Yoddha: Mohanlal, Jagathy, Puneeth Issar, Madhu, Urvashi. Dir: Sangeeth Shivan

In Nepal, a child has been chosen to be the next leader of a sect of Buddhist monks. However, he is kidnapped for sacrifice by an evil sect. Mohanlal goes to Kathmandu to meet his uncle, gets involved, becomes blind, fights the evil forces using martial arts based on the sense of sound, and finally rescues the kid and gets back his eyesight!

A wild story for Kerala audiences, the film flopped (if I remember correctly) despite cinematography by Santhosh Shivan, music by A. R. Rehman and good production values.

DVD: Released by Surya movies. Video is good and anamorphic. However the audio is pretty bad being mono panned to 5 channels. This leads to audio dropouts during dialogues, though the songs have pretty good sound quality.

Overall, decent disk for Mallu DVD standards.

Chandralekha: Mohanlal, Sreenivasan, Nedumudi Venu, Innocent, Sukanya, Pooja Batra. Dir: Priyadarshan

A Salman Khan - Preity Zinta - Rani Mukherjee movie that came out last year (I forget the name) was a bad remake of this. Basically, Mohanlal needs some cash in a hurry. Sukanya has an accident, and he takes her to the hospital, where people think him to be her husband. She is unable to speak and paralyzed when she comes out of the coma. Mohanlal, egged on by pal Sreenivasan, decides to play the role of her husband inorder to get the cash. The film then takes off in the style of older Priyadarshan-Mohanlal-Sreenivasan movies, with quality humour and very good songs.

DVD: Released by Surya movies. Video is good and anamorphic. Again, the audio is bad with mono panned to 5 channels. This leads to audio dropouts during dialogues, though the songs have pretty good sound quality. Extras include an audio only option for the songs, English subtitles, as well as cast and crew bios.

Pretty good disk for Mallu DVD standards.



Edited By chaver on Jan. 06 2002 at 06:03

do these films have english subtitles?

I rented and watched Yoddha a couple of weeks back, and don't really remember whether there were any subtitles. Chandralekha has subtitles, but they seems to have forgotten all the punctuation. Also, the subtitles disappear very fast, like the Ayngaran ones. I would post some screenshots but my DVD-ROM drive doesn't seem to read the disk.



Edited By chaver on Jan. 06 2002 at 06:05