CAST: Aditya Seal, Nikita Dutta, Jason Tham, Sahaj Singh Chahal, Mokshda Jailkhani, Tejas Varma, Aadvik Mongia, Jayshree Gogoi, Dipali Borkar, Siddhant Sharma

DIRECTOR: Bosco Leslie Martis

Mild Spoiler Alert Below, Brief Mentions of Graphic Themes

There is a moment, somewhere between “halfway” and “omg we’re not even halfway?!” into this unnecessarily long movie, where a ghost who has no resolution to his storyline spontaneously combusts as he dissolves into Heaven…or Hell (who can tell because flames).

Spontaneous combustion into the afterlife is something I would have preferred over watching this movie.

An excruciatingly long, poorly written, significantly humorless, and surprisingly dark disaster of a film, Bosco Leslie Martis’ directorial debut Rocket Gang is a confusing and cringey jaunt through the supernatural that is neither super nor natural in any way whatsoever.

The film follows five 20-somethings who, so distracted by their vanity and incessant need for selfies, almost plow into a 1970’s-era VW hippie van and instead veer the thing off a cliff. With five children inside it. As a rather large plot point that would have made me less likely to say aloud “wait what is happening” at the television every other scene, we don’t find this out until at least forty-five minutes later in an unclever attempt at a plot twist. Instead, the film gracelessly runs through character introductions for at least fifteen minutes before the opening credits even run. A gratuitous and irritating total run time of two hours and eleven minutes can be credited to the obnoxious use of slow motion about every five seconds. Half of it should have been on the cutting room floor. Most of it. All of it. How did this get greenlit??

The children these terrible 20-somethings literally kill belong to the titular dance group “Rocket Gang.” Their dance group namesake is revealed in a horrifying semi-flashback scene wherein the children are revealed to have been molested by their schoolteacher in a game everyone in this bizarre filmic world seems to be familiar with entitled “good touch/bad touch,” thereafter taking revenge by shooting a rocket into his ass.

This is somehow not the most problematic thing in this ridiculous film.

Anyway. These now-dead-ghost-children lure the Terrible 20-Somethings to a remote resort called “Wonder Villa,” which has much less screen time than every summary you will find on the internet implies. Some ghostly shenanigans that are not at all explained occur after a ridiculous summons circle with the world’s largest Ouija Board, fat jokes abound, and the performances of these actors are so bad I wished I was the ghost in this scenario.

Advertised as “family entertainment,” nothing about this was family-friendly or entertaining. I don’t know what was worse: the acting, the plot, the script, the nauseating cinematography, or watching five children fly off a cliff in a van screaming for their mothers as they died.

Probably that last one.

The only–and I mean ONLY–credit I will give to this film was the kids. Tejas Varma, Aadvik Mongia, Jayshree Gogoi, Dipali Borkar, and Siddhant Sharma are phenomenal dancers. The level of talent and pure skill these kids had was the only light at the end of a dark and quite frankly disturbing tunnel. I look forward to seeing their future careers. I also look forward to never seeing this movie again.

If I could give a film negative five stars, I would. Hard pass for Rocket Gang.