Despite India’s status as a centre of global film production, with a long history of producing low-budget horror, science fiction, and fantasy cinema – genres that other national industries such as Japan and Hong Kong have successfully exported around the world – it is notable that these Indian genre films have, until recently, rarely crossed over to fans in the West. Indeed, for Canadian film critic and programmer Kier-La Janisse, the significance of Miss Lovely for non-diasporic audiences is that “it taps into all the licentious elements that would attract a western exploitation film audience while presenting a history we know virtually nothing about.” This statement is rather telling. While Miss Lovely is aesthetically closer to an elliptical art film than the exploitation features it takes as its subject, the film has nonetheless drawn attention to a rich history of Indian genre cinema that has rarely been addressed by academics or fans in the West. Modelled on real-life trash filmmakers such as Kanti Shah, Mohan Bhakri and Vinod Talwar, the Duggal Bros make low-budget genre films that are designed to play on a circuit of fleapit cinemas outside of the metropolitan centres. Set in Mumbai’s cinematic underbelly of horror and exploitation movies, the film follows two brothers Vicky and Sonu Duggal who produce C-grade sex horror pictures evocative of genuine titles from the period such as Kabrastan / The Graveyard (1988) and Khooni Panja / The Bloody Claw (1991). On, Ashim Ahluwalia’s film Miss Lovely competed in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival.
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