Directed by the late Sangeeth Sivan, the story revolves around a group of friends—played by Shreyas Talpade, Dinker Sharma, Dherendra Kumar Tiwari, and Sonia Rathee—who begin playing a dangerous game with an ouija board, unknowingly summoning the spirit of Anamika. Word spreads fast, and soon there’s a long queue of people eager to get answers from the spirit—ranging from revelations about someone’s father’s real identity to solving petty domestic mysteries like stolen jewellery.

But things soon spiral out of control. How the group handles the chaos that follows forms the rest of the plot.

Kapkapiii, a remake of the 2023 Malayalam film Romancham, starts off as harmless fun. We’ve seen enough buddy comedies to know the tropes—a token drunk, a scaredy-cat—and they’re all present here. The problem is that Kapkapiii thinks it’s funnier than it actually is. Written by Kumar Priyadarshi and Saurabh Anand, the story gets increasingly convoluted. A tenant who fancies one of the guys is thrown in. Then comes a gangster, played by Dibyendu Bhattacharya. After the intermission, Tusshar Kapoor joins the gang, and from that point, it’s hard to track where the film is even headed. We get “chadar mod” and “len ke bode” in the name of jokes. Eventually, you stop laughing—and even stop feeling scared. You just sit there like a zombie—expressionless.

Shreyas Talpade is the anchor of this sinking ship. He’s the only one who truly understands the comic timing the genre demands, but with limited material, there’s only so much he can do. Tusshar Kapoor’s character is confusing—you’re never sure why he’s even in the film. Every actor tries, which is both reassuring and a little sad. Reassuring because at least there’s effort. Sad because, despite that, you’re bored.

The jump scares are minimal, and that’s about all you get.

The music by Ajay Jayanthi is a miss.

In the end, Kapkapiii is a classic case of wasted potential—a film that wants to be a quirky horror-comedy but ends up being neither spooky nor funny. It leans too heavily on tired tropes, underdeveloped subplots, and a scattered screenplay.

One may be the loneliest number, but No. 2 is what sent Shaquille O’Neal urgently mincing off the “Inside the NBA” stage last month while the cameras kept running.

O’Neal copped to the truth Thursday night during his 18th appearance on “The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon,” giving what might be more detail than anyone needed about that sudden departure in April.

First, he clung to the fib, saying, “I was drinking a lot of water that day. So I know I had the No. 2 run, but it was really a No. 1. So let’s just get that out of the way.”

He explained he was drinking olive oil at the time “to be sexy,” because he’d seen on Instagram that if he drank olive oil daily for 14 days, he would clean out his system and have a flat stomach. “So I was trying that.”

A laughing Fallon held his face in his hands.

“You know what,” O’Neal said. “I just made a mistake. I lied to you on national TV. It wasn’t a No. 1 run. It was a No. 2 run. I had to go bad. Oh, I had to go so bad.”

Fallon begged him to keep telling the lie. O’Neal asked whether the host had seen him squeezing his butt cheeks as he scooted away from the “Inside the NBA” desk.

Then Fallon showed a photo of what the crew did to O’Neal the next day: It put a blue porta-potty in studio on his side of the table.

Blessedly, the conversation then moved in a different direction.

Things were a bit more serious but no less amusing back in April when O’Neal got up while a co-host was in the middle of talking and — in a big hurry — walked awkwardly in front of his fellow panelists and out the stage door. Ernie Johnson Jr., Kenny Smith and Charles Barkley weren’t sure what was going on.

“You all right, big fella?” Barkley asked with a look of concern on his face.

As the camera (cruelly) followed him, O’Neal blurted to his co-hosts to “go ahead, keep talking” while one reminded him, “Hey, we’re on TV.”

“It’s that olive oil you’ve been drinking,” Barkley said. “Hey, take some matches with you.”

As the remaining hosts broke into giggles, Kenny Smith said, “After 40, you can’t hold it no more.”

“That wasn’t something planned, was it?” Ernie Johnson Jr. wondered.

Smith also noted that O’Neal had been drinking olive oil to clean out his system, saying, “Oh, he’s cleaning out his gut all right!”

“I did not like his gait as he left!” Johnson said.

And Barkley simply couldn’t move past the idea of the smell.

“Please turn his mic off, that’s all,” Smith quipped. Then, as Smith tried to return to talking about L.A. Clippers forward Kawhai Leonard, the team in TNT’s Studio J came through with the instant replay of Shaq bailing out. Instant. Freaking. Replay.

IN SLO-MO.

The three very professional analysts immediately began very professional analysis of O’Neal’s shambolic gait.

The big man returned fairly soon after that, mumbling something about drinking too much water and about Barkley talking way too long when he really needed to cut to a break.

“Sorry about that, America,” he said.

Seriously Shaq, you have absolutely no reason to apologize. As long as you remember the matches.

LOS ANGELES, May 23 (UPI) — Dogma, returning to theaters June 5, comes from a decade where indie writer/directors were celebrated for the words in their screenplays. Kevin Smith was one of the major voices that emerged in the era of Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater and Sofia Coppola.

In his first film, Clerks, Smith had his convenience store clerks express all of his thoughts about Star Wars, retail and relationships. Dogma, his fourth film, was the work of a writer who grew up Catholic and had thoughts about faith.

Exiled angels Bartleby (Ben Affleck) and Loki (Matt Damon) find a way to get back into heaven. As part of a Catholicism outreach campaign, New Jersey Cardinal Glick (George Carlin) promises forgiveness to anyone who passes through his church’s arch.

If the angels gain forgiveness, then take human form and die, God will have no choice but to allow them back into heaven. What they don’t realize is that invalidating God’s decree will cause the end of all existence.

So God’s Metatron (Alan Rickman) visits Planned Parenthood employee Bethany (Linda Fiorentino) and gives her the task of preventing Loki and Bartleby from entering the church. Smith regulars Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith) are sent as prophets to help Bethany in her quest.

This is a story that adapts Catholic scripture into a modern apocalyptic story, but it is really a vehicle for characters to talk about religion, the way characters in other Smith movies talk about movies and comic books.

That dialogue is performed emphatically, and more subtly it’s well edited by Smith and producer Scott Mosier. Smith’s biblical figures would use the F word while making their profound points, but maybe they learned it from millennia of humans, or at the Tower of Babel.

The film’s messages challenge some of the oldest doctrines of Catholicism. No one has to base their values on a movie, but as an artistic exploration of this thesis, all of Smith’s questions are backed up by a creative interpretation of the scripture.

The message is ultimately that God doesn’t care which religion you follow as long as you believe. That would offend organized religion, but the film unabashedly believes in God.

Jesus’ unsung 13th apostle Rufus (Chris Rock) tells Bethany that God wants people to think for themselves. As bold a take on religion as that might be, it is ultimately optimistic.

Bethany is a character seeking to regain her faith. She remembers the feelings that church gave her as a child.

Yet she no longer feels that as an adult, which is understandable with painful life experience. But she’s open to restoring her faith and this adventure gives her a reason.

Of course, Smith has a mischievous spark. Loki likes to talk nuns out of their faith when he’s literally an Angel with knowledge of God herself (Alanis Morissette).

Smith speculates on eras of Jesus’ life that were not in the Bible as characters speak of their time with him. Those extrapolations show empathy towards the burden of being the son of God for a teenager.

They’re also not meant to be canonical. Smith’s point is to get viewers thinking as they laugh, not launch a religion himself.

Exposure to biblical figures certainly does not make Jay any more wholesome, but his ability to keep making vulgar sexual innuendo amid crises of faith of apocalyptic proportions is impressive.

There is a little bit of gay panic when Bethany mistakes Bartleby and Loki for lovers, and Rufus exposes Jay’s secret desires for men. Characters also use the R-word, because 1999 was unfortunately before many people learned it was a slur, but Smith has addressed both of those issues in subsequent work.

The complicated release history of Dogma, passing between several studios, has made it difficult to see since its Blu-ray release. Now out of print and not streaming anywhere, the re-release is a welcome return of one of Smith’s seminal works.

Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.