We can liken Nepali films to a beautiful, multicoloured garden when it comes to Nepali cinema. It has flowers of every colour and shape, taken care of by enthusiastic gardeners, each with their preferences.
We’re trying to say that we have more filmmakers than we know what to do with. Not that this, in itself, is a bad thing. In fact, in an ideal environment, more creators are always a good thing. But in the case of Nepal, a good deal of these filmmakers do not know their way around a scene or a script.
We’re left with a few diamonds in the rough to cherish and enjoy. And besides that, we slowly learn to appreciate the beauty of even the worst films. So here are 10 Nepali movies that are so bad; they’re good!
Pari
The movie Pari is an early achievement in Nepali cinema and aims to be a fantastic fight-action movie. You probably know this film already, even if you don’t know it. It’s the movie that gave Nepali audiences this wonderful gem:
Yep! It’s a movie about a gang of teenage martial artists who go up against a real gang. On, and everyone in this film is a psychopath.
Carreng Gang
If Pari is about a gang of teenagers, Carreng Gang is an even more elaborate creation about a gang led by an actual, bonafide toddler. This movie has a very detailed story to tell, and you will keep on guessing until the very end.
Romance
Romance is that kind of movie where you never know what to expect in the next moment. The movie is about one-sided love, a failed marriage, blackmail, exploitation, and dancing. There’s so much that goes on in this film, and you never know what plot point will bounce back at you in the next scene!
Dhoom 4
Jaya Kishan Basnet has carved a unique niche in the Nepali cinema industry. He can often be found writing, directing, and starring in his creations, one where crude sexual jokes are aplenty and rhyming couplets often pass for good comedy.
Dhoom 4 is significantly worse in these regards. For one, he’s blatantly ripped off the very name of the film; then, he seems to have gone ahead and made four of them. In the fourth movie of the Nepali Dhoom series, Jaya Kishan’s character is married to four different women, and he spends a lot of time making sexist jokes about them.
Somewhere along the line, he teams up with a fighter lady on a mission to punish rapists. Somehow, the comedy film changes pace into a fully-fledged action film, and you’ll just be sitting there helpless and trying to make sense of it all.
The Famous
The Famous is a movie about a highly famous student. Given that the film fails to establish the reasons behind his fame, the script has to make it extra clear that he is famous. It does so by a genius tactic — this main character is also legally named Famous. That’s about all you need to know to decide if you want to enjoy this film!
Jyan Ko Bazi
Something tells us that the same team behind Carreng Gang created this movie. For one, one of the Kalu Baba pairs from Carreng Gang is in the film with mostly the same looks. For another, the evil gang lord toddler central to that film is also seen here, in a VERY similar role.
Once again, the kid has a weird haircut and a poncho as his main attire. Once again, the kid is a martial arts prodigy. The only difference is that the kid seems to be one of the good guys this time. Oh, and the kid knows how to fly. Just try and make sense of the scene marked below:
College Life
College Life is a highly engaging and entertaining flick that perfectly portrays the life of an average college student. In this movie, you can see a group of college besties do everything that college students can be expected to do. They go on trips, take selfies, engage in pointless banter, and wrestle at the beach in their boxers?
Outside of the above scene, College Life stays remarkably accurate to life. We would even go so far as to contend that without College Life, there would be no Loot!
Confuse
By now, you must be well familiar with the kind of black magic sorcery that some Nepali filmmakers are capable of doing with film scripts. This particular category of filmmakers in our country will take a standard film plot and make it utterly indecipherable in a tasteful way, with a panache.
Being familiar with this unique ability of Nepali filmmakers, though, one must be especially wary of a low-budget Nepali film that is titled Confuse. All things considered, though, this film holds up its storyline pretty well. We have a bone to pick with the hero’s introduction. Check the scene below:
Nai Nabhannu La 5
Kids these days are up to all kinds of stupid things, no different from time immemorial. The only difference is that kids from the olden days would eat dirt in private and just be done with it. These days, kids get the option to cry about their teenage break-ups on TikTok and never be able to delete that TikTok from the internet.
So, we do wonder if Nai Na Bhannu La 5 could have gone a little bit differently. Not only does this film pose two near-toddlers as Romeo and Juliet, but it also glorifies the idea of love to no end, leading to absurd scenes such as these.
Kanchhi Matyang Tyang
Kanchhi Matyang Tyang is yet another creation from the mind of Jaya Kishan Basnet, with more of his signature sexism and boomer jokes. Early in the film, he takes quite a bit of screentime, prepositioning a girl he just met for sex (“Paila byaa garam na, aafulai yaa chhoro janmauna hattar bhaisakyo!”). Later on, he finds a different girl to have a child with.
The movie somehow manages to end with a climactic action sequence by shoehorning an eccentric villain who likes to play the guitar in the forest. Let us know if any of that makes sense to you!
These are just some Nepali films we’ve found that are bad enough to be an enjoyable watch in their own right. Keep the list going on our Facebook comments section. You can even start a discussion on our Reddit community if you like!
