by this scene, which is like a five-minute scene, which is an eternity on the screen. This woman emerges from the forest.

This is Meena.

Yeah, this is Meena. And she's singing the song that's sort of a religious song praising Vishnu, a Hindu deity. And it's like a sound of music, like frolicking across the fields and forests and stuff. It's such a strange insertion in this movie, you guys.

I don't think this is strange. I think this is how Bollywood movies work.

I guess, I mean, it's really important. It's just like, it came out of nowhere for me. So, anyway, carry on.

We should explain the reason John and I missed it was, we could see it, we could sort of hear the music, but the vocals were missing. And I did some research and it turns out it's from how it was ripped and it was improperly done. So the center channel, which had the vocals, didn't follow through onto that copy. If anyone out there wants to watch it, make sure you find the one that has the singing.

Yes, because we watched the one that didn't and it was very upsetting. So he is clearly smitten by her. He saves her too. She almost drowns. I can't quite remember how. She managed to almost drown.

I didn't feel like it was explained why she almost why she was on death's door.

She just tripped and fell into the river, I guess.

Okay. Yeah.

I don't know.

But he saves her and brings her back to his house. And he is clearly smitten. Now, so now we have sort of a triangle, right? We've got Ajay and her uncle who are plotting to steal his money. We've got Mina who he really loves and who is devoted to him, but they cannot be together because Anju and Raj are married. And then we're going to introduce our fourth character in this sort of complex love web, which is Anand, which is Anju's boyfriend.

Can we talk about Mina for a minute?

Yeah.

Is Mina supposed to be a real person? Because she shows up just so listeners are aware. So Mina literally dances her way into this movie from the forest. Like it's not ever suggested that she has a family or a home or anything else. It's as if she has been dropped into this movie from like, I mean, I wondered if she's supposed to be like a supernatural, like, I mean, almost like a fae being who like, you know, is sprung into this narrative because I don't know. And she's such an incarnation of like faithful, conservative Indian religion, like praying and venerating the gods and being deferential to Raj in all the traditional ways. Like, is she supposed to be a real person or something weird going on here?

I think so, but I take your point because I think she represents something almost mythological, you know what I mean? She's so perfect in every way, you know?

I think this is unfortunately our ignorance of the film and the culture that we don't know. I wish I did.

Yeah, they do make a reference to her. She always travels for religious purposes to some place 40 miles away as a plot point later. So maybe that's the-

I think she's a nurse. Yeah. That's why.

Is that right?

A traveling nurse. Yeah.

So they do reference it very briefly, but I don't think we care. We don't really know about Raj's background. We certainly don't know about Ajay's background. Like all these people are sort of coming to us fully formed. If this were an American film, like we would at least know how they got kicked out of the military or what.

They're like archetypes.

Yes. Absolutely. So we now have this setup and the rest of the first half to two-thirds of the movie is about the jealousy between Mina and Anju trying to get at Raj's wealth and Raj finally getting fed up with all of this and getting furious at Anju and her uncle and Anand. One point he throws up in the safe and throws all the money at him but I don't want to get further than that because this is where, much like Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things actually, there's a great zombie movie hiding in the last 30 minutes of this film. Before we get to that, I wanted to play out the plot until we get to that point. So do you have anything to say so far, Andy? The melodrama here, it takes a long time. It's not like terrible, it's just not what zombie lovers are here for.

Yes. I would say, so, I mean, this is a curious movie and the first entire hour of this movie is what I would call a thriller, or I would even use the phrase erotic thriller in the sense of like your basic instinct or something like that and not that this is an explicit movie, but in the sense that it's got like a femme fatale, like a lot of the plot is built around sexual misbehavior, there's schemes within schemes going on, and there's even a scheme we won't know about until the movie's final 60 seconds that's been going on.

Right.

Then it pivots into a supernatural revenge story for its second half. Yeah.

So let's just finish up here. So he gets upset and he goes and sulks in his office, he's mad, and this is the first time we see him doing science. But he's been working on this. So at one point, he is working on something in his lab, and somebody says, Anju is calling for you. Anju has become very jealous of Mina at this point, and he's like, I can't right now, I'm in the middle of an experiment, and they insist. So he leaves his experiment which bubbles over and gets a little out of control, and it was just Anju playing a joke on him. So this is when he has his meltdown, he's furious, like get out of my house, take all the money, I don't care. And he goes back to his lab, sits down and has a glass of water. But what we saw is the audience is that some of this chemical he's been working with has seeped into the water. And when you said during your description, he becomes paralyzed, this is the accident that paralyzes him. Whatever he's working on has this paralyzing effect.

Yeah, can we just say this is the grossest looking water by the way? Like it's clearly polluted when he takes a big chug of it. It's like, I don't know, man.

He wasn't paying attention. I think we're supposed to realize how upset he is.

Can we pause? I need to backtrack for a little aside. Did you guys notice that throughout this first half of the movie, Anju is reading paperback novels?

Yes.

Okay, did you guys pause and identify these novels?

No, Andy, we were hoping you would do that.

Andy, pausing would make this movie last longer.

Oh, this is a rough one. This is something we haven't addressed, this is a long movie. Okay, well yes. So I freeze framed on these and did some research to find out what the novels are. So can I tell you about them?

Please.

So both of the novels are English novels, which struck me as interesting, so I did some digging. The first one, I think actually Raj is reading this first one. It is a novel called The Prize by Irving Wallace. Do you know who that is?

I do know who Irving Wallace is, but I don't think I've heard of The Prize. I know the name, how about that?

Yeah, so Wallace wrote these heavily researched high-drama like soap opera-y page-turner novels. And this one, The Prize was a big best-seller. Its premise is kind of funny. It follows the, quote, lives, personal scandals, dark secrets and political intrigues of several diverse characters who have been chosen to receive Nobel Prizes. Oh, wow. So, just kind of weird, right?

Yeah.

But it was a huge international best-seller, and it was turned into a film with Paul Newman in it, I believe.

Oh, really?

So later, the better one, though, later Anju is reading a book that's not, the title is not clear, but if you do some digging and reverse image searching, you can figure out what she's reading. And so what she is reading is a book called, is by a prolific British author named James Hadley Chase. I saw the name on that book. Yes. The book title is obscured, but if you search on the image, I believe the book she's reading is called, I'm gonna paste into our chat. So listeners can't see it. I'm gonna paste the cover, two covers under which this book is released. And maybe John, you could read the title.

All right, here they go.

The first one, hold on, I'm having trouble reading it. There's a Hippie on the Highway. That's the first one. And it features a woman wearing like hip 60s sunglasses and wearing a bikini.

She's no hippie.

No. These covers are amazing.

Yeah. And we will describe the second cover there.

Yeah. It features basically Charles Manson wearing a black leather jacket with his thumb sticking out and a cigarette sticking out of his mouth. And the rest of the cover is black too.

So I went on Goodreads. Here is the, I'm going to read you the full back cover blurb of this novel. And then I'll tell you a little bit of its cultural context, which is kind of wild. All right. Here's the blurb for Hippie. There's a Hippie on the Highway by James Hadley Chase. It seemed like a good idea at the time to ex paratroop Sergeant Harry Mitchell, home after three years in the deadly jungles of Vietnam. Head south to Florida, get a summer job, soak up some sun, relax a bit. But when he got to Paradise City, he found himself drawn into a lethal setup, where dumped corpses, smuggling operations, over ambitious cops, hired killers, and a sexy little double-crosser called Nina, combined to make life very unhealthy. So if that intrigued you, it's one of many trashy pulp crime novels written by James Hadley Chase. I love that they're reading it.

You know what? Now that you tell us that description, it makes perfect sense that Anju is reading it. Like she's getting ideas.

It makes sense Raj is reading a book about Nobel Prize winners because he's a scientist.

Exactly. That's one of my points. Like this movie is being really cleverly meta with this stuff. Interesting. But the backstory of this novel by James Hadley Chase is, so this guy was outrageously popular in India, specifically in the 70s and 80s. His books were everywhere. John, so if you were like a young person in India, or like you were a commuter riding on the bus or the train to work, you read this guy's stuff in India. Right. Because it was one of the first of a wave of like, basically pulp fiction translated into the various Indian languages, and it had a huge influence on horror and other genre films in Bollywood. Because it represented, I mean, we would call it trashy literature, but it's got the edgy, exciting vibe to it that all exploitation art has with it. It really caught on in India, and I went on to Goodreads today where it has a 3.77 rating out of five, and a lot of the reviews on Goodreads were in Hindi. Oh, interesting. Yeah. One of the reviews, John, you might appreciate this, described the protagonist of this novel as, quote, a 70s version of Jack Reacher, if that makes sense.

It makes perfect sense having watched the first season and a half of Reacher at the gym lately.

All right. Well, the whole reason I bring this up is that this movie is deeply indebted to the pulpy lurid stories being told in the West at this time, and it's not an accident that the protagonists and the villains are reading the stuff on screen.

Nice.

Well, Andy, I expect a review of There's a Hippie on the Highway at the end of our next episode.

Looking forward to it.

All right. Anyway, back to this movie, John.

So back to this movie. So the conflict that emerges now is that Raj is sick and Meena really wants him to go to a hospital, but Anju insists that he stays home because she doesn't want him to get better, right? She wants his fortune. And he is plotting all this time with her uncle who has drawn Anand into the plotting.

Yeah, tell us about Anand if you don't mind.

So Anand is a useful idiot. He is smitten by Anju and she can talk him into anything. He's a lovable lug. He doesn't really want to be part of this story, but he does want to be with Anju. Though when he realizes there's money involved, he does become more, he gets himself in deeper and deeper. He's very handsome, tall, like a tall leading man type, you know, bare-knuckle fighter type. Yeah, he's got a beard.

He looks like a Jonathan Frakes.

Yes, he does.

In any case, so she draws him in to do her dirty work, basically. So after much debate, they realized they've got to get rid of Raj. He's not dying, but they need him to because they want his wealth. So Anju talks Anand into pretending to be a doctor, going in and earning Raj's trust, and then injecting him with something fatal. So this is their plot. This involves a lot of things like they've got to get Meena to leave the house for a couple of days, as along with Ramdas and Chanchal. So there's the whole thing. But in any case, he is feeling very ill. Anand, the doctor comes in. There is this tense and a protracted scene where they inject him with this stuff, and he flails around violently and dies like halfway off the bed in the most uncomfortable way. This is like the second movie we've seen where somebody dies in a really, like the middle of his back is laying across the wooden bedpost with his arms hanging down. I'm like, you know he's got to be there for like 20 shots. That's not really nice. So he dies. And it's very dramatic and everybody's very upset. Do you have anything I want to say about this scene?

I mean, there are a number of things that are interesting about this. First, this is a quite effectively tense scene.

Yeah.

Where Anand, the fake doctor, and Anju who obviously who feels so guilty and uncomfortable with what she's about to do that she won't even look Raj in the face. While he's lying in bed and the doctor is preparing this lethal injection. I mean, the other thing I wanted to say is, I mean, in my notes I wrote here, we are an entire hour into this movie.

Yes.

We have watched movies where all of this would have been taken care of in the first eight minutes. Yeah.

In a noir film, this would have been over. Multiple gunshots would have been heard in the whole thing. Yeah.

So every scene in this movie is four times longer than it probably needs to be.

Or, let me put that another way, that we would expect it to be in an American film probably. Exactly.

Sometimes it's tedious and boring, but sometimes it really creates a great effect. This is one of the scenes where it creates a great effect of lingering tension. I just watched Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds with my teenager. So this is the thing Tarantino does, for example. He's famous for drawing scenes out, like in Inglourious Basterds, there's that interminable scene in that restaurant. Do you remember where our heroes are down there, and the Nazis, there are Nazis down there, and the Nazis are on the verge of discovering who our heroes are. It's like you sit there in that scene for like 10 minutes, and the tension just soaks into you, and it's incredible. When this movie's long drawn out scenes work, it is because they are channeling that kind of energy.

Yes.

When they don't work, it's because it's like a seven minute song routine that's like just not landing, right?

Right. Or two minutes of someone walking from downstairs to upstairs.

Right, exactly. So, you know, I mean, I think overall this works more than it fails in this movie, but it is worth noting this is a pretty long movie, and sometimes you really do feel that length.

Yes, absolutely. So there is also a projected scene where they've got to take his body and bury it. They put him in a trunk and like, they're dragging it out of the house. And at one point, Anju's dress gets caught in the edge of the trunk and she like takes it off. She doesn't want it anymore because it's touched the dead Raj. And then like his arm falls out while they're carrying the trunk. Eventually they get it into his little car, drive it somewhere and bury it. And there's a lot of screaming from Anju, but it happens in the end.

So can I ask you guys, like, so what is added when you watch actors just go through every single step of the story, right? You watch them walk from room to room. You watch them get in the car. You watch them get out. You watch them walk to the grave. You watch them dig a hole. You watch them put the box in. I remember when we watched, I mean, the reason I ask is because we have seen movies that did this and it felt really amateurish and bad. What is that movie where, what is the movie we watched where they go to, like on their honeymoon, they go to that castle, remember? Yeah, where his cousin or something like that is raising zombies. Do you remember that one?

Oh, was that-

Come on, guys.

With cousin.

Yeah, his cousin, it's like the main character's cousin. It's a woman and she's raised a zombie of her brother or something.

Okay.

What?

Is it one of the comedies? Is it like Scared Stiff?

No, it was not a comedy. It's the one where on the night of his wedding, he takes his new bride to-

To the strip club. A strip club. Yeah.

Remember that one?

Yes.

Oh, that was the dead one. That's right. That's the one set on outside of New Orleans.

I remember when we watched that one, that movie did this, but it felt terrible. That movie didn't know how to cut away from a scene after the point of the scene had been established. This movie though walks us through the same boring stuff, but it doesn't feel awful. I'm just curious what you guys think about that or what it adds or something.

It's clearly a better movie and used to better effect than it is in the dead one. I remember us laughing. That's why I just laughed it. There's a scene where the zombie walks all the way from one edge of the screen to the other without the camera moving and we were like, oh my God, would you guess? Yeah. I hear what you're saying and it is better. I don't know if it's just immature filmmaking or something else that is not allowing them to cut out things that don't really need to be showing. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

I feel like the dead one, they gave you everything they had. If they cut, there wouldn't be much left in the film. I feel like this one, they left everything in, and they had a lot they could have cut out. I don't know if it's immaturity of the director and the editors, or if movies were just longer to indie at the time and they had to hit a time post. I don't know.

Okay.

That's a good question.

But yeah, carry on, John.

Yeah. The reason why I'm not going beat by beat is because that's one of the things about this movie. Every thing they do is filmed and discussed and done. Like you said, it works sometimes, and sometimes it's like, okay, let's get going here, you know?

Yeah.

In any case, they bury him. Mina comes back and they lie to Mina saying, hey, he's in a hospital all the way in Bombay. Actually, do they say Bombay? Because Bombay is not-

Okay.

So when did Bombay become Mumbai? More recently than this movie.

Yeah.

That's for sure.

Yeah.

All right.

In any case, that's where he is and Mina accepts their story. However, this is now our zombie horror movie. Who's excited? I'm excited.

The pivot is remarkable.

It is. It changes genre.

Yeah. It changes genre. So we first start with the haunting essentially, right? Anju is hearing her name called in a spectral spooky voice and becomes terrified. There are all these clues that something or some creature has entered the house. This is Raj's house they're still living in. At one point, she sees footprints of grave sand and a mark of a body, a filthy body lying in Raj's old bed. She goes and gets anonned and is terrified. The start is Anju is being haunted and so is Anon to an extent. But you don't know if it's real or not. Actually, this is a really effective sequence of the film where these things keep happening and you're like, is it in Anju's head? Is it not? Is this real? At one point, she encountered Raj's corpse hanging from a ceiling fan and she runs to get anonned and when they get back, it's not there. And I was actually really engaged, like are we in a ghost story here? What's actually happening? Tell me what you thought about this sequence, Andy. I thought it was kind of great.

I thought the same thing too. I'm not used, in 1972, I'm not really used to fake outs in these movies because we have not gotten almost any fake outs in the zombie movies we've watched in this podcast.

No, they're sort of linear.

Yeah, this movie has quite a few sequences where she sees Raj's gross decayed corpse, or there's blood, or there's a body hanging, or just something happens, and then the character wakes up or runs out of the room, and when they go back in, there's no sign of it. So, I mean, it's very ghost story-esque in that, basically, the sense you have is that Raj's ghost is basically harassing his murderers.

But we see him, and he does have a gross decayed face, he does slumber quietly and has big eyes, and, I mean, he looks like a zombie, but he's haunting them. And the other thing that's going on, again, we're not going plot beat by beat, but they found out, it took them a long time to actually get into Raj's safe, and when they get into it, there's nothing there. And they find his diary, and his diary tells them that, A, he sent, A, he sent all his money away with his servant Ram Dass, and B, he was working on a formula that was developed by various American tribes that creates zombies, and so his scientific work, the stuff he consumed that paralyzed him, also turned him into a zombie.

Yes. You know what I loved about this? I actually love the number of things about what you just described. I loved their realization that the key had probably been buried with Raj because they couldn't find it, and so they have to go dig up his corpse.

And that was a great sequence. Ajay was freaking out and she's got to talk Anand into doing it. There's a lot of great scenes with Ajay where she's got to talk Anand into doing stuff and she's really comes across as the villain of this film. And in fact, when we're revisiting villains of the 70s, like remind me that Ajay is a very interesting and different villain than we've had before, you know what I mean?

She is, because she's like 70 percent villain, 30 percent sympathetic, and maybe we can get into that later. She's not exactly a cold-hearted evil witch.

No, she's manipulative, she's selfish, but she's not like a complete monster, you know?

Yeah, this is another scene where they show you every minute of them tossing the house looking for the keys to the safe, and it works.

Yes. It really works.

And they eventually find it in the coat pocket of Uncle, and they accuse him of trying to steal the money. In any case, at one point they do.

Well, hold on, but that's a good part because he says he didn't have it, and I think my interpretation is that Raj, the spectral ghost, somehow dropped the keys in the uncle's pocket to turn themselves, make them pit against each other.

I think you're right.

I think you're right. But there's one other comment I had about that section, John, and you mentioned it briefly. So we learn in a funny aside that feels very tacked on, that also Raj was researching zombie, zombification formulas. I love that they referenced that he was researching ideas for creating zombies that came from American tribes. Because think about, it's just fascinating to me that the zombie might now, from an international perspective, be considered an American monster. Yes. Think about how many American zombie movies have tried to spook their audience by suggesting that these zombie rituals came from some quote exotic place, right? And in Is It Revolt Of The Zombies, they even try to say that zombies came from like ancient Cambodia, right, or something like that? So the Indian subcontinent. And here is an Indian movie about a zombie that is casting. The zombie is something that came from the Americas, which is just interesting to me.

Yeah. And it's just such a different perspective, right? Because you and I would make a strong distinction between North America, South America, and the Caribbean, where all this takes place. And from an Indian perspective, that's just the Americas over there, you know?

Exactly.

And so it's sort of like what we do. It's nice to see what we think about the rest of the world, what it reflected back at as it brings it into sharp relief, I guess.

It is. And it also, I think, it sits interestingly with one of this film's major concerns, which is the edgy progressive morality that came from America into our culture. But along with that, along with those edgy modern ideas came the formula for making zombies.

That's just interesting. Yes.

So carry on.

So we've got a full on ghost story going on here. They can't find the money. They've given up finding the money. There's some great scenes that are really tense where Anju seems to be stalked. And at one point it looks like Zombie Raj kills Anand, and then she wakes up and Anand is fine.

Yeah.

But then the haunting begins again and they're sort of clustered together inside a closed room, terrified. And this happens for a couple of nights.

And there's some great interactions between, so there's three plotters, right? It's Anju, Anand and her uncle.

Yes.

I absolutely love a movie that shows us some good, tense interactions between bad people. Yes. We flagged this first back in zombie movies in Zombies of Muratau, where we had those scoundrels that were always bickering. But here we just see, these are all three people who are bad to varying extents, and they don't like each other by the end of this movie. As the tension of the haunting rises, they turn on each other. It's great.

In fact, it's really effective because they drive the uncle away, they realize they can't get the money, and finally they decide, well, we're going to leave. Ajay is like, no, I don't want to leave. She's basically throwing a fit at Anand and saying, Anand, I'm not leaving, and I don't want you to leave, so you can't leave. He's like shoving her away, and they have a big fight about it, and then he finally leaves, he grabs his suitcase, suitcase burst opens, and what comes out of it, Andy?

A bunch of Raj's money.

All of Raj's money, and Anju has lost her mind, and she's so angry, she picks up a sword that was in the pile and stabs Anand, who goes rolling down the stairs. And he's like, I don't know where the money came from. This is a very protracted scene, and he's basically saying, I don't know where this came from. It wasn't me, like somebody was manipulating them into this. So Anju is at the bottom of the stairs, crying over Anand's body, thinking she's lost her mind. She looks up and she sees these well-mannered, polished shoes, and she looks up, and it's a perfectly fine and alive Raj, along with Mina. So what has happened? What has Raj done?

What Raj has done is something he's going to have a real hard time explaining to the police.

So wait, how did Anand die again, sir? Well, let me tell you.

So what Raj has done, it's not entrapment exactly, but it's probably legally like a cousin to entrapment. Yes. What Raj has done is Raj realized that Anju had just married him for the money and that he had a sense that she was probably going to try to kill him for his money, which she did.

Yes.

So he enlisted Meena and his two loyal servants, and they set up this incredibly elaborate charade. They switched out the poisonous injection for something harmless. So Raj faked his death. Fortunately, he didn't suffocate in the trunk that they shoved him in. But there's a lot of little questions I would have raised if this plan were being pitched to me, but that's okay. Yeah.

It was such a surprise because they really didn't make it seem plausible at all whether manhandling his body and bearing it underground.

Yeah. It's a big trick. He pretended to be dead and then he escaped. Then he and his servants have been basically Scooby-Doo style haunting his would-be murderers with these different pranks and scares and by planting the money and planting the keys and basically driving them to turn on themselves, which worked. Then in the end, it's only Anju left realizing that she really has screwed this situation up quite badly.

Her moral failings have left her with nothing. And the one delightful bit here is we finally see, Mina gives this really snarky, sarcastic smile and it's the first time her face doesn't look like the perfect vision of purity, you know what I mean? When they reveal the drama, that was a nice moment. Yes, and then it says the end.

Well, but first, a couple of things happens. First, I mean, one of the delicious dramatic points is that Anju at the end has just stabbed Anand, thinking that he was trying to sneak off with the money. She stabbed him with, speaking of things that I learned from Dungeons and Dragons, I think this was a Kukri.

I believe so. I was gonna say that, but I wasn't sure, but it's the sword also that Thomas, Dresden's brother uses in the Dresden Files.

Okay, yeah, it's either that or a toll war, but I think it's a Kukri.

I think you're right. It's the one that has the, it bends inward and it has an inward edge, so it's a reverse curve, yeah.

I don't think you're supposed to stab with it like she does, but that's okay.

No, I don't think so.

She wasn't trained to use the Kukri. But the dramatic high point of this movie is when holding her dying boyfriend in her arms, she says, after all this, I really didn't care about the money, I just didn't want to be alone, you know? And so she couldn't admit that for her husband, but brought to an extreme emotional point, she realizes, you know what, at the end of the day, the money isn't the most important thing. But it, of course, is too late, and she kills herself, right?

Yes.

She kills herself in the worst way by stabbing herself in the stomach with that sword, which is way to guarantee yourself an agonizing long death. But yeah, and then it just ends really abruptly.

And that's the end. The one thing we forgot to mention at the beginning, but I'll mention it now, is this is our second film that has bright red credits over traditional daylight scenes, and you cannot read them for the most part.

It's so blurry. It's so blurry.

Yes.

So that is Do Gas Zameen Ke Neeche. An interesting film. I really enjoyed it in a lot of ways, but have questions.

I have something for you guys first. For me, when I lost the sync with the subtitles, my subtitles became minutes off. I lost track of what was happening.

That's when I switched to YouTube at that point.

Well, it was late.

It was last night, so I didn't.

I just started paying attention to the music more, and I started going back a little bit. It could be cheesy, and I'm not going to do this to make fun of the film because I actually quite enjoyed it. I'm going to play you three music cues and one sound effect, and I want you to see if you can tell me what they represent in the film. Here is your first option.

I think I know what this one is. Is it when Raj discovers Anand and Anju are kissing in his bedroom?

It is not.

Oh, all right.

That is a great scene, by the way, because the camera does that late 60s, early 70s rapid, repeated zoom.

Zoom, zoom, zoom.

Yeah, just like Bear in Blood, the triple zoom. Zoom, zoom, zoom. Yes.

That's the moment when the uncle is revealed as the villain. We're in the bar and there's this guy, one of the guys who was the thug who attacked Anju, collecting his money. The camera swivels over to this guy in the bar and he turns and looks at the camera and we are meeting our villain and this music happens. It is so over the top, but you know he's the villain because of it. You can't miss it. I just kind of loved it. All right. Here is your second music here. See if you can tell me what scene this is from.

Is it from one of the chases?

It is not. That's what's interesting. There's so much action in that music. Andy, do you have a guess?

Oh, I can't even think what this might have been. No, I'm sorry. I would have guessed it was a scene. We didn't mention where Mina is being chased around the beach by the evil uncle.

No, that's what I love about this music. It is so over the top and it kind of doesn't match what you're seeing. This is when the moment when Raj is injected with the poison and he rides on the floor for 40 seconds. This is the music that plays for 40 seconds.

Gotcha.

That's great. Here is your final music cue.

Is this the end?

It is the end when she looks up and it's like the triumphant Raj. But to me, it's trumpets, but it's also melancholy and it makes you feel for her, because it's from her point of view and it's sad that she loses.

Yeah. What is great about this music and what it does, even though it's way over the top, is this is a cheap handheld sloppy movie. You can't really read the subtitles we had, we're not great and sometimes they're missing. But it does very simply direct you to how you're supposed to be feeling about these situations and these characters without any ambiguity, which I think is a really great idea for a horror film.

It is not subtle.

It's straightforward. Yeah.

I had this exact thought when, as we say, there's that point where the subtitles go awry, and so we had to find a different source for the film. I did wonder, for a little while, I was thinking I was not going to be able to find a version with subtitles for the last 20 minutes of the film. And I considered trying to just watch it and see, and I think you would get all the important stuff without knowing what they're saying. Just from the visuals and from the music.

With the exception of the very end, because it's not clear without what they say what happens. The very last moment.

They're having a sort of moral debate at the end.

Yeah.

All right. Here is the last, it's not a music cue, but I just did it because I love it so much.

That is either when Raj is fighting the guys at the beginning or Anand is fighting the thugs at the end.

It's in the beginning when he's fighting, when Raj is fighting the guys.

Yeah. That scene is really funny to watch. It's really entertaining. There's a scene where he like triple slapped someone across the face that made me laugh out loud. I don't know if that's what we heard, but.

Yeah. The first part of the fight was all slapping. I go, is this going to be a slapping movie? No, there's kicking and punching later.

No, and then he does this sweet Captain Kirk like move where he puts both his fists together and does an uppercut on some guy and makes him flip backwards.

It's that starfully martial art of the day all the way.

Yes. It's pretty great.

There was a sound effect. Brad, I should have asked you to grab it, but whenever Raj, whenever Zombie Raj was stalking them, there was a sound. It sounded like the growling of a cat or something. It sounded like they had feral animal noises, almost.

Yes.

I don't know, there's just a lot. What we're saying here is the sound in this movie is like 40% of the film. All right, so John, let's go through our closing questions where we try to evaluate this movie and place it in the family tree of zombie cinema.

All right.

John, in Do Gas Zameen Ke Neeche, is there a hero party?

There's a villain party, really? Yes.

Is it our first villain party?

Maybe. So Zombies of Moratown had heroes, but it also had what I would call a villain party.

Yeah, I think that's true. But yeah, it's kind of cool. They featured their front and center throughout the whole film. Not the whole film, but certainly the second half.

What makes them work is that, so there's three villains and each of them is there for their own reasons. They are not cardboard bad guys. Right, the most cartoonishly evil is the uncle. He is pressuring his niece Anju into the scheme. And so well, and she expresses numerous times during the movie that, I mean, she is, her motives are kind of, she's driven by fear here. Like she believes that without money, you know, you can't survive and live, you know, which you might be channeling some economic anxiety that might have been familiar to viewers at the time. So she's doing this out of what she perceives as necessity. And then Anand, the third person in this trio of villains, is doing it out of love for Anju. He doesn't really want to be doing it. So, I mean, that's how you get good characters, right? They're all there for their own reasons. And yeah, it's like a good hero party, right? There's like prickly character elements that bring them into conflict with each other. All right, anyway, how does that party do? How many survive?

Well, none of them, because Andrew kills herself. We forgot to mention how the uncle dies. Basically, in Zombie Garb, Raj scares him into jumping off a cliff and then puts his body inside the trunk that he was buried in. Like, dang, dude.

Is that his body?

Was it his body or the Gravedigger's?

I think it was the Gravedigger's body because he falls like 500 feet. That's true. And I was like, there's no way the body looks that good after that.

You're right.

All right. So let's talk about the type of zombie we're dealing with here. I mean, if we want to be pedantic, we could accuse producer Brad of faking us out with a non-zombie movie.

Right.

Because the zombie turns out to be a Scooby-Doo trick. However, what kind of zombie are we dealing with here?

Well, it is a classic reanimated zombie in appearance. They do make his face really gross and make him really pale and give him wide staring eyes. But he haunts like a ghost. So in that way, he's different.

Yes.

We think he's a science created zombies, right? Because he's created by the serum. It turns out he's not created at all. But in theory, it's a science zombie. But he's been created for dramatic purposes.

He's a vengeful ghost slash zombie. That makes me always think of what was the anthology film we watched that zombie with the terrific mad evil cackle?

Gallery of horror.

Yeah. He's in that genre, like a revenant maybe as we've used a couple of times. Yeah. There's no zombie horde because it's just him.

Right.

How is the zombie in this movie destroyed or killed?

It's not. You can't. It's like a ghost. They try to do stuff and it always disappears. You can't.

What's the kill count in this movie compared to other zombie movies we've watched?

It's just three if we don't count Raj who survives, but maybe it's the gravediggers who we'd say four.

Yes, but the gravedigger does show up at the end. He was faking it too.

He was faking it too. Okay, good.

Yeah. Just the three villains. The happy gravedigger. Is the world threatened?

No. We've gone back actually to the personal drama. This feels like something back in the Caribbean in the 1930s, where it's a rich family fighting amongst themselves.

It does. Yeah. All right. Then zombies, it's a fake zombie, so it can't return to being here. Granted that this is a fake zombie, are there any new strains or zombie firsts in the portrayal of the zombie that we need to call out?

I just think it's interesting that the zombie here is used as a prop to induce fear in a ghost-like way, but they're very specifically choosing not a ghost. They're very specifically choosing it to be a zombie, which I think is interesting. I don't know that we've had a zombie created or faked in a way to do exactly this.

Agreed. It feels like an odd choice, but the sort of odd choice that makes for an interesting movie, I think.

And it's the sort of choice that pushes genre forward, right? Like this film is often credited as sort of bringing a new angle to horror to Indian cinema. So instead of like hairy monsters or something, it's now zombies become an interesting viable option for Indian horror. And so by mashing up sort of the ghost story with what's popular, you know, like Night Of The Living Dead is hit by this point and everyone's seen it, you know, it's like a cool mashup. And this is how you sort of get new kinds of genre films.

I would add, don't forget, I think this is, I don't think this is the first Indian film that's a zombie film.

That's right.

And we sort of touched on this and I'm not sure if this is accurate, but is it the first thriller kind of zombie film?

That's a good question. I feel like, again, we're going back to Zombies of Morta, that had a little thriller angle to it.

But not of the modern structure like what we talk about now.

Well, I mean, what was that one? That was really three movies in one. He kept recutting it and releasing it. That was technically a thriller.

That's true.

Yeah, Blood Of Gasly Horror. So I actually would say that, Blood Of Gasly Horror feels like kind of, yeah, you're right, John. Or you're right, Brad. We have seen a few movies hinting towards this, but I think this feels different. I think this is something unique. So anyway, at the beginning of this podcast, John, you identified four pillars of the zombie film genre. I don't know, I mean, since this is such an unusual zombie film, I don't know how this will rate, but let's just go through them for the sake of it. John in Do Gas Zameen Ke Neeche, is there an apocalypse?

No apocalypse.

Not at all. It's one of those intensely personal stakes films. Is there contagion?

No. We only ever get one zombie, and it's clear that it was made by a serum.

Yeah. Are there tough moral choices?

I mean, kind of yes, right? I mean, one of the things we do now, the way we intended this question is, does the fact that the world is ending or your loved ones are turned into zombies cause you to take or make tough moral choices? We do have our villains all struggling with, well, the uncle doesn't struggle, but everybody else struggles with moral choices. In a sense, yes, I think so. It's the one thing that's here. It is the moral complexity of their choices that is driving the movie forward at some point.

I agree. Does this movie feature loved ones turning against you?

I'd have to say yes. Anju in theory loves Raj and he has become a zombie and is chasing her. There ended up being a couple. That's interesting. Now, we designed a series of 1970s questions to talk about American cinema, but I think we can ask a few of them here. Let's go for that. Does this movie sort of push the boundaries of on-screen violence and sexuality? Keep in mind, for India, not for the United States.

So again, not knowing exactly what the boundaries were like in India, it's a little hard to say. So violence, I want to say no. There's not much in the way of on-screen violence here. Sexuality I think is present in a significant way in this movie. Whether this was shocking to an Indian viewer or not, I don't know. But look who is sexy in this movie. It's Anju, the bad one, right? And look who, and her opposite, her mirror is Meena, who is demure, modest, pious. Anju seduces Raj at the beginning of this movie. And there is a scene after their marriage where she attempts to seduce him that I think we are meant to be kind of repelled by, even though, I mean, like in modern, I mean, look, viewing it from our modern perspective, it's like, well, a spouse, you know, trying to be sexy for their spouse doesn't seem too offensive. But it's a really drawn out scene in this movie. And I think we are meant to be kind of repelled by her brazen sexuality, even within the context of marriage. Yeah, I think so. So I think this movie is playing a lot on that. That said, it's not like it's not pushing any boundaries as far as like there's no nudity or on screen sex or something.

Does this evoke terror of crime, lawlessness or anarchy?

I don't think that it evokes crime or anarchy in the way that some of our American anti-hippie zombie movies have done.

I will say that there are gangs of thugs on two or three different occasions that are chasing down innocent people. So there is a sense of lawlessness if you leave the house kind of thing.

That is an interesting thing. I hadn't thought about that. But yes, their uncle can hire thugs whenever he needs to get at the people he doesn't like. You know what is absent entirely from this movie? Is the government or authorities in any way, shape, or form? I don't think that's entirely an accident. To the extent that this is a movie about crime or anarchy, I think it is exuding or playing on fears of like what greed is doing to society, right? Because greed and the need for money or the perceived need for money has driven all of our villains to different extents to violate basic cultural norms. And I think that these are themes that have been present for thousands of years of human art. So greed didn't magically appear in the 1970s. However, I don't think you can separate this from the encroaching hegemony of Western materialist values that a lot of non-Western countries are feeling at this point.

Would you say it invokes economic anxiety and consumerism run amok? I mean, I think you're saying that it does. Very much.

Yeah. I won't repeat myself, but 100 percent.

All right. And last but not least, how about a divide between new and old generations?

I think it very much evokes a divide between the new and the old world. Nobody in this movie except the uncle is really old, older. So it's not literal generations. But I think we are supposed to see in Raj a sort of a nostalgic version of the old ways. The very beginning of this, I said that not long before this movie came out, there had been official legislation removing kind of support for these sort of, I guess you might say, sort of freeloading elites. And the result is you got big manners like the one Raj lives in. I mean, he lives by himself with two servants in this sprawling estate. Yes, though he does have a job in theory. He does have a job. I mean, it's not ruined, but many shots in this movie, especially when The Fog Machine is turned on, evoke a sort of Gothic ruin to his estate.

I was going to say, especially during the end, when she's like walking around the house with The Fog Machine going with a candelabra, I was like, this is like a Vincent Price Gothic Horror movie right now. Yeah.

Yes. Absolutely.

And we've discussed it already, but I think this movie is drawing a line, a moral line between the pious ways that we have lost and the new modern ways that are degrading us. Like 80 percent of the time Meade is on the screen, she's praying, like piously praying, and the bad guy Anju mocks her for praying too much.

I'm going to go back and watch her songs, because what I got is a subtitle of her talking about how Krishna is like the most perfect being, and I want to hear her sing that. So don't talk me out of it.

The subtitle for me for that lyric was, Vishnu, I am a fan of you.

Yes.

Which is a hilariously literal and non poetic translation. But yes.

All right. Well, bring us home, Andy.

All right. We always close with, it was three questions, but we've added a fourth, so now it's four traditional closing questions. John, would you and I survive in the sort of zombie world of Do Gas Zameen Ke Neeche?

So I think we would. I think Ajay only has so many people she can manipulate all at once, so I think we'd be safe.

Yeah, and the bad guys all die as a direct consequence of their own evil. They're reaping what they sow, and I don't think you and I are quite that cartoonishly evil.

Well, do you have an uncle who's cartoonishly evil who'll push you to doing these misdeeds, is the question.

I don't.

I have some nice, nice uncles.

Yeah. I don't know.

All right, John, is Do Gas Zameen Ke Neeche a zombie movie or a movie with zombies?

I think it's a movie with zombies.

I think so, too. Yeah. It's really a supernatural revenge ghost story with a zombie in it.

Yeah.

So all right, this is an interesting one, John. Do you recommend this movie first to a general audience? Is this a movie people should take time out of their day to watch? Secondly, do you recommend this movie specifically to the legion of zombie-loving listeners of this podcast who are always on the lookout for something new and interesting in the zombie world?

Yeah. So on the first part, I just think the quality is so poor. It's hard to find a decent print of this film. I just can't recommend it. If you're a film buff and you're curious about Indian cinema, I think there's value here, but just for a regular Joe, I don't think so. So now for zombie loving fans, I can certainly recommend the second half of this movie. The problem is you can't get the impact of it without watching the first half of the movie, but I think I'm still going to say yes, because it was interesting enough.

I think I'm going to give a soft no to both, but I actually enjoyed this one, John. Yes. I will say just the good stuff in this movie outweighed what admittedly are some kind of rough elements, like the length, the low budgetness. That said, it's kind of tough. If this movie were shorter, I would give it an easy recommendation, but it's not short at all. It's not short. It's like Lord Of The Rings. So soft no to both. I don't think it really adds anything new to the zombie world. If there had been something more specifically Indian about the portrayal of the zombie, I would give it a definite yes, but I don't know. Soft no to both.

Fair enough. So Andy, should your mom watch this film? She might like the traditional values.

She's a traditional girl.

I think mom has probably not seen any more Indian cinema than I have. In that sense, it's an interesting. Just like on the level of just seeing something, I'm not used to seeing. This movie works, right? The costumes look great. The clothes are fantastic. The makeup looks great. The settings are great. That said, I'm going to say no. It's too long and boring for mom. And yeah, so I'm going to say no. Sorry, mom. You can give this one a skip. How about your mom, John?

No.

Okay.

She couldn't stand this for 30 seconds.

All right. Well, that's our questions, which leads us to the final and most terrifying part of every episode. That's where producer Brad reveals to me and John, what zombie movie we will be watching next. So John, before Brad begins, are we going back to America or do you think Brad is taking on, are we venturing further afield?

I think we're probably going back to America. That's my guess.

Well, our next film released in 1973 is our first British film since 1966.

Well, we finally made it out of 1972, my God.

Yes, and here's a snippet of the trailer for you.

Okay.

Meet Dr. Storm, a scientist who discovered how to control the human mind, whose patients have no choice but to obey his every command. You're sick! You're ill! You're insane! A genius who wants to create an army of humanoids.

Well, my friends, there'll be three more companions for you very soon.

Dead bodies recycled into faceless humanoids that follow orders to kill.

And here is the poster for you to get more info on. Hold on.

Nice. I was thinking the title of this movie might be Humanoids or something.

No, the title of this movie is Horror Hospital.

Black Gloves Of Evil, Le Bear, The Ultimate Horror.

All right, we're thorough mad scientists here.

Yeah, so what do we got here? We have a doctor who himself looks like a zombie or a skeleton wearing a surgical mask. So kudos to him for following protocol. We have a screaming woman's head and then we have a lot of blood.

Yeah, a lot of blood and some funky text.

It's a black and white poster. The only thing of color is the red blood.

Yes. All right, I'm here for it.

So just so you know, this is listed as a dark science fiction horror comedy.

Okay.

We haven't seen a comedy in a while, at least an intentional one.

We've been a little light on comedy.

Yeah, exactly. And do you recognize any of the names listed in the cast?

I'm looking at them. Vanessa Shaw, do I recognize that name?

No, it's the first name in the list.

All right. And Dennis Price, maybe. Ellen Pollock seems familiar, too.

So the first name is Michael Goff.

Yeah.

He played Alfred in the Batman movies.

Oh.

Wait, in the Batman TV show, you mean?

No, in the movies, in the Tim Burton ones.

Oh, really?

Okay.

All right. Okay. So he went up, not down his trajectory. Okay.

All right, everybody. Thank you. Join us next time for Horror Hospital. If you haven't had a chance to rank us in the podcast app or on Spotify, it really does help us out. We have merch. You can go to Redbubble. There's a link in the description. You can follow us on Facebook and Instagram, where producer Brad has been putting together fun reels and historical facts about our various mad scientists and zombies and other fun stuff. So check us out there as well. See you next time on Zombie Strains. You've been listening to Zombie Strains. We'll be back next episode to talk about another zombie movie. If you enjoyed our podcast, please take a moment to rate us in your podcast app of choice. Tell a friend, follow us on Instagram at Zombie Strains. All of this helps like minded people find the show. See you next time.