Mayank Shekhar's Review: Hisss

By Hindustan Times
Director: Jennifer Lynch
Actors: Mallika Sherawat, Irrfan Khan
Rating: *
Mallika Sherawat, I guess most men will agree, is hot. Until she opens her mouth in her movies. She doesn't say a word in this film. Great!
She appears butt-naked pretty much throughout, makes love to a snake (her soul-mate); pushes her tongue almost down the serpent’s throat as the thick, slithering animal makes its way up her thigh. Hush. This is pornography for the hormonally demented teen. Or maybe this is erotica. The only difference between pornography and erotica is probably in the lighting of the room!
The skin-tight snake-suit makes Ms Sherawat Anaconda of the east. She gobbles men alive. Rightly. They’re all wife-Mallikabeaters and rapists anyway. A cop with the designation of detective as from the American force, Irrfan Khan, investigates these serial deaths.
The snake-woman’s main target is an old white gent who growls in Bob Christo’s Hindi: “Mein naag mani legi” (I’ll get the snake’s jewel). It seems he needs it to cure his cancer. He lives in a cave, shoots his servants dead, forces them to untangle two snakes while they’re having sex and captures the male one alive.
The separated female snake is the gorgeous “icchadhari nag" (serpent who changes form at will). She wants her lover back. Blame yourself first for films you fail to figure.
The mythology of the “icchadhari nag”, this film informs us, dates back to India’s history from 2300 BC. We know it from Bollywood alone (Nagin, Nigahen, Nagina). One of those movies under an assumed title ‘Pratigya’ plays on a screen within this screen. My personal all-time favourite from the genre has to be Jaani Dushman (2003). This one’s lame compared to that curio.
The snake is, I suppose, a strange Indian phallic symbol, worshipped among unmarried girls, pouring milk. Its female human form, a buxom woman in movies, bays for the male blood, while she can’t resist the sound of the ‘been’ (snake-charmer’s flute-like instrument). She begins to instantly dance for our pleasure. This stuff can warp many brains. It did Deepa Mehta's recently (Videsh). It’s evidently affected one Ms Jennifer Lynch, daughter of a well-known Hollywood name David Lynch (Mulholland Drive, Eraserhead, Blue Velvet). Well.
I walk out of the theatre and hear popcorn vendors, ushers go, "Hiss, hisss, hissss, hisssss…." Hilarious! Nag, punch me. Please.