Black and white. Shower on. Curtains drawn. Bare back. Sinister music. Curtains part. Enter hand silhouette. Comes down rapidly. Victim down. Liquid trickles down drain. Match cut with eye close-up of dead.

Yes, the famous scene from Psycho. Just that in Sajid Khan’s latest “entertainer”, the bare back is not of Janet Leigh but Mahesh Manjrekar. There’s no knife but danda. In place of blood, it’s soap bubble. And there’s a line summing up the scene which goes: “Naaha tu raha tha, dhoya maine.”

That’s Alfred Hitchock turning in his grave. That’s you turning in yours. Your grave is air-conditioned with plush seating plus popcorn and cola. There are others sacrificing lives alongside you. And it’s an excruciatingly painful death. Death by cinema. Death for cinema. Death of cinema.

Year after year this smug know-it-all I-don’t-give-a-damn director has been throwing poop at you in the name of cinema. His films are repugnant, redundant and ridiculously banal. TV humour is smarter, SMS jokes funnier than his comedies. Milking star friends and sprinkling item songs, the films have collected enough crores for Sajid Khan to continue wreaking havoc on cinematic sensibilities.

The man’s remade Himmatwala this time. That nauseating 1983 film by K. Raghavendra Rao, best remembered for the matka song Tathaiyya tathaiyya hooooo and Sridevi’s colourful moves to the same. One of those badly-aged films that even YouTube would refuse to buffer for you.

And Sajid’s chosen not to update it. So, here’s a man trying to remake a 30-year-old film as if we are still in the 1980s, arguably the worst decade for Hindi cinema. No spoof, no parody. Just unmitigated obnoxiousness.

The plot and the characters –– and sometimes the dialogues –– are (almost) unchanged. There’s Ravi (Jeetendra then, Ajay Devgn now) trying to seek revenge on Sher Singh (Amjad Khan then, Mahesh Manjrekar now) and Mamaji (Kader Khan then, Paresh Rawal now) by teaming up with his lady love Rekha (Sridevi then, Tamannaah now), Sher Singh’s daughter. There’s the mother and the sister too and the esraj in the background, every time they appear.

There’s also a tiger, which loses and gains size in every shot and has a disclaimer “enhanced by CG” popping up like a cigarette warning. Let’s just say the soft toy tiger in Om Shanti Om was more “enhanced”.

Also changing their shapes and sizes in every shot are Ajay Devgn’s two eyes, thanks to the inconsistent digital removal of his eye bags. Definitely not Maa Sherawaali — Manmohan Desai tribute? — doing the patching up.

In the middle of all this awfulness, Paresh Rawal channelling Kader Khan keeps talking to the camera. From “Idhar aao” to “waapas jao”. Then, in a scene, he licks and bites Mahesh Manjrekar’s ears because they are tasty and even puts his hand into what are “not his pillows”. And then they put crabs inside each other’s pyjamas and jump around to Railgaadi railgaadi.

A hundred years of cinema we are celebrating, right?

And in case you are not sure what exactly you should be doing there sitting in the dark, you are also ordered when to laugh and when to applaud like a paid TV audience.

There’s suddenly a scene inside a truck where the hero rattles off lines against rape and for preserving the sanctity of women in our country. Within minutes not one but five skimpily-clad women are strutting their stuff in extreme close-up. The song’s called Dhokha dhokha. Apt.

Playing hopscotch between action and comedy, Devgn’s dismally out of form. The expressions are strictly stock and the feet hardly happy. A Rohit Shetty obviously knows how to use him better in similar avatars.

Tamannaah’s no Sridevi, of course, but has an arresting presence and does bring Tathaiyya tathaiyya and Taki taki alive in her own way. At other times she is given costumes that make her look straight out of Star Trek. The old one.

If you can go beyond his Shakespearean hair and moochh, you might just enjoy Paresh Rawal. But no one can do Kader Khan like Kader Khan.

Life’s too precious to spend two-and-a-half-hours over films like Himmatwala. Cinema’s too precious to pamper filmmakers like Sajid Khan. I didn’t sign up for this job for a Good Friday like this. But I take heart from the fact that maybe, just maybe, I could save some of you from the suffering.

And for the himmatwalas among you, hope you rest in peace. With or without a pillow.