Thursday, March 8, 2012

Excuse me, miss; Do you speak Tamil?

YAVARUM NALAM

I'm not sure if the headline is a great pick-up line or not but in any case I've just ordered this bunch of Indian genre films. These films deviate from the Indian horror films I've watched previously in that they're not from the Hindi spoken Bollywood but from the Tamil language part of India. Originally I really just wanted to order the above film, YAVARUM NALAM, which is a horror movie that a Cinehound member posted about. However, altho the price of the DVD was only Rs.175 ($4.50) on eBay India, the postage to Euroland was Rs.800!!! But the seller said I could order more DVDs for the same postage fee, so I picked the other three out of which two of them are horror movies and one is a sci-fi movie. They all have English subtitles.

NANJUPURAM

ARUNDATHEE

ENTHIRAN

By the way, remember how they would sometimes make different language versions of films simultaneously in Hollywood in the old days? For instance, the 1931 version of DRACULA was filmed twice; During the day they would shoot the English language version starring Bela Lugosi and at night they'd film a different version for the Spanish language markets. This was before dubbing was invented obviously. However, they still do this practice in India! No, I'm not making that up! The horror movie YAVARUM NALAM was filmed twice at the same time, on the same set, and by the same director. The difference is one is in Hindi and the other - the one I bought - is in Tamil. But why not just dub them? Well, apparently religious and other customs are too different, a dub simply isn't enough.

The Hindi language version of the film is called 13 B and is also released on DVD. Actually the Hindi version is much easier to get hold of (hence my wanting the other dvd OBVIOUSLY! LOL). I intend to get hold of the Hindi version as well though. Oh, and there's even been some talk about a Hollywood remake.