Taarzan the Wonder Car

Some descriptions practically beg a person who likes bad movies to watch the movie involved. Such is the case with Taarzan the Wonder Car, a film about a car designer who is murdered and comes back as a vengeful car.

Taarzan is like a psychotic Herbie the Love Bug gone completely off his medications. But don't let the movie fool you into thinking it's a bizarre automotive remake of Death Wish. In between car-delivered-justice sequences, large sections of the movie are devoted to light-hearted romantic comedy.

Raj (Vatsal Seth-who looks sort of like an Indian version of Crispin Glover at first) is the school nerd, but he falls hard for Priya (Ayesha Takia), the beautiful new girl in school. This portion of the film plays out like an wacky romantic teen comedy Patrick Dempsey might have made if he had worked in Bollywood. Raj misses his father a lot, and after finding his dad's old scrapped car, he embarks on a project to rebuild it.

Despairing of ever getting all the parts necessary to make the car work, Raj prays for a working water pump. But what he gets is his angry dad's vengeful spirit possessing the newly rebuilt car—Taarzan. And Taarzan the Wonder Car is determined to deal with anyone who messes with his family, and to kill the bastards who murdered him.

The movie's lighthearted tone gets thrown off a bit when the Taarzan the Wonder Car begins sneaking out alone to perform vigilante work. He attacks people, rams a man's car into a train and blows him up, harasses and stalks his enemies' wives when they're alone at night. One of my favorite scenes Tarzan hides inside a thatched hut, and then pursues his target down the road—still wearing the hut. And then he jumps on the guy's car, still wearing the hut. This is probably not the weirdest thing that happens. There is a lot of inspired auto-vengeance and much of it is completely unbelieveable, and thus highly entertaining.

The movie is strangely similar to a Herbie movie—if Herbie were murdering people. Sometimes Taarzan will stop his murderous pursuit to save a busload of children, make a smiling face of sorts, and then go back to chasing down his prey and kill them. And as he pursuses his victim there is always a tiny plastic Tarzan figure dangling from his review mirror, gently swinging in what I assume was supposed to be a menancing fashion. Or was it a friendly fashion? Either way, it had me laughing.

This probably makes the movie sound better than it is; there are some problems that make it hard to recommend. First, it's really long. The parts without Taarzan the Car doing amazingly stupid things range from mildly entertaining to downright boring. There are a couple of Bollywood musical numbers, and while they're not horrible they're not that good, and they don't do anything crazy like include a dancing car. C'mon Bollywood, you could have managed it.

Taarzan the Wonder car is a curio; an after-school-special kind of movie with a homicidal vigilante car. While it's not a particularly good movie, it does have some hilarious scenes. Whether it's worth sitting through the whole movie for them is up to you.