Colleague giving you trouble at work? Business rival taking away your clients? Here's a solution: try black magic water to get rid of your rivals. It looks like just plain water; you can mix it in mineral water, chocolates or even soup
Raaz 3
A; Horror
Dir: Vikram Bhatt
Cast: Emraan Hashmi, Esha Gupta, Bipasha Basu
**
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It will make your rivals hallucinate and lose their mind, their business and then you will reign. Superstar Shanaya (Bipasha) tried it on starlet Sanjana (Esha Gupta) and it worked!
Sanjana wins the Best Actress award for two consecutive years and has gotten all the plum roles around that were meant for Shanaya. An old servant advises her to discard her God and turn to an alternative power. Shanaya is stewing over it with a drink when director-cum-boyfriend-cum-wimp of three years Aditya (Emraan), who’s just won an award at the same ceremony, drops in to commiserate.
Says Aditya, while shoving his award in her face, “Here’s the award for my best actor.” Shanaya throws it. Replies Aditya, “Success and failure are a part of life. It doesn’t matter. Come on, let’s get married.” Shanaya tells him to FO.
She instead visits an atma in a slum. He hands over a cup of black magic water, which needs to be given to Sanjana by a trustworthy person. Of course, who better than the wimp director boyfriend? He is seduced into administering the potion to his colleague in drinks when he is shooting or dining with her and discussing her family life. Sanjana then starts seeing scary things from her past.
During one of her breakdowns, Sanjana sobs, “I have lost whoever I have loved. I have so much love inside me but nobody to give it to.” Why not? What am I here for then, thinks Aditya and promptly jumps into bed with her. Shanaya’s not happy, because now the wimp is refusing to give that evil water to his new girlfriend. So she offers it mixed in chocolates and has Sanjana hallucinating about cockroaches flying at her with such single-minded intensity that all she can do is get out of her clothes and streak through a filmi party. She loses all her films and Shanaya gets all the offers.
But she is not satisfied. She has sex with the worm-laden atma, so as to enable him to kill Sanjana. And then Aditya has to go into the atma-world, which somewhat resembles the 26/7 Mumbai deluge, to kill Shanaya and save Sanjana. He is not too successful till Ganpati Bappa intervenes.
Phew! Raaz 3 is a typical cheesy horror film that assumes that if it manages to bring out enough cacophony and ghastly blood-oozing people, it doesn’t need a story at all. So a woman keeps screeching in agony, a man growls fiercely in the background for a majority of the running time while random corpses eavesdrop on human conversations and report them to other humans on the phone in the foreground!
However, even with some pretty interesting visual concepts the Inception-inspired underworld particularly, the Thirteen Ghosts type of ghost imagery and most 3-D tricks and a couple of good powerful scares, the story turns out to be pretty flimsy. The basic assumption is that Bollywood has only two actresses and if one doesn’t get the job, the other definitely will. The director also takes long breaks at his own whims, producer be damned.
As far as acting goes, Esha overdoes the vulnerable bit (although she is slightly better in the second half); Emraan, of course, looks like he doesn’t even know what he is doing in the film. Bipasha ends up just as an overdose of cleavage and legs, without enough flesh to the character. Perhaps the push-up could have been used in the storytelling department.