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Many centuries ago, Raja Hari Man Singh has killed the demon Saamri
(Ajay Agarwal) by decapitation and had his head walled up in his palace
while his body was entombed in a temple many miles away. However, before
he died, Saamri cursed Singh's family, promising all women of the family
to die at childbirth, and when Saamri's head and body are rejoined again,
he himself will put an end to the Singh family for good.
Back in the now, the curse is almost forgotten - until Suman Singh
(Arti Gupta) falls in love with Sanjay (Mohnish Bahl) - and suddenly her
father Ranbir (Pradeep Kumar) realizes she's not a little girl anymore and
will want to marry and have children, which Ranbir cannot allow after he
saw his wife die a horrible death (that involved her turning into a
monster) at childbirth. Consequently he tries to chase Sanjay away, even
at gunpoint, but seeing his love is too strong, he tells him and Suman
about the family curse. However, instead of breaking them apart, he only
causes them - and their friends, martial artist Anand (Puneet Issar) and
Sapna - to go to the old palace to try and put an end to the curse.
At the palace, Suman is constantly plagued by visions of Saamri's
deformed head and similar spooky things, but nobody tends to believe her -
until Sanjay and Anand find a secret chamber in the palace, and in it the
head of the demon, kept at bay by God Shiva's trident. The two of them
decide to not disturb the peace of the head and wall it up again - and
that could be that, thing is, Sangar (Satish Shah), a greedy woodcutter,
thinks the young men have found a treasure in the secret chamber and wants
to steal it ... instead of course, he only frees the head from the spell
of Shiva's trident and is soon possessed by Saamri, who forces him to take
the head to the old temple, rejoin head and body and bring Saamri back to
the living.
Soon enough, Saamri has killed both Anand and Sapna, while Sanjay and
Suman are taken captive by Raka (Dheeraj Kumar), the leader of the next
village, who wants to sacrifice them both to the gods in order to avert
the curse of Saamri from the village - but Bijli (Leena Das), Raka's
sister, has fallen in love with Sanjay and helps him and Suman escape -
even at the cost of her own life ...
Finally, Sanjay figures out that the only way to defeat Saamri is with
the help of God Shiva's trident ... but when they go to the palace to get
the trident that kept the head at bay, it's nowhere to be found - but
Saamri has already been waiting for the youngsters. Only in the last
minute can Sanjay find the trident hanging in the chandelier (it never
becomes quite clear how it got there) and use its power to drive Saamri to
the village square, where Raka's villagers burn him in a bonfire ...
A comical subplot involves a gangster played by Jagdeep and an armless
village leader played by Rajendranath doing a broad parody of the
classic Inidian film Sholay, that has only very little to do with
the rest of the movie ...
Purana Mandir is hardly a film strong on subtlety, rather it
throws everything it has got at the audience, from old-fashioned shock
effects like hairy monsters and thunder and lightning to modern gore
effects - though not all of these effects are of high quality. In fact, Purana
Mandir is a shocker made on the cheap for an undiscriminating audience
that comes for the shocks and little more - and it seems the producers had
the right idea with the concept because the film was a tremendous success
and the most successful of the Ramsay family - India's first and foremost
producers of horror films - to this date.
Compared to established Western horror classics, the film of course
looks crude, almost basic, but taken as a cheaply made, silly but funny
B-shocker, it works quite well, and shouldn't be missed by fans of Asian
horror cinema.
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