‘Satan’s Double Subsequent Stage’ film evaluate: Santhanam’s barely humorous, least scary addition to an uneven franchise

Santhanam and Rajendran in a nonetheless from ‘Satan’s Double Subsequent Stage’
| Picture Credit score: Assume Music India/YouTube

Let naysayers and non-believers say what they need, the Dhilluku Dhuddu movies are the type of responsible pleasure that should preserve this world operating. There’s a bungalow, a ghost or two, a foul-mouthed Santhanam, a Rajendran who leaves you in splits, and a fundamental storyline with a couple of twists that by some means retains you invested. In fact, there are the same old issues, just like the fresh-faced heroine used as eye-candy and Santhanam awkwardly nonetheless clinging onto his desires of turning into a industrial cinema hero who can struggle and dance. Satan’s Double Subsequent Stagea.okay.a DD Subsequent Stage isn’t too totally different from the primary three movies of this franchise (whereas authorized causes would possibly stop them from formally calling it a franchise, each movie has a meta line about being a sequel). Nevertheless, the jokes don’t land the place meant, and post-interval, the movie finally ends up as a dreadful mess.

DD Subsequent Stage strikes away from how every of its predecessors launched the lead characters to the haunted bungalow. In Dhilluku Dhuddu, the heroine’s father, who’s in opposition to her relationship, manipulates and takes the hero and his household to a bungalow to kill him off, unaware of the haunting presence there. Within the second half, the heroine’s father was a black magician who despatched a yatchi to guard his daughter from males lusting after her. The third was quirkier, revolving round a bag of cash that many events chase after, together with the hero who wants it to avoid wasting his relationship, just for the bag to finish up in a haunted French villa.

A nonetheless from ‘Satan’s Double Subsequent Stage’
| Picture Credit score:
Particular Association

DD Subsequent Stage, surprisingly, doesn’t wait to introduce the horror component, taking off from a well-staged sequence that includes fashionable Tamil reviewer Prashanth. We’re launched to a mysterious ghost named Hitchcock Irudhayaraj (Selvaraghavan) who lures movie critics to his mysterious theatre known as Cinema Paradise (easter eggs abound, together with a black magician named Mama Kurosawa) and kills them off as a result of they’re spoiling the sanctity of cinema. ‘Unga amma enga amma illa da, cinema!’ utters Irudhayaraj at one second. However earlier than you anticipate a critical tackle movie criticism, like R Balki’s Chup, I have to remind you that this can be a Santhanam movie. And so director S Prem Anand swaps all that potential for some low-hanging fruits.

Our protagonist, a relatively annoying one, is Kissa 47, an acclaimed movie reviewer on YouTube. He behaves like a man-child emulating a Gen Z rapper and calls everybody ‘Bro’ in an accent that Santhanam struggles to take care of. One night time, Kissa’s YouTuber girlfriend Aasai Harshini (Geethika Tiwary), mom (Kasthuri), father (Nizhalgal Ravi), and sister (Yashika Anand) are pulled into Irudhayaraj’s movie, known as Hitchcock Irudhayaraj. Kissa and his buddy Veenpechu Babu (Rajendran) too enter the movie’s world to avoid wasting the previous’s household, however to their shock, they discover them taking part in quirky characters of Hitchcock Irudhayaraj, on a cruise ship with a masked killer, unaware of who they are surely. His mom is a Telugu-speaking thief named Shilpa, his father is Captain McDonald, and his sister is Maya, a scantily-clad lady who’s in love with…Gautham Vasudev Menon’s Detective Ragavan, the hero of Hitchcock Irudhayaraj.

After following these characters hilariously evading the masked killer, the movie strikes to an island mansion that’s haunted by a ghost named Jessica, performed by Kissa’s girlfriend Harshini. And that’s the place all of the chaos ensues on this slasher-cum-supernatural horror. A lot of those preliminary parts work because of the many meta-references that organically discover their approach in. After they meet a Thai-speaking man who offers them a clue, Kissa and Babu can decode as a result of subtitles seem on the display. When Gautham romances Maya, the scene cuts to them dancing to ‘Uyirin Uyire’ from Kaakha Kaakha (props to Gautham for being a sport). Equally, Kissa and Babu can hear voiceovers, play with slow-motion photographs, and even journey to the previous by means of flashbacks. Being a movie reviewer, Kissa even asks a fellow character to not utter misogynistic dialogue.

A nonetheless from ‘Satan’s Double Subsequent Stage’
| Picture Credit score:
Particular Association

Sadly, every part goes haywire for Satan’s Double Subsequent Stage within the second half, the place the author has clearly exhausted all of the tips in his arsenal, and we’re left with a relatively tedious one hour that spoils all of the enjoyable. At one occasion, the makers repeat an thought from DD Returns that by some means simply doesn’t work right here. There’s additionally this testing scene surrounding Nizhalgal Ravi’s bowel actions that the movie might have performed with out. What might have been a enjoyable and taut comedy-horror will get stretched. A gaggle of cannibals are launched, serving no function apart from letting Santhanam flex his muscle mass in some struggle sequences.

The largest letdown is the horror component on the centre; each Jessica and Irudhayaraj are simply probably the most boring ghosts within the franchise, and also you actually miss the gory kills and weapons-wielding ghosts of DD Returns. The scares decline, GVM’s character turns into as inanimate as a movie prop, and the metaness of the movie begins to put on skinny.

On the finish, the query that left me puzzled is how Kissa and Babu might see and work together with Irudhayaraj, who’s sitting comfortably at his theatre, watching all of it unfold on the display. Is it as a result of the makers couldn’t afford the price of VFX for a portal that hyperlinks the 2 worlds? However even a portal to a different dimension couldn’t have saved the movie from such writing or from besting Dhillukku Dhuddu 2 because the least entertaining entry to the franchise.

Satan’s Double Subsequent Stage is at the moment operating in theatres