Director: Bhushan Patel

Cast: Sunny Leone, Parvin Dabas, Sahil Prem

Rating: 1 star

Tis the ongoing trend of remakes and Ragini MMS 2 hops on to the bandwagon with a sensuality upgrade a la Sunny Leone. Most who ventured into the hall (for all the right reasons) would snigger and call it an understatement.

The former adult film actress stars as Sunny, a former adult film actress featuring in a ‘horrex’ (horror + sex) film. And the movie is no class act when you’ve got a sleazy director (Parvin Dabas) at the helm of affairs. His name is Rocks, so fire away the puns and innuendos.

There’s Satya (Sahil Prem) a mysterious scriptwriter skulking around. Horror of horrors, you also find Sandhya Mridul playing a tacky starlet, Monali.

They decide to take Ragini’s (Kainaz Motivala) story from the prequel and make a film on it, in the very house where the previous events occurred. A tad exploitative, considering that she is scarred, stricken and quite literally still haunted by the ghost of her past.

She even attacks Sunny who visits her in the asylum as research (straitjacketing the insane clearly being an alien concept there). If that encounter did not set off alarm bells for our heroine, a board, warning one of the haunted house and the sheer nighttime spookiness of the place don’t tip her off either. So pardon her skepticism.

The shooting commences and the oomph ensues. There are dark shadows on the periphery but the crew pays no heed. And that’s when they start dropping dead. (This is fine, since you feel nothing for the caricatures and were, in all likelihood, rooting for such an eventuality).

There’s a half-backed parallel track of Dr. Meera Dutta (Divya Dutta), who’s New York-returned and claims to be Ragini’s therapist, though we don’t actually see them together in session.

The film is replete with horror clichés like flickering bulbs, foreshadowing, levitating bodies, creaking doorways and haunted cacklings. And there are the jump scares, the laziest of all gimmicks. So many jump scares, they are overused.

Sample these scenes:

A character opens the door to knocking. *ominous music* Another character is standing outside… wearing a face pack.

In another scene, Dr. Dutta is sitting on her laptop. *ominous music* Her assistant slams a cup of coffee on her desk.

There are also sparkling gems of dialogue in the film like:

Rocks: Tumhe zor se nahi lagi?
Sunny: Lagi? Kab?
Rocks: Jab tum heaven se gir rahi thi.

And when Sunny broaches the topic of meeting Ragini for research, Rocks snarks to another character, “Research? Yeh porno se Ritu’porno’ kab bann gayi?”

All these and more are enough to have you hoist a flag at half-mast for your brain cells.

Ragini MMS 2 is a relentless assault of Sunny’s skinshow. Heck, she gets a whole scene where she fakes an ecstatic orgasm before the crew members. No point commenting on her performance when the camera is lingering over other assets. Genuinely talented actors like Parvin Dabas, Divya Dutta and Sandhya Mridul are embarrassing themselves here. There’s also the briefest of cameos by AIB’s Tanmay Bhat, which is just as cringe-inducing.  The rest of the cast does not even try to emote. Maybe that was the way to go all along.

Walk away. You’ll find better scares at the click of a mouse button. And you’ll retain those brain cells.