Hisss (2010)

Once the movie has ended (if you have managed to actually watch it till it ends) the only thing anybody would say is: “what the hell was that?!”

Perhaps the fact that Hisss has an international female director created high expectations from the movie. Also, we were excited to see Mallika back on Bollywood screens after her surprising success in Hollywood. Finally, if you have a beautiful woman shedding clothes after every few seconds, quite a lot of people are bound to be looking forward to watching the movie out of curiosity.

Therefore it’s no surprise that the movie actually generated 6 crores on its opening weekend at the box office. But one thing has been reinstated by these results: Box office reports are rubbish. Hisss has proven to be a walking talking disaster, and anyone who has been brave enough to watch it till the very end needs to be given a medal of honour.

The plot itself isn’t so silly, therefore we won’t be so hard on the script writer. However, the director and the script writer are both the same. We are still trying to figure out what Jennifer Chambers Lynch was thinking.

The story revolves around a snake, who turns into a woman after her lover is captured in the jungle. She infiltrates the city to find the American, George States, who had kidnapped her mate. This man himself has brain cancer, and believes old myths which say that the nagin (Mallika Sherawat) has powerful venom which can help cure his disease.

In an attempt to lure her into his web, he kidnaps her mate from the jungle itself. What unfolds in the movie is how she follows him into the city, to find her love, and to seek vengeance.

Doesn’t sound so bad right? In fact, it sounds quite interesting; It actually sounds like a tragic love story. But don’t be fooled, the movie instead is an unnecessarily gruesome horror/thriller flick. Don’t watch it while eating food.

Hisss is filled with unnecessary rape scenes and bloodshed. Without exaggeration, there is blood in every scene, whether it has anything to do with the nagin or not. Everybody seems to be bleeding all the time!
Then there is lack of acting skills displayed by the prominent characters in the story. The American, (Jeff Doucette) is a monster in the movie. He is torturing and slaughtering everyone and everything that comes his way. Unfortunately, he can’t act.  We don’t think he has cancer in the movie, he looks like a psychologically handicapped person.

Plus he seems to enter a Star Plus land, where he is thinking to himself in his broken down Urdu (it’s weird that even when is thinking in his mind, he is thinking in Urdu even though he can barely speak the language properly. But during the movie, he is screaming and hurling abusive words in English to his servants.) We understand that maybe it was to capture the Indian audience that doesn’t understand English. But then, why put English sentences at all? It all seemed highly unrealistic
Plus Irfan Khan looked like he kept forgetting his dialogues. The man is a brilliant actor, and has done some amazing performances such as the one in Slumdog Millionaire, and The Namesake. Then why can’t he act as an Indian police officer, which is the most clichéd role in all of Bollywood?

Finally, the star of the show: Ms Mallika herself. She has done nothing in the movie, except not wear clothes and look possessed. We aren’t kidding; the nudity has been turned up a notch. Okay, so she is a snake who doesn’t know anything about human rituals, but then the nudity could have been tastefully done.  Instead, there are scenes where you are taken by surprise and are almost embarrassed to look back at the screen.

The movie has been edited poorly. They have tried to run two, three stories simultaneously to build up the plot, but all they managed to build up was confusion. First 30 minutes, and you aren’t sure which story to follow. Finally everything links up in the end in the most unrealistic and impossible way.

The movie will definitely have people laughing at the blatant absurdity of everything! There is nothing in the script or the acting that was normal. We are surprised that there is so much money in Bollywood to be wasted away like this.

Another thought that crossed our minds was that maybe this is a parody; maybe this isn’t the real thing. How could the directors overlook how silly everything was? Maybe that’s why the director has actually disowned the movie. When in the history of film-making has a director disowned his own movie?

Jennifer claims that the movie looks like a horror movie instead of the epic love story she wanted to make.
Apparently, the producer is to be blamed for this. The ‘original’ movie that was shot by Jennifer herself was much different from what the producer, Govind Menon, made it look like in the end.

Even though the movie has already received some extremely harsh criticism from critics, Hisss is being considered a hit. Mallika Sherawat claims that the ‘younger generation’ has appreciated her, and it doesn’t matter what the critics say. Sorry Mallika, but that isn’t true. Some of the critics and media people are from the younger generation too, and even they think the movie was rubbish.

We wouldn’t recommend anyone to watch this. The only thing you’ll get is a bunch of nightmares – Manal Faheem Khan

Rating:- 1 out of 5

Cast and Production Credits

Year – 2010, Genre – Horror / Thriller, Country – India, Language – Hindi, Producer – Vikram Singh, Govind Menon, William Sees Keenan Director – Jennifer Lynch, Music Director – Anu Malik, David Kushner, Panjabi MC, Alexander Von Bubenheim, Craig Nobles, Julian Lennon, Cast - Irrfan Khan, Mallika Sherawat, Divya Dutta, Jeff Douchette

Mallika Sherawat in Hisss (2010)

I have to confess to a pet phobia. I’m petrified of snakes. I’d never keep a cobra for a pet. But I can see Mallika Sherawat, stretched out on a settee, with a serpent coiled around her. It’s so Madam M!

Irrfan Khan, her co-star in the just-released Hissss, agreed with me: “She suits the role to the T. It’s not an Indian nagin, so she won’t have to sing and dance or speak either. But she’ll get to do all the other things that she is famous for,” he commented, tongue-firmly-in-cheek.

Among the things Mallika’s famous for are her lip-locks. If memory serves me right, there were 17 of them alone, in Khwahish that launched her in the lead. This was followed by Kis Kis Ki Kismet that had three kisses in the title itself. And then there was Bheege hoth tere…’ in Murder, which had her smooching Emraan Hashmi on a parapet in a high-rise in Bangkok. The riot police almost got them.

Surprising statistics from someone, who six years ago, had confessed to me that her first kiss had scarred her for life. “The smell of raw onions was nauseating. I’ll have to find myself a vegetarian, a no-onion, no-garlic, non-smoking dude. Bad breath of a guy is frightening,” she had shuddered in distaste.

I knew that Khan smoked and his diet definitely included onions, garlic and all things non-vegan. So, how did she agree to kiss him, I’d wondered when quizzing him on his modern-day nagin adventure? “Mallika doesn’t kiss me, if she did I’d die,” he had deadpanned, pointing out that he was not one of her victims in the film but her saviour. And that saved him!

When I’d brought up the subject of poison kisses with Mallika she had laughed, “Snakes don’t kiss, they swallow, didn’t you know that?” No, I didn’t. But then, Mallika knows so much more about reptilian hisssstory than I do. Her early memories are woven around the snake charmers who would pass through her village in Haryana.

Mine are woven around the Nagin films of Vyjanthimala, Reena Roy and Sridevi that I would shiver through with half-shut eyes. In fact, so deep-rooted was my fear of the slithering creatures that if they crawled into newspapers or even school books, family and friends were instructed to tear out pages to preempt a storm of hysterical sobs.

Mallika has no such frights sparked off by unanticipated sights. She was clicking pictures at Cannes earlier this year using a snake as an accessory. “I’m not afraid of them,” she says fearlessly. “They are pretty fascinating creatures… Limbless, venomous, cold-blooded predators who swallow their prey whole. As a kid I enjoyed watching Sridevi in Nagin. Tsui Hark’s Hong Kong film, Green Snake, with Maggie Cheung and Joey Wong playing twin snakes, was interesting in a campy way. But strangely, one of my inspirations for Hissss was An American Werewolf In London.”

For a good part of a year, Mallika has been in make-up for four hours everyday. She has worn a body suit that has prevented visits to the loo and left her dehydrated for days. She  had leeches crawling all over her and has braved freezing rain in the jungles of Kerala on some days. You’d think she’d hate snakes by now. But no, Madam M is open to the idea of a sequel to her first productions.

So, will the hisssstrioncs continue… – Roshmila Bhattacharya