Retrospective: International Guerrillas (1990)

[Shane Burridge]

International Guerrillas (1990) 167m.

 

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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