Aranmanai 4 whips out quite literally every small cliché in the horror handbook. The checklist, which in retrospect would’ve made for a banger of a drinking game, includes a horror-induced comatose patient, a female ghost with tufts of long hair, small children, who were once part of a schmaltzy family, but now introduced to terror in a paranormal house, a forest where things come to die, mysterious smoke that can only be the conveyor of bad news, and of course cobras. Imagine all of this topped with a generous serving of jump scares and screeching music. Make no mistake, we all love a good campy horror comedy, which is a genre unto itself. But Aranmanai 4 simply presents the primary elements of this genre, without traces of any effort to meld the two.
It’s not that we aren’t used to seeing comedy tracks come in fresh after an overly sentimental scene. Or big laughs about something utterly frivolous (Yogi Babu and VTV Ganesh do the honours) right after we listen in on a big revelation about the scary ghost. But Aranmanai 4 does this with a frustrating sense of mediocrity. The jokes are unsurprisingly aimed at the lowest hanging fruit — either centred on a woman or conveniently mocking homoeroticism — to such an extent that even if it rarely lands (Kovai Sarala’s dalliances lighten the mood occasionally) it is still forgettable.