Retrospective: International Guerrillas (1990)

[Shane Burridge]

International Guerrillas (1990)

The only way you'll see this all-singing, all-action, all-rabid Pakistani 
absurdity is through grey market video, which is just as well 
because the idea of sitting through it for nearly three hours in a 
cinema is unthinkable. When UK author Salman Rushdie published 
his novel 'The Satanic Verses' in 1988, the Ayatollah of Iran took 
offense at its depiction of Mohammed and issued an open bounty on 
Rushdie's head, forcing the author into seclusion. After a failed 
assassination attempt by a lone extremist the following year, 
enterprising Pakistani film producers figured they could give the public 
what they wanted, and make a bit of cash on the side, by fictionalizing 
an account of Rushdie's pursuit, capture and execution. It seemed, as 
in the case of much Pakistani cinema, or 'Lollywood' movies, that 
INTERNATIONAL GUERRILLAS was unlikely to ever be seen by western 
audiences, but the inclusion of Rushdie as a character gave it a leg-up 
into the bootleg market, and to the embarrassment of Pakistan's film 
culture, found an audience of schlock aficionados.

You'd have to be a diehard aficionado to tackle GUERRILLAS in one 
sitting: it takes nearly an hour before the opening credits appear to 
announce the central characters as the guerrillas of the title. By this 
time they've already had practice beating up a few bad guys (though 
everybody would be easier to tell apart if they didn't all have the same 
mustache) and ready to do battle armed only with their list of Salman 
Rushdie insults, three Batman disguises, and a direct line to Mohammed 
for divine intervention; to wit, a flying Koran that fires lightning bolts. 
The next hour and a half is a shambles of various chases and shootouts 
until the inevitable showdown with Rushdie on his private island fortress. 
This finale contains a Pythonesque singalong which, even with half of 
the cast chained to crosses, doesn't seem any less absurd than the five 
previous musical numbers performed by sexily-gyrating young girls 
(I'm sure The Prophet would have approved) who insistently sing about 
how attractive they are. It should be conceded that the two heroines in 
the film are easy on the eye but with names like 'Dolly' and 'Shagutta', 
they sound like they would have been better off in a Pakistani Austin 
Powers movie.

As in India's 'masala' films, GUERRILLAS pulls out all the stops to create 
a mixture of adventure, romance, comedy, espionage, musical 
interludes, and Rushdie being blown up. The end result looks like it was 
edited on steroids - EVERY character gets a reaction shot or a smash 
zoom whenever anything happens, and you'll lose count of how many 
times the director includes a close-up of someone's feet landing on the 
ground. You'll laugh at how awful the film is at first, but find it difficult to 
keep it up before halfway through. Stick with it though - by the final act, 
the film has gone so far over the top that it is parodying itself, and among 
the histrionic emoting you'll get such choice lines as "We'll mutilate your 
evil face so bad that even Satan won't recognize you!". 20th-century 
architecture may have argued that less is more, but GUERRILLAS decisively 
demonstrates that more is less. Characters deliver jingoistic diatribes at 
every opportunity and the frustratingly dramatic background music never 
stops. Rushdie himself is portrayed as a James Bond supervillain whose 
glasses are always poised on the bridge of his nose to better facilitate evil 
leering, all of which must have been much to the bemusement of the real 
Rushdie, who in any other film would been disturbed to see himself 
assassinated in effigy. Instead, he found GUERRILLAS so far removed from 
reality that he couldn't see any harm in allowing it to be screened in the UK. 
It would be unfair to assume all Pakistani films are as bad as this one, but if 
this is the sort of thing that's expected to garner big box-office receipts in 
their cinemas then it doesn't provide an incentive to seek out others.

sburridge at hotmail.com 

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