All ye diehard Bollywood haters, good sulk. Hindi movies have seen dakus of all whiskers, but the bad guys who stalks this Ram Gopal Varma movie, are zanier, scarier, and more real than all of them put together.

The story is a take on the exploits of the South Indian smuggler-dacoit-at-large, Veerappan. They says he sometimes crosses over Bangalore from his jungle kingdom, and so if he chooses to see what Bollywood has done with him, his response would be worth knowing. Of course the hero-heroine love story is all there, the songs too. But director Ram Gopal Varma is one freak case in a Hindi film world tot full of cheese. Varma\'s movies, Satya as a strong example, don\'t often come off that Bollywood assembly-line which has been doing serious damage to our psyche.

The amount of havoc wreaked by the combined force of matrimonial and Fair and Lovely ads and Bollywood, is there for all to see in India. Why Varma has to be hyped, and this is important, is that he shows us the enormous possibilities of the Hindi movie. He doesn\'t stick to the formula that makes most Bollywood flicks so sick.

Varma too may be in the business of selling dreams, but his realism is what gets you. There\'s this scene in-Jungle of holidayers on a safari-\'typical\' Indian group, a Sikh couple, Bengali honeymooners, kids, a foreigner too, a lot of racket, complaints about not spotting a lion (to which the guide retorts that lions don\'t have a time-table)...and you just know that movie-watching is great fun.
And the dakus are savage, intense and hilarious (an Indian reviewer calls them "cool demons"). You should see them discuss the method of a kill-"you hold this part, you the other", as if they were putting up a banner or something.

The Veerappan you get to know is called Durga Narayan Chaudhary, a name as far away from the real-life villain\'s Dravidian origins, and neither does he have the Veerapan-patented handlebar moustache. Durga is unkempt, likes to stare through his hair, speaks not too coherently, and likes this city girl (Urmila Matondkar whom he has taken hostage).

All along, Vijay Arora\'s camera is a marvel, surreally caressing the silence and noise of the jungle. That is another reason why this movie is immensely watchable.

But then you might ask, what\'s so watchable about a movie that has a cliff-hanging scene at the climax. Now come on, let\'s forgive Varma on that one. And actually, it doesn\'t look that contrived. When you have the audience wildly cheering at the end of it all, it surely becomes a great movie experience.