Two teenage girls, Ria (Subholina Sen) and Payel (Ananya Biswas), meet up with Pele (Soumendra Bhattacharya) and his brother Babai (Ranodeep Bose) for a night on the town, after which they plan to find a hotel for some casual sex. This being India, however, where sex before marriage is a big no-no, they are unable to find anyone willing to rent them a room, so the horny foursome hide in a shopping mall until after hours instead. Once the lights all go off, the teens find themselves face to face with a weird elderly couple who entice them into playing an ancient, evil version of the popular board game Ludo that feeds on blood.
Not being well versed in Indian horror flicks, I am unsure as to whether a shopping mall is a popular setting for such movies, but it's the second in a row for me, my previous Indian horror experience being the absolutely lousy Darr @ The Mall (2015). Ludo isn't any better. Darr's highlight was an energetic song and dance routine (which says a lot about the rest of the film); Ludo's strongest point is its occasionally rather nasty gore, which includes eyeball gouging, gut ripping and tongue tearing. But both films suffer from a plot that makes very little sense.
Ludo's 'Hellraiser meets Jumanji' evil board game is a neat idea that offers plenty of scope for scary moments, but co-directors Qaushiq Mukherjee and Nikon fail to make the most of their concept, instead offering up lots of random creepy imagery without much of a coherent story-line; when the narrative is so confusing, it's hard to engage the viewer, and even harder to scare them silly. Worse yet, the second half of the film changes tack completely, forgetting about the teenagers to focus on the backstory of the game and its original victims, resulting in a horribly disjointed mess of a film that makes for a very frustrating experience.
