Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again host a fundraiser for Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and providing them with happy homes.
Today’s theme: Sweetest Taboo
What happens when you take classic Indian devotional cinema, mix it with Shaw Brothers black-magic sorcery, and throw in top-tier mid-90s digital visual effects inspired by Terminator 2: Judgment Day? You get Ammoru—a wild, jaw-dropping Telugu mythological fantasy epic where a fierce Hindu Goddess descends to Earth in disguise to protect her most devout follower from an evil sorcerer, wicked in-laws and supernatural torture.
Before CGI took over global blockbusters, producer Shyam Prasad Reddy saw James Cameron’s T2 in 1991 and thought, “We need to do this with our ancient gods.” The result was a three-year production nightmare with over two-thirds of the budget burned on pioneering blue-screen matte work and computer graphics. A movie shot twice over until director Kodi Ramakrishna got the insane scale just right.
The story opens with a dark village legend: an epidemic plagues a town until a selfless young girl sacrifices herself to trap the Mother Goddess (Ammoru) in a local temple and protect the land forever. Fast forward to now: Bhavani (Soundarya) is a sweet, deeply pious young woman who becomes a deadly enemy when she exposes Ghorakh (Rami Reddy), a menacing sorcerer who buries young girls alive for black-magic power. Ghorakh’s vengeful family forces Bhavani into a nightmare marriage with his saintly doctor nephew, Surya (Suresh). And while her new husband is in America, Bhavani’s monstrous in-laws torture her endlessly, setting up a brutal gauntlet of scheme after scheme.
Enter the Goddess herself (Ramya Krishna). To protect her devotee, the Deity descends to Earth disguised as a precocious child servant named Papa (Baby Sunaina), who torments the abusive in-laws with slapstick supernatural vengeance. Shorakh gets out of jail and unleashes dark spirits, poison and lethal curses to destroy Bhavani’s family, making her send away her guardian. Now, Ghorakh goes for the throat by murdering an infant and attempting to disrobe Bhavani in the temple. But when Bhavani’s blood accidentally marks the Goddess’s forehead like a sacred bindi, the divine bargain is sealed. What follows is a full-blown divine-wrath finale, complete with giant-sized manifestations, glowing tridents, flying dark spirits, and sorcerers getting pulverized by holy vengeance.
Ammoru started a deluge of VFX-heavy devotional fantasy films across South India.
Between Soundarya’s heart-wrenching performance, Ramya Krishna’s majestic, fiery presence as the Goddess, and Rami Reddy dialing evil up to 666, this is everything.
In the book The Sweetest Taboo. this movie is mentioned by the world’s foremost expert in cinematic child life cessations, Erica Shultz: “A baby falls into a well and drowns, accompanied by a feral cat meowing and a doll banging symbols. It is brought back by the goddess Ammoru after the final bloody battle, who says she rescued the baby and has had her this whole time.”
You can watch this on YouTube.
