IT CAME FROM LOLLYWOOD! A triple-bill of Pakistani Pulp Cinema
WHEN: Friday 10 April 2009, 3pm-9.30pm
WHERE: Great Theater, 19 University Place
Open to the public. Refreshments will be available.
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Bollywood, Tollywood, Kollywood – Lollywood? The movies emerging from Lahore, Pakistan – in particular its horror films – have for many years been prized by cinephiles and those with a taste for the weird and wigged-out.
Even before 1971, when the election of socialist president Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto led to the relaxation of the country’s morality codes, many Pakistani directors, some more technically and aesthetically sophisticated than others, were busy reworking local ghost stories and Hollywood shockers to the delight of audiences hungry for tougher fare than the romances and weepies coming out of Bombay.
‘The Exorcist’, ‘The Omen’, the films of Hitchcock: all were set upon, gouged and reconstructed as monstrously garish East-West hybrids. Over time, the horror genre, both in Lahore and in the mythologically-orientated southern Indian scene, became associated with hysterically loud and tinnily-recorded soundtracks, thunder-thighed women laying chopsocky moves on hapless baddies, and near-homunculi sporting ludicrously cheap face-paint and false beards to make them look like wolf-men and crazed beasts. But in amongst the trash, there were gems. Strange gems….
IT CAME FROM LOLLYWOOD offers a rare opportunity to see three seminal works of Lollywood horror spanning over 40 years:
* ZINDA LAASH (aka The Living Corpse) (dir. Khwaja Sarfaraz, 1967) is a classic B-movie remake of Dracula that became the first X-rated feature in Pakistani history.
* INTERNATIONAL GORILLAY (dir. Jan Mohammad, 1990), categorised as a ‘video nasty’ and banned by the British government on its initial release, is a notorious hate-thriller in which righteous Muslims decide to kill a casino- and disco-obsessed enemy of Islam, aka novelist Salman Rushdie, who has taken to torturing prisoners by reading The Satanic Verses aloud to them.
* HELL’S GROUND (dir. Omar Khan, 2007) is a witty satire of contemporary urban malaise in which yuppies from Islamabad get lost in a forest that turns out to be terrorized by a burqa-clad, mace-swinging serial killer.
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