Saaptember: Naga Kanya

 Naga Kanya (2019) is also known as Neeya 2, and in theory it's a sequel to 1979's Neeya, which was itself the Tamil remake of Nagin, the 1976 superhit which started the snake movie trend in the first place.  It's really a sequel in name only, but it does represent a return to snake movie basics, featuring an angry snake woman tearing through everyone who stands in her way, and trading magic stones and snake lasers for a sizable body count.  

On the other hand, Naga Kanya has its own snake lore, explaining the new rules in an animated opening sequence.  In this movie, being a shapechanging snake is a curse, and the snakes are human by day, snake by night.  Snake couples still perform special dances on auspicious full moon nights, but it's not just about serpentine canoodling, it's about recovering a sacred chain to become fully human.

Once the rules are explained, we cut to Divya (Catherine Tresa).  Divya has a problem: she loves Sarva (Jai), but he just doesn't seem to like her, no matter what she tries.  Publicly confessing her love didn't work.  Introducing herself to everyone they meet as his girlfriend didn't work.  Threatening to burn hi face with acid didn't work.  It seems hopeless, so she tries asking strangers for advice in a Facebook livestream.  This does at least get Sarva's attention; he tries to explain what a bad idea that is, and further explains that he avoids romance due to a "naga dosham," an unfortunate conjunction of stars in his horoscope which has already claimed the life of one would be fiance.  He can't marry anyone unless they also have a naga dosham, but Divya cheerfully explains that she does indeed have a naga dosham in her horoscope.  That's good enough for Sarva, so he obligingly falls in love and they become engaged.

Meanwhile a mysterious woman named Malar (Raai Laxmi) is wandering the streets looking for a man named Vikram.  A couple of shifty looking men claim to know him, and Malar follows them to an abandoned building, but it's a trap.  She's surrounded by thugs threatening to assault her, and when they don't listen to her pleading, she turns into a giant cobra and kills them all one by one.  (Turns out snakes can change shape during the day if they're angry enough.)  She asks a sage for help locating Vikram, and he has a vision, revealing that Vikram is Sarva, and he's just married Divya.

On the wedding night, Divya has a terrible dream about a giant snake.  She confesses that-she doesn't have a naga dosham at all, and faked her horoscope to be able to marry Sarva.  He's already invested, so he forgives her and consults with his family astrologer, who tells them that there's a priest living nearby who can remove the curse, but until then they must remain celibate.

They do as the astrologer advises, but the ritual will take some time to prepare, so they get a room at a nearby hotel called Le Poshe, which is not quite as classy as the name implies.  Malar is also staying at Le Poshe, after killing her sage friend in a fit of anger.  She tries to make contact with Sarva, but he doesn't remember her.  She tries turning into Divya to seduce him, but he's taking the astrologer's advice seriously, so that doesn't work either.  The situation calls for a flashback.

So the movie cuts to Malar's past life as a college student named Pallavi, who is in love with Vikram, Sarva's last incarnation.  Pallavi's father is a powerful man with an army of goons, and since Vikram is of the wrong caste for his daughter, he's decided to kill the young man.  (If I were a crime lord and my daughter's boyfriend came to my house and beat up my entire supply of goons, I think I would view this as a recruitment opportunity and welcome him into the family, but that's just me.)

Pallavi and Vikram elope.  On the way they stumble across a small shrine, with a chain hanging from the statue, so Vikram picks it up and gives it to Pallavi as a mangalsutra.  Unfortunately, the chain belonmged to a pair of snakes, Devi and Devan (Varalaxmi Sarathkumar and Manas, respectively), who were using it to break their curse.  Devan tries to recover the chain, but Vikram assumes he's one of his father-in-law's goons,and a fight breaks out.  In the struggle Pallavi accidentally kills Devan, leading a  furious Devi to spit poison in Vikram's face, killing him.  She curses Pallavi to be reborn as a snake tormented by memories of Vikram, then kills her too.

Back in the present, Malar bumps into Sarva while visiting the shrine, and convinces him to take a tour of the area while she tells him about his past life.  Meanwhile Divya has realized that something is up, and she goes to seek divine aid.

Naga Kanya is as bonkers as it sounds, and sometimes it is bonkers in a way that I like.  The final confrontation is a clash of snake themed Indian movie monsters, as Divya temporarily transforms herself into a vishkanya by drinking a large jug of venom, and the day is saved by literal divine intervention in the form of a squirrel.

However, the movie never quite manages to come together in a satisfying way.  It's never anything more than the sum of its parts, and some of those parts are not great, particularly the hotel employees who conspire to drug and sexually assault Malar.  They fail, because shapechanging snake woman, but for some inexplicable reason the whole sequence is treated as comic relief.  It makes for a curate's egg of a movie: good in parts, but rotten in others.

 

Saaptember: Prem Shakti

The shapeshifting snakes of Bollywood are surprisingly versatile.  They can be vengeful killers, doomed lovers, mystical guardians, or, as in Prem Shakti (1994), fairy godparents.

The film doesn't start with the snake, though, it starts with Gangwa (Govinda) and Gauri (Karisma Kapoor), literal star-crossed lovers.  The families aren't feuding or anything, and Gauri's father actually likes Gangwa, but he is an astrologer and their star charts say that they cannot be together in this lifetime.  In fact, even trying to be together will lead to disaster.  He sends his daughter to stay with her uncle during the upcoming full moon, a time which will be particularly dangerous for her.  

Naturally, Gangwa comes to rescue her.  They flee into the night, and discover a secret and spooky cavern underneath the village well.  Entering the cavern, they stumble into a snake movie already in progress, as a wicked sage (Puneet Issar) tries to force Nagraj (Nitish Bharadwaj) to give up his Naag Mani as part of an overly complicated bid for immortality.  Gangwa intervenes, causing the sage to miss the chance for immortality for another twenty five years, and the angry sage curses them, turning Gauri into stone and killing Gangwa.  Nagraj vows to protect the petrified maiden, and time passes.

Twenty five years later, Gauri is . . . well, she's a statue, so she hasn't moved.  Gangwa has been reincarnated as Krishna, adopted son of an idol maker (Sulabha Deshpande).  Krishna is an artist, haunted by the half-remembered image of a beautiful woman he's only ever seen in his dreams, and tormented by his failure to recreate her image.  Encouraged by his mother and his childhood friend/half-hearted love interest Pinky (Neela) he stops dreaming long enough to get a job making mannequins.  his first assignment is to make a male figure, but working late into the night Krishna falls asleep, and Nagraj appears and transfers Gauri's spirit into the new mannequin, transforming it into a perfect likeness of her.

Krishna is fired, naturally.  He tries to buy the mannequin form his former boss, but before he can borrow the money it's sold to someone else.  Krishna wanders the streets on a rainy night only to see his creation in a department store window.  he's chased off by the security guard (Shakti Kapoor) but the next day he saves the life of the store owner and is given a job working with the flamboyant window dresser Romeo (Kader Khan).  That night, when Krishna is alone with the mannequin, she comes to life, introducing herself as a miracle, as "Krishna's Karishma."

And nothing's gonna stop them now, because from this point on the movie is a pretty straight adaptation of the Kim Catrall movie Mannequin, interspersed with scenes of the evil sage trying to kill Krishna again and Nagraj protecting the young lovers from the shadows.  Krishna and Karishma frolic through the store after hours every night, and her creative outfits are a huge hit, reviving the store's fortunes and foiling a takeover attempt by the owner's wicked uncle.  People start to notice that Krishna has an unhealthy fixation on a mannequin, but Romeo isn't particularly worried.

And then things go a bit off the rails.  Krishna tries to introduce his mother to Karishma, but she doesn't answer because she is a mannequin.  He's furious, and vows to quit the store and never speak to her again.  Karishma is heartbroken, but Nagraj assures her that they can make it if they're heart to heart.  Before that happens, though, they'll have to deal with corporate espionage, mannequin-napping, evil magic, entirely too many comic relief characters, and an abrupt ending that doesn't explain a thing.

Despite the bonkers premise, Prem Shakti may just make more sense than Mannequin does; having a clear cosmology helps.  That doesn't mean it makes very much sense, though.  There's a lot to nitpick here, starting with the fact that the evil sage could have won if he'd focused on finding Nagraj rather than taking his revenge on the young couple he already took his revenge on twenty five years ago. 

Prem Shakti is nonsense, but it doesn't pretend to be anything else, and it is at least reasonably entertaining nonsense.  Govinda and Karisma can dance, the plot moves along briskly, and the costumes really have to be seen to be believed.

Saaptember: Sheshnaag

 Sheshnaag (1990) shares a mythology and a few key cast members with Nagin, but a different genre.  Nagin was a horror movie with a sympathetic "monster" and unsympathetic victims, but Sheshnaag is a fantasy film with a pair of heroic snakes acting as mentors and protectors to Rishi Kapoor. 

The movie opens with an unconvincing lunar eclipse.  In a hidden temple dedicated to the divine snake Sheshnaag, shapeshifting cobras Pritam (Jeetendra) and Banu (Madhavi) use their magical powers to reveal a hidden hoard of treasure, to be distributed carefully by a secret society of philanthropists.

However, the secret treasure is not quite secret enough.  The evil sage Aghori (Danny Denzongpa) knows about the treasure.  He also knows that the ritual can be used to grant him immortality.  To do that he'll need Pritam and Banu, so he sends his disciples out to kill all the snakes in the area; this should force the pair to come out of hiding, and his disciples can make a tidy profit by selling the snakeskins.  And it works!  Pritam and Banu face Aghori in a magical duel.  Aghori wins, wounding Banu in the process, and the couple are temporarily separated.

Banu is nearly captured by Aghori's minions, but she's saved by Bola (Rishi Kapoor), a flute playing innocent who is devoted to Shiva and recognizes snakes as his fellow devotees.  Thanks to Bola, she is able to escape and be reunited with Pritam.

Meanwhile, Bola has problems of his own.  His father has just died, so Bola has to go and live with his sister Champa (Rekha) and her husband Bansi Lal (Anupam Kher).  Champa is kind, virtuous, and determined to look after her naive little brother, but Bansi is a cruel and abusive drunken gambler who is determined to spend all day playing cards with local nogoodnik Ganpat (Jack Gaud) and his cronies.  

Bansi allows Bola to stay and tries to put him to work herding cattle, but Bola is distracted by a forest shrine to Shiva and loses the cows.  Pritam and Banu return them, but at that point it's too late.  Bansi beats Bola, then threatens to beat Champa until Bola leaves.  Bola can't let any harm come to his sister, so he leaves and takes shelter in the woods.  But Bansi is not finished; during a drunken gambling spree he loses all his money, the house, and even Champa's mangalsutra to Ganpat.  Then he wagers Champa, and loses her too.

Ganpat goes to claim his prize, flanked by his sycophantic goons.  Champa tells him that he's full of it, that Bansi can't actually wager another person, and that it didn't work out so well for the Kauravas when they tried the same thing with Draupidi in the Mahabharata, but Ganpat contends that the Kauravas failed because they weren't evil enough.  Champa runs, Ganpat and his goons chase her, and she throws herself into the river to escape them.

Bola doesn't take the news well, so to protect him, Banu takes Champa's shape, acting as his sister.  She uses her snakey powers to lead him to hidden treasure.  Bola buys a fancy house, and Pritam joins the household by posing as a servant.  Everybody's happy.

And then she walks into their lives.  Kamini (Mandakini) is the daughter of Lalchand (Raza Murad), a wealthy dealer in animal skins and secretly one of Aghori's disciples.  She's sort of engaged to Vikram (Dan Dhanoa).  After Bola saves her from a bear, he's immediately smitten, while she falls for him after he uses the power of song to summon a crowd of animals, and she cools on Vikram after he and his men start shooting said animals.  (The subtitles consistently refer to Kamini as "Fireplaces," and I have no idea why.)

And then Bola finds Bansi and brings him home, and things get really complicated.

The special effects in Sheshnaag are delightfully terrible, starting with that lunar eclipse, which was clearly created using cardboard cutouts over a light.  The plot is . . . well, it doesn't always make sense, but there's certainly a lot of it.  The sudden shift in genre to martial arts move late in the film is a little jarring, though.

And the cast?  The cast is really great, full of highly respected veteran actors who take this ridiculous movie completely seriously, and play their parts without a trace of irony.  It's delightful

What is not delightful is that Pritam's magical duel with Aghori cuts to footage of an actual fight between a mongoose and a snake.  It's clear that some animals were harmed in the making of this movie, and the song about being kind to animals is kind of undercut by the fact that there's someone just offscreen throwing birds at Rishi Kapoor. 

Saaptember: Nagin

 Nagin (1976) is widely regarded as the first proper Indian snake movie; there are older movies with snakey themes, but this one codified the tropes, presenting a shapechanging female snake taking revenge on the men who killed her love.  Wikipedia confidently claims that Nagin was inspired by the 1968 French film The Bride Wore Black, a revenge drama with a similar theme and a complete lack of shapechanging snakes, but I have another theory.

Vijay (Sunil Dutt) is wandering in the woods when he saves a man being attacked by an unconvincing vulture.  He explains to the man that he's not here to hunt, he's researching a legend about snakes who gain the ability to take human form after a century of penance.  The man, Naag (Jeetendra), replies that yes, all of that exposition was indeed accurate, and that he is in fact a shapechanging snake.  As a reward for saving his life, he will permit Vijay to watch the new moon ceremony in which Naag and his beloved Naagin (Reena Roy) will consummate their union.  They've been waiting for a century, and it's kind of a big deal.

Vijay immediately contacts his five friends, including strident atheist Uday (Kabir Bedi), family man Suraj (Sanjay Khan), ladies man Rajesh (Vinod Mehra), hot-tempered Raj (Feroz Khan), and Kiran (Anil Dhawan), who is not very smart.  They all laugh at him, so he invites them to join him in spying on the ceremony.  They see Naagin dancing in the moonlight, but when Naag, still in snake form, appears, Kiran shoots and kills him.  

Vijay springs into exposition mode, explaining that they need to find and bury Naag immediately, because the female snake will swear revenge, and can see the faces of Naag's killers by looking in his eyes.  They wander around the forest for a while, long enough for the dying Naag to get a good look at each of their faces, then they leave.  Naagin finds the dying Naag, swears undying vengeance, and looks into his eyes to see the faces of his killers.

And then it is time for vengeance.  Kiran doesn't survive the night, because he is really not smart.  Naagin takes the shape of Rajesh's girlfriend Rita (Yogita Bali) and eliminates him too.  Vijay takes the others to visit a sage (Premnath Malhotra), who gives the  men protective amulets.  They will be safe as long as they wear the amulets, and so, one by one, Naagin tricks the men into removing the amulets.

So, to recap, a man who is already interested in and knowledgeable about shapechanging snakes convinces his five friends to join him in observing a ceremony, one of the men acts impulsively leading to a death, and a snake woman takes her vengeance by hunting them down one by one, only to fall to her death at the end of the film.  Yes there are similarities to The Bride Wore Black, but this is Cult of the Cobra, Universal's somewhat obscure killer snake woman movie.  It just replaces Cult of the Cobra's Orientalist nonsense and misplaced lamia with nagas from actual Indian folklore.

To be clear, I haven't seen any direct evidence that the filmmakers were inspired by Cult of the Cobra, but I haven't seen any direct evidence that they were inspired by The Bride Wore Black, either.  If I'm right, though, then this is the greatest Bollywood stealth remake of a western movie ever, an act of cultural reappropriation, and it manages to cast actual Indian actors in the Indian parts, to boot.

Nagin also draws form vampire movies in ways that later snake movies don't.  The protective amulets are obviously reminiscent of the crosses and garlic that Van Helsing is always trying to get people to wear, and they work just about as well.  Mirrors reflect Naagin as a snake rather than a woman, and that's a minor but important plot point later in the film.  And when she's attacking her victims, Naagin tends to lean into their necks, even though the actual bites don't reflect that.

And there's subtextual overlap as well.  This is not a deep movie, but it does touch on changing attitudes toward sex.  Part of what makes Naagin dangerous is that she can take the form of a more sexually liberated version of their significant others.

Nagin is not a perfect movie.  It's long, there's a subplot about financial misdeeds that goes nowhere, and the comic relief interlude with legendary comedienne Tun Tun falls flat.  Still, it was a hit, it made Reena Roy a star, and it managed to launch a new subgenre in Indian horror.  It was the first snake movie, but it would be followed by many others.

Saaptember: Cult of the Cobra

 (For whatever reason, my computer won't read this particular DVD, so no screenshots this time.  I'll have to settle for the movie poster.)

 

The plot of Cult of the Cobra (1955) sounds very much like an Indian snake movie: six men traveling in India anger a woman who is also a snake, and she follows them home and kills them one by one.  But it's not an Indian snake movie, it's a Universal horror movie, with all of the careful research that implies.

 

In 1945, six American airmen are exploring a city bazaar in n unnamed Asian country, though the set dressing, costumes and the matte painting behind them all strongly imply India.  The important ones are Tom (Marshall Thompson) and Paul (Richard Long), who are roommates back in America and are both in love with Julia (Kathleen Hughes), and Nick (James Dobson), who is an avid photographer and not very smart.  They meet a snake charmer (Leonard Strong) who poses for a picture with his cobra, and Paul takes the opportunity to expound on the mysterious Lamian cult, snake worshipers who are supposed to live in the area.  The snake charmer reveals that he is in fact a member of the mysterious Lamian cult, and he will sneak them into a sacred ceremony for a hundred dollars.  Everyone agrees, mostly because Paul keeps going on about it.

And it turns out the snake charmer was telling the truth! Fortunately the members of this particular snake cult all wear hooded cloaks, so it's easy to sneak in.  The snake charmer warns them, repeatedly, that they should not under any circumstances try to take pictures.  Cue the dance number (50s B-movie style, not Bollywood style) and Nick starts taking pictures, with a flashbulb.  There's a fight, the temple is set on fire, Nick tries to steal a basket containing a dancer, and the cult's high priest (Edward Platt) curses the intruders.

The airmen make their escape in a jeep, but Nick is missing.  They quickly locate him collapsed in an alley, suffering from snakebite.  They take him to the hospital and it looks like he's going to make a full recovery, but the nurse leaves a window open, and the snake returns and bites him again.  He's dead by morning.  

The rest of the men return to the US.  Julia and Paul become engaged, ending the love triangle pretty decisively.  Tom is devastated, but he gets over it pretty quickly when he meets the mysterious new neighbor Lisa (Faith Domergue).  He offers to show Lisa around New York, and things go . . . okay.  Lisa seems to like him, but she's determined to keep her distance.

And then the airmen start dying one by one, and it's Lisa.  Lisa is the snake woman.  The movie makes no effort to conceal the killer's identity form the audience (and it's just as well, because the movie poster shows Lisa turning into a snake) but the characters haven't figured it out yet, so Tom continues his pursuit of Lisa.  Honestly, he's coming on a bit strong, picking a  fight with an old friend who dared to dance with her at a party and breaking into her apartment.  And against all odds, she starts to fall for him as well.

Paul, on the other hand, is suspicious.  He's noticed that his friends have started dying shortly after being cursed, and while the police aren't willing to accept his "curse" story, they do run blood tests on the dead men and discover that they were all killed by cobra venom.  Lisa realizes that Paul is suspicious and decides to kill Julia for some reason, perhaps because she walked in on Julia reading one of Paul's many books on snake cults.  (Why does Paul have so many books on snake cults?)

In the end only Paul and Tom are left, and the police are starting to close in.  Lisa and Tom attend Julia's new play, giving her one last chance to try and kill Julia before meeting a rather undignified end; turning into a snake is great for stealthy kills, but there are some severe disadvantages when humans know you're there.

Cult of the Cobra does bear some slight resemblance to Indian folklore, but I think it's a coincidence rather than the product of actual research; even the snake cult always refers to Lisa as a lamia, which is the wrong mythology from the wrong continent.  That's just the tip of the iceberg, though; the obvious problem is that "Asia" is a sound stage filled with mostly white actors dressed as people from India; Rama Bai is the only Asian name in the cast list, and she played "Woman in Asian Market Square."  They did have Indian actors in 1955 - Bollywood was thriving at the time, and the highly regarded Shree 420 came out the same year.

However, location shooting and international actors cost money, and this was not a big budget movie.  It was originally released as part of a double bill with Revenge of the Creature, the first sequel to The Creature from the Black Lagoon.  The low budget is Cult of the Cobra's secret weapon, because atmosphere is free.  The movie draws heavily from Val Lewton's work, and especially Cat People, relying on shadows and intimation rather than flashy special effects.  Lisa takes long walks through the darkened city streets, animals are terrified of her, the lighting shifts across her face as she's torn between her mission and her growing feelings for Tom.  To be clear, this is not as good as Cat People, but emulating Cat People is a great choice given the budget.

The budget means that the movie has one real advantage over India's later snake movies.  There are a few shots of actual cobras, but most of the time when Lisa is in snake form she appears in silhouette or is represented by an unconvincing rubber snake on a string.  Indian snake movies tend to use real cobras and a lot of them die.  I'm happier with the snake on a string.

Another theme month?

 Why not?  Welcome to Saaptember, a celebration of the snake movie.