Raaz (2002)

A married couple retreat to a weekend getaway house in the countryside to give their crumbling marriage one last chance, but the vacation turns into a nightmare when they discover that a spirit is violently haunting the property and that it's tied into a deep, dark secret that one of them has been hiding.

REVIEW: Raaz is a Bollywood horror movie from the early 2000s, although with the poor quality of the video you would think that it's from much earlier then that. On the flip side however, that made the movie feel older, thus it added a bit of atmosphere to the creepy scenes, making them that much more creepier. And let me tell you, since this movie is almost three hours long (as is par for the course for a Bollywood movie), there is plenty of creepy, scary, spine-tingling atmospheric scenes to be found here. Between thunder storms, mysterious thick fog, whispers in the night, ghastly screams from afar, doors and windows banging around on their own, or geysers of blood spraying down from an overhanging chandelier, this movie is in no short supply of dozens of fantastic scenes to make any horror fan, Bollywood or not, enjoy this.

Unfortunately, also because of its long runtime, there is many stretches (especially in the first chunk of the movie) that goes on way, way too long without anything interesting really happening and during these parts I often found myself checking my phone and browsing my Facebook. It doesn't help that, for the most part, the acting is pretty terrible in this one as well. 

In addition to the terrible acting, like with 99% of Bollywood movies, this one is filled with random song and dance numbers that have little, if anything at all, to actually do with anything going on in the movie itself. Where I love the modern Bollywood style of song and dance numbers (I.E. the pop dance hits that make you wanna get up and groove, that remain stuck in your head for all time), I'm certainly not a fan of the more classic restrained style of Bollywood song and dance numbers, of which unfortunately populate this movie.

Luckily, the amount of horrific scary scenes, and the amount of genuine tension and atmosphere put into them, mixed with an atmoshperic moody score that reminded me at times of The Shining's score, far outweighs everything I didn't like, I just wish that the pacing between those scenes could have been tightened up just a tad, and the acting improved a bit.

6/10 Rooms in the Psych Ward