Raa Raa Review: Too many cooks spoil this broth

Tollywood’s tryst with horror films will never wane. It’s the most favoured genre for our filmmakers as we get a toast of an experimental subject every now-and-then. And the latest entrant in the horror-comedy bandwagon is actor Srikanth’s Raa Raa. The film has been in the news for all wrong reasons as its director’s name was missing from the posters following a rift with its producer Vijay. Eventually, an established director on the condition of anonymity and other enthusiastic technicians from the team had taken over the mantle to complete it.

Cast: Srikanth, Naziya, Seetha Narayana
Director: Shankar

Cut to the story. The film’s protagonist Raj Kiran (Srikanth), is a struggling director who chooses to showcase horror to the audience with his film. He sets the ball rolling with his ‘creative’ team comprising a 60-year-old co-director, a wannabe globetrotter, an entertainment junkie and an ambitious woman, and lands up in an abandoned bungalow.

Directed by more than one person, this film proves true the proverb ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth’. It appears that every person who has donned the director’s hat has worked on the same inedible dish, one whose ingredients fight with one another, and which should never have been made in the first place.

The makers of Raa Raa seem to have decided to re-use a familiar plot. To be fair, it may have been a new idea during its inception, but with the delay in production, the core plot bears a lot of similarities with Taapsee-starrer Anando Brahma. And, they've mixed that up with vulgar and double entendre dialogues which come out of the mouth of veterans like Srikanth and Raghu Babu. The latter tries to keep it going throughout the film, too.

The poorly etched characters slacken the film’s pace and the melodramatic narrative uses regular cinematic cliches like a romantic song, a jump scare and a buffoonery scene. When you are watching a horror film, it’s not the story the viewer looks forward to, but the proceedings. The saddest part is almost every filmmaker ends up charting a similar storyline unless it’s something really fascinating like Prema Katha Chitram, the genre-bender.

Raa Raa runs you over and makes you feel restless without doing anything exciting. Overall, it’s an incredibly awry story that fails to engage its viewers on any level.