100 Days (1991)

100 Days is a remake of the 1984 Indian Tamil-language mystery film Nooravathu Naal, which was also remade in 1986 as the Malayalam language movie Aayiram Kannukal.

Yet all of these movies at their heart are based on another film, the 1977 Lucio Fulci film Sette note in nero or as we know it in America, The Psychic.

Devi (Madhuri Dixit) is dealing with panic attacks and visions of accidents that have yet to occur, like her sister Rama (Moon Moon Sen) being murdered. She tries to work with her friends Sudha Mathur (Sabeeha) and Sunil (Javed Jaffrey) to deal with these portents, which come true when her sister is murdered and buried inside the wall of a mansion.

Five years later, Devi falls in love with millionaire Ram Kumar (Jackie Shroff). Sunil, who was secretly in love with her sister. They get married and move into his family mansion, the very same place that has her sister’s bones hidden inside, leading to Devi’s visions coming back. She finds the wall and tears it down, finding a skeleton with a similar necklace that she shared with Rama. Yet the cops, led by The Inspector (Shivaji Satam), refuse to believe her.

The visions don’t stop. Devi sees a murder, a magazine named Priya with a horse on its cover and a video cassette with the title 100 Days. She also starts looking into her sister’s life. It turns out that she was working on her thesis about the sculptures and temples of India, yet many of the things she had been studying have been stolen and replaced with forgeries, a crime that cost Jagmohan (Jai Kalgutkar) and Parvati (Neelam Mehra) their jobs. And now, the murders in her visions are of Parvati.

Parvati knew who killed Rama because he videotaped the murder, which he’s using for blackmail, which causes her to be killed by Jagmohan while carrying the evidence on tape, which is labeled 100 Days. She sees the cover of Priya with a horse on it and starts to see visions of herself hurt and staring into a broken mirror. And that’s when she tries to share the videotape, which she found hidden after the murder, with her husband.

On the tape, Rama is confronting Ram. Devi learns that the future father of her child — yes, she’s pregnant — comes from a family destroyed by gambling and he rebuilt their wealth through crime, working alongside Jagmohan and Parvati to smuggle the artifacts that Rama was studying. On the night that she confronted him, Jagmohan shot and killed her, framing Ram.

Near instantly, Jagmohan attacks Ram, stabbing him, and then brutalizes Devi before burying her in the same wall that once held her sister. Luckily, she has a watch that plays a song that her friend Sunil is able to hear. He fights Jagmohan while the police arrive and they save our heroine, who watches as her husband is arrested.

Directed by Partho Ghosh and written by Bhushan Banmali and Devjyoti Roy, this is a movie that makes me wonder. What would Fulci think? Would he be amused by the five musical numbers? And how wonderful is it that while Fulci once saw himself as someone who would be forgotten, his films have now been remade more than once in a country quite different than Italy.

You can watch this on YouTube.

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