- The eighties are making a comeback in Bollywood. All the big films like 'Singham' and 'Dabangg' are either South remakes or revolve around heroes with Hercules-like strength.
In a film from that era, a king gets the word 'Mard' tattooed on the chest of his handsome newborn son. Everyone knows how painful it is to get a tattoo, but in the film, the newborn baby keeps smiling during the procedure. Then in that youth 'Mard' turns into a thong and gives a dialogue - 'Mard ko kabhi dard nahi hota'. In another film, a street orphan boy grows up to become a disco sensation. Thousands of people flock to the tune of his electric guitar, but there is no power connection attached to the guitar. In a film of that time, when Jeetendra and Sridevi are dancing on the bank of a river, pots bigger than stainless steel kothi can be seen in the background. We are talking about eighties movies.
If you ask the truth, it was a very drunken period of Hindi films. Eighties films were full of pointless and stupid story plots, their villains were ridiculous and their dances were weirder than Dolly Bindra. In short, it can be said that it was the worst decade of Bollywood. And yet you will still find fans of eighties movies today.
Mumbai-based Kapil Samant and his friends are such fans of Hindi films of the 1980s. Samant and his circle of friends gather in their apartment and watch a film of Mithun Chakraborty's era, the name of which is not even remembered by many people today. Samant fast forwards and stops at a song from the movie 'Kasam Paida Karne Wale Ki'. Composer Bappi Lahiri's duet from Michael Jackson's 'Bit It' features Mithun and Salma Agha Bhadak dancing in red leather pants. Seeing that, no teenager of today can stop laughing. Samant's friends also laugh at the flamboyant song, but at the same time, it cannot be denied that they enjoy watching all this.
There is an old cinema named Alexander at a junction near Kamathipura, the red light area of Mumbai. The theater is so dilapidated that a small hole in its wall is a box office and a small wooden plank is its door. However, the condition of Alexander Theater is said to be better than the video theaters around it. These video theaters operate with the help of a TV and a CD player in a single room. Here you find the posters of Mithun's 1989 C grade rubbish film 'Ilaaka' and even though Jeetendra is now retired, Jumping Jack is still a hit hero for these video theatres.
Salim Sheikh, an employee of Alexander, sits outside the theater with a small table waiting for it to open. He is not worried about competition from nearby video theaters but Manoman hopes that the area is not sold to a builder and no multiplex is built here. "It's a different matter that we can't afford to release new Bollywood films, but even today there is a demand for old films here," says Sheikh. Mithunda's 1997 film 'Yamraj' has recently been pulled from Alexander and a new Bhojpuri film has been installed but the old film will return to theaters in a few weeks, it added.
"The regulars in my theater (poor day laborers and workers) may have seen an old film at least a dozen times, but still they keep coming back to see their supposed hero take down goons to avenge his sister's rape," added Sheikh. states.
Rajesh Vora, known as Rajubhai in cinemas across Mumbai, understands Salim Sheikh very well. Rajubhai, who owns a shop that prints and sells movie posters, believes that there is a lot of money in the films of that decade. Films of the 1980s will always be popular in North India. Here the competition is between Bhojpuri cinema and southern remakes. Who cares about your Ranbir Kapoor and 'Rockstar' Annie love story here? A man who can't spend more than a twenty note on a movie every week has never been to college and will never have a chance to woo a beautiful rich girl in his life. That is why he cannot associate himself with today's films,' Rajubhai argues.
'Bodyguard' like Rs. Scriptwriter Kiran Kotrial, who wrote a superhit film that did business of more than 100 crores, even believes that the eighties are returning in Bollywood. "All the recent big films like Singham and Dabangg are either South remakes or revolve around heroes with Hercules-like strength. The same joy that was felt in Mithun's Gunda or Amitabh's Ganga, Jamuna, Saraswati comes from these films,' he says adding that 'today no one feels strange seeing the hero carrying a huge crocodile on his shoulder. Ultana, the multiplex audience greets him with shouts and whistles.'
Thanks to the internet and YouTube, fans have been able to freely enjoy movies from the eighties and nineteen decades. "Those movies are so bad that it's fun to watch," says Mumbai-based game developer Shailesh Prabhu. This 28-year-old has grown up watching Amitabh Bachchan's films. Don is his all-time favorite film but he has a different feeling for Bachchan's Shehenshah. In the film, Bachchan plays the role of a corrupt police inspector by day and a fighter who wears armor-like clothes and takes down the evildoers by night. 'It is India's own original superhero film,' believes Prabhu. He might have loved these movies in his childhood but today he likes to watch the same movies because of the melodrama and many inconsistencies. Like other fans, Prabhu also enjoys watching the glaring loopholes in the screenplays of eighties films. Take the blockbuster film Tridev, in which Sunny Deol, who plays Inspector Karan, is believed to be dead. But in no time he returns with a mustache on his face. The funny thing is that not only the villains of the film but also Sunny's friends can't recognize him' says Prabhu giving an example.
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