10 Horror Movie Rip-Offs You Won’t Believe Exist

The Bollywood film industry is infamous for lifting plots and characters from Hollywood blockbusters wholesale. Those films are then often run through the filter of the masala convention of Bollywood cinema, in which multiple genres - comedy, musical, romance etc - are spliced into a single narrative to appeal to the largest number of people possible.

That’s what we get with Salim Raza’s Bach ke zara (unofficially known as Bollywood Evil Dead), a film which follows Sam Raimi’s 1981 classic The Evil Dead so closely that it’s in danger of tripping over it.

Raza clearly loves the original, but he doesn’t have the proficiency to do anything more than ape Raimi’s gonzo crash zooms and crazy angles.

To make matters worse, Raza clearly didn’t have the budget that Raimi did – and Raimi’s film was famously made on a microbudget by talented and enthusiastic amateurs as a labour of love. You could say that Bach ke zara was made on a shoestring, but that would assume that his budget even stretched that far.

Given that this is a masala film, what that means is that the cracks are papered over with a song and dance number, goofy comedy and a couple of romance arcs. It’s actually not as bad as it sounds – goofiness is a pretty good fit with the lurid, OTT aesthetic of even an ersatz Evil Dead movie – but then it couldn’t be worse than it sounds.

However, if you’re a devotee of the original movie and can appreciate the cultural reference points of a Bollywood production, you could easily find yourself enjoying the ninety minutes you spend on Bach ke zara.