Betaal

Betaal was produced by Red Chilies Entertainment for Netflix, and is written and directed by Patrick Graham who was behind 2018’s Ghoul, which I really enjoyed. This one is… not as good, doing little to separate itself from other offerings in the genre, but we’ll get into that in a sec. Betaal tells the story of a squad of soldiers, or maybe mercenaries, who are tasked with clearing some pesky villagers from the path of a proposed bypass. There’s this tunnel, see – we’re told it’s a really well made tunnel – and this construction company would really like to use it for their highway, but it’s all sealed up. The villagers try to explain that inside the tunnel lives the curse of Betaal, a local evil spirit hellbent on world domination, and letting it out is probably not a stellar idea. Construction company don’t care tho, which brings us back to the rent-a-troops. They “clear” the villagers, open the tunnel, and unleash 90 minutes of generic zombie show upon the world.

Except they’re not zombies. They’re cursed dead dudes, or something. They are undead, balding British redcoats with lightbulbs for eyes. They shoot muskets, but otherwise behave exactly like zombies. The “curse” is transferred from the monsters to the humans through biting or scratching and to truly dispose of a body, you have to burn it. See, zombies, but we’re not saying the Z word here. It’s as if they couldn’t afford to license the zombie concept so instead decided to make knock-off zombos. Try New Zombos! They’re Not Zombies! The coolest thing about these zombos is that their leader can posses people. Adds an interesting element.

The soldiers spend most of the time holed up in an old military base and we go through a bunch of classic zombo scenes. There’s the discovering-the-people-we-thought-were-dead-aren’t-dead scene. You got, having-trouble-killing-a-friend/relative-even-though-they’re-clearly-a-snarling-demon scene. That scene has by far the best makeup. The half human version is excellent. Great teeth. There’s the selfish guy who dooms the group for personal gain. It’s all in there! At one point the main character delivers the line – “This is what you call a hard Brexit, motherfuckers” – which is so outrageous you kinda have to admire it. There should have been a scene where someone tries to explain Brexit to one of these reanimated colonials.

“A resurgence nationalist sentiment combined with some questionable campaigning prompted a majority of Britons to vote to leave the European Union leading to an incredibly complicated and drawn out negotiation between England and the EU which cost one prime minister a job and for a while centered around the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland.”

“Blarg?”

“I don’t know, man.”

The best part of this show is probably the cast. It’s more or less an ensemble and they’re all pretty solid, even the kid. Viineet Kumar, Suchitra Pillai, Siddharth Menon, and Jitendra Joshi are particularly good. Sadly, the show itself is not great. It’s not painful, I did watch the whole thing, but I would probably skip it unless you, like me, have an almost unlimited tolerance for mediocre action/horror and want to see how this part of Asia is handling the zombo genre. After finishing Betaal, I was browsing Netflix and noticed a zombie show called Reality Z set in Rio de Janeiro. Alright, Brazil! Let’s see what you’ve got.