A survival thriller centred around Kodaikanal’s Guna cave has set the cash registers ringing across Tamil Nadu. Just that Manjummel Boys is a Malayalam film even if a significant chunk of the movie slips into the Tamil zone. This celluloid spectacle with its hat-tips to Kamal Haasan’s Guna and the Kanmani anbodu song has struck an emotional chord with the audience on either side of the Palghat Gap.
While box-office chatter veers towards the biggest Malayalam hits in Chennai and the rest of Tamil Nadu, it is also time to take a leap back in time to the 1980s when the cinematic offerings from across the Western Ghats had a different connotation. Back then, the presumption was that Mollywood either dished out award-winning fare, movies that were telecast on Doordarshan during the Sunday afternoon slot, or films laced with erotic content.
The tedious or the smutty seemed to be the stereotype and even the rare mainstream hit like Karyam Nissaram featuring Prem Nazir and helmed by Balachandra Menon, which ran at Anand theatre, was lost within the avalanche of presumptions. It didn’t help that a few movie halls out to make a fast buck often spliced in soft-porn bits into the content on offer.
