"I will rip the living flesh off your bones!"

August 15, 2007 1:51 PM

"A group of teenagers, en route to attend a rock concert, lose their way when their car runs out of fuel in the dead of night. They find themselves in an unfamiliar rural backwater where they are confronted by flesh-eating zombies and a psychotic cannibalistic killer dressed in a sheet. It could be the plot to a thousand Hollywood horror films but while these teenagers may dress, talk and smoke dope like young Americans they are in fact young Pakistanis, and the film - Zibahkhana or Hell's Ground - is the first modern horror film to be filmed in Pakistan."
posted by brundlefly (11 comments total)

This sounds like a horror movie I could actually stand to watch.

I'm hoping that the Pakistani understanding of the genre is somewhat different from the current trend in American/Western horror films to show as much blood and guts as humanly possible.
posted by smackwich at 1:56 PM on August 15, 2007 [1 favorite]

Braaaain chuuuuutneeeey...
posted by mazola at 2:46 PM on August 15, 2007 [1 favorite]

I'm hoping that the Pakistani understanding of the genre is somewhat different from the current trend in American/Western horror films to show as much blood and guts as humanly possible.

"The truth is that Indian culture and mythology has always been filled with the gory and the gruesome. The Mahabharata and Ramayana include scenes of blood drinking, tongues being pulled out, children being beheaded, thumbs and noses being cut off and people being forced to lie on beds of arrows."

Err, maybe not... It'd be interesting to see the differences, though.
posted by vhsiv at 2:50 PM on August 15, 2007

I'm so proud.

And people worry about the effects of Westernization!
posted by misha at 2:58 PM on August 15, 2007 [2 favorites]

Filmed in and around Islamabad, Zibahkhana manages to include Pakistani rock music, hijras - transvestite eunuchs common in the subcontinent - as well as some pointed social criticism of contemporary Pakistani society.

It's a modern day "Rocky Horror"! Filmed in Pakistan! On paper, this is the best movie EVER! I shall see it!
posted by soundofsuburbia at 3:03 PM on August 15, 2007

I'd like to go on record as saying that the giant mace is a sorely underused killing device in modern horror, and I support the film because of that if nothing else.
posted by brundlefly at 3:09 PM on August 15, 2007

I really wanted to like this, but that trailer is pure, unadulterated crap. The editing is really lazy, the sound mix is horrible, the "old man warning" scene is possibly the biggest cliche in the genre, then there's some sort of weird comic book panel still frame thing they repeat a couple of times, with some strange captions...

It looks really bad, sadly. The mix of English and Urdu in the voiceover just makes me even more convinced that it's some guy with a US slasher film fetish trying to emulate what he's seen and likes, without much grasp of cinematic language.

If I had to say something good about it, I guess the last girl we see in the clicheed character introduction is very cute, and the zombies don't look bad. But that's about it.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 4:01 PM on August 15, 2007

And by modern, they mean 1970s B-movie.
posted by Eideteker at 4:45 PM on August 15, 2007

I want Thomas Friedman to write a column about this.
posted by LarryC at 7:37 PM on August 15, 2007 [1 favorite]

Those drum beats make me want to get up and start dancing

Ey, Bale Bale!
posted by hadjiboy at 9:09 PM on August 15, 2007

2 points:

1. Zibahkhana transliterated mean "slaughterhouse" or "slaughter chamber".

2. Omar Ali Khan, the director of this film, is the grandson of Princess Abida Sultan, a remarkable woman of her time, who left her throne in the princely state of Bhopal, India as presumptive heir apparent and migrated to Pakistan in 1949. Bhopal had a uniquely rich history of women rulers known as the Begums of Bhopal.
posted by Azaadistani at 9:25 PM on August 15, 2007 [1 favorite]