Dhund – The Fog starts off nicely when a raving lunatic is killed by a separate raving lunatic when he tries to light fire to some dolls. From there we get the credits sequence and then move on to a completely different story involving two sisters named Simran and Kajal. When we meet them, they're spending the afternoon singing songs while lounging around the pool. Two horny guys named Sameer and Kunar spy the two foxy ladies living it up in their bikinis and, being proper perverts, decide to scope them out and take pictures of them. You'd think that the girls would clue in on this but no, they're way too into their musical numbers to notice two creepy guys hanging out snapping away with their camera. Unfortunately for Simran, one of the pictures that Kunar took ends up smack dab on the cover of one of the popular magazines in town and now everyone gets to see her in her bikini!

Soon though, in an unexpected twist, Sameer tells Simran that he has fallen madly in love with her. This seems to ease her anguish over the magazine cover thing quite a bit and soon the two girls are double dating with the two perverts who whisk them off for a night of dancing and singing at a local nightclub. Soon enough it's evident that Sameer and Simran are a good match, and that Kunar and Kajal are also starting to fall for one another. The reasons behind this aren't really made clear, so it's probably not important why it happens, only that it does. If you need a reason, simply assume that they pair up the way they do because their names start with the same letters. It's as good a reason as any.

Now that everyone is in love and finished dancing and singing, it's time to remind the audience that they are indeed supposed to be watching a horror film. Enter Ajit and his sister Preeti, who is entered in a beauty contest where she will square off against Simran. We then find out that Simran and Preeti have a sort of rivalry in that Simran has consistently beaten Preeti in every beauty contest that they've ever competed against one another in. Ajit figures it's time for him to do something to help his sister so he starts calling Simran up at strange hours and threatening her over the phone and he makes it very clear that if she does enter, misfortune will befall her cat. She brushes the threats off as nonsense but soon finds that Ajit means business.

Simran enters and wins the contest, and Ajit decides to take matters into his own hands. He heads off to the house where the girls live just as their two boys head off on a shopping excursion in the middle of the night. When they return, the girls have killed Ajit in self defence. The four decide to hide his body at the bottom of the pool but Ajit doesn't stay there long and soon enough, they're seeing his corpse in strange spots at strange times...

I can get into Bollywood films if they tell a good story. I can appreciate the song and dance routines, and I can appreciate the melodrama. Sadly, with this film, there's very little to differentiate it and make it stand out. The story borrows very heavily from I Know What You Did Last Summer (which wasn't that good a film to begin with) and the song and dance numbers feel tired and uninspired.

To the film's credit the two female leads are very easy on the eyes and there are a couple of interesting kill scenes and a nice twist or two involing poor old Ajit's corpse but it's too little too late and the movie takes well over an hour to really start moving. This one might have some novelty appeal due to the strange mix or horror and beauty contest rivalry, but other than that this is, unfortunately, a pretty forgettable film.

The DVD

Video:

The film is presented in its original 1.85.1 widescreen aspect ratio and the transfer is enhanced for anamorphic sets. There's some grain present throughout as well as some mild print damage that shows up in the form of the odd speck here and there but nothing so harsh as to really pull you out of the film itself. Color reproduction is good, though not great, and the black levels stay reasonably strong. There aren't any problems with mpeg compression artifacts or pixelation but there is some noticeable edge enhancement and line shimmering in some scenes. Not a perfect transfer from Image but an acceptable one.