High spirits: "Stree 2"

2018's original Stree had the advantage of stealth. A spry two-hour horror-comedy, launched into a moment when the Indian mainstream was thumping out far burlier, heavier (would-be) entertainments, it found emergent young talent (the irreverent screenwriting duo known as Raj & DK, director Amar Kaushik) enlivening what might have seemed a careworn horror premise (village haunted by vengeful wraith) with progressive thinking (the wraith was another victim of the patriarchy), funny situations and agreeably goofy playing. Few analysts saw it coming, and yet - like one of those Blumhouse titles pitched as crowdpleasing counterprogramming in the pell-mell of awards season - it proved a major domestic hit at a time the industry was crying out for them. Stree 2, perhaps inevitably, turns out to be twenty minutes longer, logistically bigger (hundreds of extras for the opening song-recap, widespread supernatural activity, no less than four post-credit scenes in the MCU style) and starrier with it, two notable cameos confirming a general sense the sleeper proposition of old has become a runaway gravy train even A-listers are newly keen to board. Though Raj & DK have moved on, doubtless busy trying to drum up new ideas for their roughly 407 streaming series - Niren Bhatt assumes scripting responsibilities - both Kaushik and the core cast have been retained, as has a faith in old-school story and character that steadies Stree 2 whenever it threatens to succumb to full-on sequel bloat. For the village that plays host to still-virginal tailor Vicky (Rajkummar Rao, ever-game as these films' equivalent of slasher cinema's fabled "final girl") is now being stalked by a new threat: a fast-rolling furball that reveals itself as a severed head disappearing the local womenfolk. Once again, these mysterious events are rooted in past injustice that has to be righted in the present-day; once more, our hero is almost too busy mooning over his unnamed spectral sweetheart (an appropriately ghostly Shraddha Kapoor, drifting on and off set from adjacent shoots) to achieve that. This is very much one of those sequels that does the same thing again, winding up on the exact side road the first Stree did; it just takes slightly longer to get there, is all.

In the meantime, what becomes apparent is that this is going to be a shits-and-giggles franchise (or "kicks-and-giggles", as one character chastely rewords the phrase), specifically targeted at a brain-in-first-gear Friday and Saturday night crowd. (I caught it on the Sunday of a Bank Holiday weekend, which just about counts.) Stree 2 undeniably gives good spook. Though the mythology this time is vastly more torturous (some of the extra space gets filled with exposition), the severed head is a genuinely unnerving effect, dispatched by its headless master like Oz's flying monkeys to nip at quarries' behinds and/or drag them away, using suddenly sprouting tendrils, to an uncertain fate. It's pure coincidence that the film should have opened in a month of especially heinous real-world crimes against Indian women, but the monster here gains in resonance for seemingly doubling for any nogoodnik trying to exert control over the female form, be they Tate, Trump or Taliban. The gags are more mixed this time, though: second-string situations that really need the pep provided by Rao and his ragtag brothers-in-arms (Pankaj Tripathi, Aparshakti Khurana, Abhishek Banerjee), set to shouting at or talking over one another at high speed. (This is a louder film than its predecessor, which isn't really an endorsement.) One extended mix-up involving a character called Chitti and the Hindi word for letter (chiththee) has comic roots that extend, like the severed head's tendrils, back in the direction of the "Who's on first?" routine; I saw something of those much-rented Eighties texts Vamp, The Monster Squad and Beetlejuice in the first Stree, but Stree 2 reminded me this yammering kind of comedy-horror actually dates back almost a century, to The Old Dark House and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Whatever novelty the first film possessed has been trampled well underfoot, then, but Stree 2 remains broadly amusing and, no matter how boysy and noisy it threatens to become, treats its women with respect, which is heartening in the context of latter-day Hindi cinema. In its more inspired sequences (some business with a ceremonial elephant costume, and non-buff Rao's efforts to pull a sword from a stone amid the closing stretch), it even begins to approach the leftfield charms of those Malayalam crowdpleasers that set the box office alight earlier this year. Story plus stars plus savvy: it's not a radical nor complicated formula, but it's surprising how many of our mass entertainments - and how many of our bigger mass entertainments - seem to have forgotten all about it of late.

Stree 2 is currently playing in selected cinemas.