Count the snakes.

 Monica, O My Darling (2022) begins as it means to go on, with murder.  Factory worker Dev (Shiv Chauhan) barely has time to announce his engagement to Shalu (Zayn Marie Khan) when he's attacked and killed by an industrial robot.

Six months later, Shalu's brother, brilliant engineer Jayant (Rajkummar Rao) is attending the company gala for Unicorn Robotics.  Things are going well for Jayant; he's just been appointed to the board of directors, and he's engaged to Nikki (Akansha Ranjan Kapoor), daughter of Unicorn's CEO Satyanarayan (Vijay Kenkare.)  He's also kind of a terrible person; he's openly dismissive of former childhood friend Gaurav (Sukant Goel) and he's having an affair with Monica (Huma Qureshi), the company secretary who is also performing a big dance number at the gala for reasons that are never explained.

After the gala, Jayant and Monica are enjoying some "alone time" when she announces that he's pregnant.  She make sit clear that she's keeping the baby and that she will take care of it herself and not tell anyone who the father is, as long as she's provided with large sums of money at regular intervals.

The next day, Jayant receives an anonymous letter with incriminating photos of him and Monica, asking him to meet the sender at a sleazy hotel.  Jayant assumes that it's Monica attempting to formally blackmail him, but it turns out to be Nikki's brother Nishikant, who reveals that Monica has also been blackmailing him, along with the hapless and very married accountant Arvind (Bagavatyhi Perimal).  Nishikant insists that there's only one solution to all of their problems; they need to kill Monica.  He pressures the other men to agree, then they draw lots to decide who will do the killing, who will transport the body, and who will dispose of it.  Then Nishikant makes them sign a contract detailing the arrangement; since he's the assigned killer, he doesn't want to take the fall alone.

 The plan is overly complex, involving luring Monica from Pune to Mumbai, with Jayant driving for miles in a borrowed van before taking the train back home, hopefully before Nikki has time to wake up.  It's hectic, but everything seems to work until Jayant delivers the body to Arvind, who is supposed to bury it in the woods.  Arvind is far too hapless to handle the job on his own so Jayant reluctantly stays to help bury Monica in the woods, but the men are chased away by a leopard.

The next day, the body is found in the woods, still wrapped in a yellow tarp, but it's not Monica's body, it's Nishikant's.  Monica is apparently fine, and still cheerfully insists on being paid.  But it's clear that there's something else going on; Arvind is killed by a snake someone sent in the mail, and Jayant barely escapes his own snake.  People are dying, and quirky detective Naidu (Radhika Apte) is closing in on Jayant.

Jayant makes for an unusual protagonist, because he really is a terrible person.   On the other hand, the audience isn't really expected to root for him, just watch in bemused fascination as he struggles to avoid his fate.  Much of the time he's passively terrible, selfish and hypocritical but not actively malevolent, but he's willing to do awful things in order to protect his comfortable life.  Monica is also terrible, but is more honest about what she wants and displays more agency in general, which makes her a more sympathetic character.  

Monica, O My Darling is a black comedy rather than a proper film noir, but the twisty plot hangs together, and the killers (there are multiple murderers) have understandable motives.  The film is deeply cynical, often funny, and surprisingly fun.

Wrestling with love.

 Sword and sandals movies, also known as the peplum genre, were big in Italian cinema in the early Sixties.  It's a very simple formula:  cast a well muscled and macho actor as a legendary figure form history or mythology, throw in a bevy of beautiful women, add a scheming villain and some monsters to fight, and watch the magic happen.  Despite the mythical setting, the budget can be kept quite low, because the real draw is the hero performing feats of strength, and key plot elements can be recycled from movie to movie, so it's easy to crank out a number of pepla in short order.  There's no way that Bollywood would let a trend like this pass them by, especially when hunky wrestler/actor Dara Singh is right there.  Which is why we have Samson (1964).

The movie jumps straight into the action.  Samson (Dara Singh) is a very strong man who lives in the forest, but he has made his way to Hasnapur, a city of sort of Amazons in order to rescue a goat, which was taken from the forest by one of the women.  Men are forbidden in the city, with a couple of notable exceptions, but that doesn't stop Samson; he knocks down the city gates, defeats a giant (played by Singh's old wrestling rival King Kong) and meets with Rashid (B. M. Vyas), the city's vizier and high priest of the god Mukkadas.  Rashid hands over the goat and Samson leaves.

This angers Sheba (Mumtaaz), queen of the city, so she rides out into the forest to take the goat back.  She loses control of her chariot, but Samson is there to rescue her, and when faced with this large, handsome and kind man she feels an immediate attraction, which will not do at all.  After sending some decidedly mixed signals, she yells at Samson and leaves.

Sheba is angry because love is forbidden in the city, by order of Mukkadas.  That's why the city is almost entirely inhabited by women, and if any woman should fall in love the city will burn down.  Which doesn't stop Laila (Ameeta), Sheba's chief handmaiden.  Laila has been secretly meeting with the young, handsome and roguish Salook (Feroz Khan), and that means love songs in secluded palace gardens.  (Mukkadas doesn't seem to have considered the possibility of women falling in love with women.)

Of course it's all a scam.  Rashid is secretly an evil sorcerer and master of a sect of orange-robed cultists, and he fakes the miracles of Mukkadas using three powerful spirits, Aag (who produced fire), Paani (water) and Hawa (wind.)  Rashid plans to take open control of the city, but first he wants to find and kill the missing Prince Salook, Sheba's older brother, who was smuggled out of the palace as a small child.  He has his cultists searching the area for a man who bears the city's decidedly medieval coat of arms on his back, which is either a really large and elaborate birthmark or somebody tattooed a baby.

Meanwhile Sheba is confused by her strange feelings for Samson.  Laila carefully explains that these feelings are love, and that love is actually quite nice, but Sheba knows that love is forbidden so she resolves to end the problem by killing Samson, and sets out in the rain, bow in hand, to do just that.

Before she can fire her bow, Sheba is attacked by stock footage of a tiger, and Samson rescues her with the power of wrestling.  Sheba faints repeatedly, and suddenly it's raining, so Samson takes her to his own cabin and places her in his bed.  There's a moment when he's clearly considering kissing her, but Samson isn't a creep and so he goes outside and chops wood in the cold rain instead.  Sheba was secretly awake during the almost kiss, and Samson proving himself a decent dude is enough to win her over completely, or at least enough for her to stop trying to murder him.

The, trouble.  Someone overhears Laila and Salook singing love songs.  he escapes, she;s captured, and while the law says that women are not to be punished there's an exception when they refuse to give up their canoodling partner, so despite Sheba's protestations Rashid sentences Laila to be fed to what the subtitles refer to as "The Scary Beast."  Salook shows up to take her place as Scary Beast kibble, then Samson shows up to help defeat the beast.  Salook is saved, the ladies are delighted, the city celebrates, and Rashid must come up with a new plan.

He tries using a genie as an assassin, but Samson just wrestles it to death.  The next step is poison, specifically a potion made from the venom of twenty one different snakes, a brew so toxic that just touching it will be enough to kill a man.  He invites Samson and Salook to a banquet in their honor, and has Sheba offer them "sacred Mukkadas water" to drink.  Samson insists on trying it first, and he changes color for a moment, but he's so strong that the poison doesn't kill him, it only makes him angry.  He blames Sheba, and stalks off back to the forest with Salook in tow.

Fortunately, the rift between Samson and Sheba doesn't last long, because Dara Singh and Mumtaz are genuinely adorable together, with a sparkling chemistry that you don't generally get in a peplum movie.  Once the good guys are united and Rashid has seized complete control of the city, it's time to settle matters Samson style, which means walls will fall and pillars will topple.

 

I do not know if this movie is supposed to be set in ancient Judea, ancient India, or some imaginary kingdom; Hasnapur is a real place in India, but I can't find any refernece to scary beasts and Amazons.  Despite the setting and the snazzy haircut, though, Samson is recognizably Samson.  He's strong, and his strength comes from his faith in the one God he follows.  On the other hand, he's a whole lot nicer than the Biblical Samson and makes a much better boyfriend.

For the most part Samson is very similar to a traditional peplum film.  The songs are an obvious difference, but I think the plot is also a bit more direct; it helps that the "haughty Amazon queen" is the primary love interest rather than the secondary antagonist, which both simplifies the cast and removes any need for Samson to lose his memory and spend a soporific idyll in her clutches.

On the other hand, like a lot of peplum, the movie is padded.  In this case, it's padded with wrestling.  So much wrestling.  Samson wrestles King Kong for no apparent reason.  Samson wrestles a tiger.  Samson wrestles a genie.  Four of the evil cultists turn out to be wrestlers, leading to even more wrestling.   

In the end Samson is a fun movie, in the same way that the Hercules movies I used to watch on cable TV as a kid were fun, with the palpable chemistry between Singh and Mumtaz as an added bonus.  I'm going to have to track down Singh's Hercules as well.

Bhooty Call: Chandramukhi

 If you've seen the first Bhool Bhulaiyaa, then the plot of Chandramukhi (2005) is going to sound very familiar.  There's a reason for that; both movies are a part of a chain of remakes in different languages, stretching back to the 1993 Malayalam film Manichitrathazhu.  Still, casting matters.  This is a Rajnikanth movie, so the viewer can expect extra fight scenes, plenty of dancing, a song about how Indian village life is just better, and of course Rajni's usual understated humility.

The movie opens, like so many ghost stories do, with a dispute over building contracts.  An important contract has been awarded to Ganesh Construction, run by Senthil (Prabhu), and his angry rivals respond by trying to kidnap a vanload of Ganesh employees, but they are immediately rescued by Sathil's adopted brother Saravanan (Rajnikanth), a respected psychiatrist who has just returned from America.  The angry construction thugs vanish from the movie right after that, along with the whole contract dispute plotline; they seem to be in the film in order to be beaten up, assuring the viewer that yes, this is indeed a Rajnikanth movie.

Senthil has another problem, though.  He's recently married Ganga (Jyothika), but his mother had promised to marry him to his cousin Priya (Malavika), thus putting an end to an interfamily feud.  Priya's family don't know that Senthil is married now, so Saravanan offers to explain things to Priya's aunt Akhilandeswari (Sheela) and the rest of the family, and check out the haunted castle Setnhil bought while he's in the neighborhood.

Obviously, the family assumes that Saravanan is the promised groom, and though he tries to explain they really don 't let him get a word in edgewise, so instead he goes to check out the palace.  It is supposedly haunted by the spirit of Chandramukhi, a dancer in the court of the wicked king Vettaiyan.  When he found out that Chandramukhi was in love with Gunasekaran, he killed them both.  Chanramukhi's angry ghost returned for some serious haunting, but he had the ghost sealed in a Room Which Must Never Be Opened, guarded by a giant snake, then left town.

Sethil and Ganga arrive and clear up all the confusion.  They announce their intention to move into the haunted castle, and Akhilandeswari decides that everyone will move into the haunted castle.  And they do, and everything is fine.  Saravanan meets Durga (Nayanthara), the gardener's granddaughter, and he flirts with her by acting like a jerk at every opportunity until she realizes he has a good heart after all.  Meanwhile, Ganga becomes more and more fascinated by the story of Chandramukhi, and decides to open the Room Which Must never Be Opened.

After Saravanan is called away to attend to a patient, she gets her chance.  She convinces Durga to help her get a key made, and they open the room.  Ganga is delighted, but things start going wrong almost immediately, when the blacksmith who made the new key suddenly dies.  Things start getting spooky, with a mysterious voice singing at night, Ganga's sari mysteriously catching on fire, and a near fatal fishtank accident. The family quickly decides that Durga must be responsible.

And then Saravanan returns, just in time to foil an attack on Priya, though no one gets a look at her assailant.  It is time for Saravanan to bust a ghost, but to do that, he needs to figure out who the ghost is.  (It's Ganga, obviously, but he needs to figure that out.)

As in Bhool Bhulaiyaa, there's some question about whether the ghost is real or just a manifestation of Ganga's psychological problems, and as in Bhool Bhulaiaa, it doesn't really matter.  Saravanan's psychological approach seems to help, and so does the exorcism performed by the intimidating sage Ramachandra.  The psychiatrist and sage work well together, rather than arguing over whose worldview is correct.

The narrative is a bit more jumbled this time, though.  In addition to the evil contractors who appear in the opening and are never seen again, Akhilandeswari has an ill-defined evil scheme which never goes anywhere, though it does lead to a fight between Saravanan and her personal servant Oomaiyan (a shirtless Sonu Sood.)  Even the computer generated snake gets a lot of buildup but never interacts with any human characters and then just leaves.  

But ultimately it all comes down to the cast.  Rajnikanth displays his usual swaggering charm, but Jyothika steals the entire movie, effortlessly switching between charming as Ganga and chewing all the scenery as Chandramukhi, within the same scene and sometimes within the same line.  Most of Rajnikanth's movies in this era were named after the character he played.  Chandramukhi is an exception, and Jyothika earns it.

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.