Guaranteed a laugh, or money back! Watch it

Washington: Watch it. If you like it, you pay for it. If you don`t, you get your money back! That`s the offer made by an India-born doctor, who also dabbles in film making, for his third movie released on DVD.

"It`s no gimmick," says 43-year-old Ravi Godse, a top internal medicine specialist in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, about his film, `Help Me Help You`, a low budget comedy that raises the question whether people should help those who don`t wish to be helped. After a doctor is told he has only six months to live, he sets out to try to improve the life of six of his friends. But he ends up creating more trouble for them. "The more they hurt, the more he wants to help. Then it turns out he is not dying and the friends are out to get him," Godse or Dr Ravi, as he likes to be called, told reporters. "I have personally never looked at money-back guarantee as a stunt," Godse said. "With me, it is honest and genuine." The film received "excellent response" during a theatrical release in Pittsburgh. DVDs of the film are getting sold across multiple outlets. Online response is equally brisk on www.HelpMeHelpYouMovie.com, he said. "So far, there were only a few requests for money-back, I would say two percent," Ravi said. "They were refunded promptly. One of them thought that the script was weak. Another said that the effort was good, but he would still like the money back." "The response overall is gratifying. This is a very different brand of humour. It is not high-brow and intellectual," said Godse, who earlier stuck to local talent for his Pittsburgh-based films. This time he hired widely known TV and movie stars - Steve Guttenberg (`Diner`, `Cocoon`), Richard Kind (`Spin City`, `Curb Your Enthusiasm`), comedian and Disney sitcom star and director Rondell Sheridan, and Sabrina Bryan, a former daytime soap star and member of `The Cheetah Girls`. Yet Godse managed to keep the cost down to $200,000 by finishing the shoot in a mere 10 days. Additionally, the cast and crew too "gave me a break and charged most of their fees as part of ownership in the movie because they believed in the script". "So it was win-win," he said. "They say that amongst the three variables of cost, speed and quality, you can have any two but not all three. I wanted to prove them wrong." Godse, who began making movies in 2004, has made three films so far and four more are in the works, including `Thursday the 12`, a political satire about life after death and `2 guys 3 girls and a mad professor`, an Indian movie based on his own novel. He is also working on a historic epic where Mahatma Gandhi gets turned into Israel`s founder David Ben-Gurion and vice versa with hilarious results. IANS