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.

More gorillas than any other Indian movie.

 Adipurush (2023) is, among other things, a devotional film inspired by the Ramayana, so my usual rules apply: I'm not going to evaluate the movie based on its theology, I just want to see if it tells an entertaining story.

Ravana (Saif Ali Khan) is the rakshasa king of Lanka.  He's a devoted follower of Shiva who managed to earn a boon from Brahma (Bijay Anand), who promised that he could not be slain by any god or demon, during the day or at night.  And I'm sure there are no loopholes there!  Ravana may be evil, but he has tremendous style, as demonstrated by the hymn to Shiva he performs with four statues of himself as backup singers.

Ravana is approached by his sister Shurpanakha (Tejaswini Pandit), who reveals that she lost her nose in an attempt to win the affections of righteous prince Raghava (Prabhas) by killing his wife Janaki (Kriti Sanon).  Shurpanakha praises Janaki's beauty, and encourages Ravana to abduct the woman, which would allow him to avenge his sister and gain the most beautiful wife in the world in the process.  Ravana decides that this is a great idea and will have no negative consequences.

Raghava is the rightful heir to the throne of Ayodha, but in order to fulfill a boon requested by his stepmother, he gave up the throne and now lives in a cave in the woods with Janaki and his brother Shesh (Sunny Singh.)  Raghava and Shesh are righteous warrior archers able to create supernatural effects with their arrows, so abducting Janaki is difficult, but Ravana is clever.  He disguises a demon as a golden deer in order to draw the brothers away, then disguises himself as a mendicant sage in order to lure Janaki out of the protective force field that surrounds the cave.  (Yeah, Shesh can make force fields with his arrows.  He's a really good archer.)  Ravana succeeds, and flies away with Janaki on his giant bat.

Raghava needs an army to rescue Janaki.  Shesh suggests raising an army in Ayodha, but Raghava feels that that would violate his vow, so instead they go searching for the vanara king Sugriva (Guarrav Walia).  The vanara hero and demigod Bajrang (Devdatta Nage) joins them on their quest, and they help Sugriva regain his throne in exchange for an army.

Meanwhile, in Lanka, Ravana does his best to win Janaki's heart, offering her power and jewels and . . . well, mostly power and jewels.  This doesn't work, and Janaki chooses instead to sit under a tree and wait for Raghava, because, as she carefully explains to Ravana, Raghava is coming for her, and no boon is going to save him.

The special effects in Adipurush range from okay to not very good, but that's not really a problem for me.  The problem is that there are so many special effects.  Most of the backgrounds are CGI.  Most of the characters are CGI.  Even Ravana has been turned into an overly muscled giant who occasionally has ten heads.  Almost everything is fake, so nothing really feels real, giving the whole movie a weightless quality that blunts the impact of the emotional scenes and the outrageous stunts.

Lanka itself is also a bit distracting, because the design is very clearly inspired by Mordor, complete with orcs.  Almost everything in Lanka is black, including Ravana's "Golden Palace," and while I respect Ravana's commitment to the bit, it does make the scenes there feel less real, and it blunts the impact of Bajrang burning everything down, since it's all black, so how can you tell?

I did like some aspects of the production design.  The vanara range from ordinary looking monkeys to gorillas to "Planet of the Apes" style nobility to Bajrang, who is the most human looking while also having the best tail, and Jambavan (Roopesh Jadhav) is a bear, as expected.

Saif Ali Khan, meanwhile, has figured out that Ravana is the best part, and he's clearly having a good time chewing all the scenery despite having to act through a fog of CGI.

Is Adipurush a good movie?  Probably not.  I found it to be a reasonably entertaining film, the big dumb action movie adaptation of the Ramayana, but it's clear form reviews and ticket sales that the Indian audience isn't interested in a big dumb action movie adaptation of the Ramayana, especially when they have so many other adaptations to choose from. 

Not being a jerk does make a big difference.

Ru-Ba-Ru (2008) is an example of a surprisingly popular subgenre in which a bad boyfriend or husband is given a magical second chance to live key points of their relationship over again, like A Christmas Carol but with more kissing. 

Nikhil (Randeep Hooda) and Tara (Shahana Goswami) live together in a surprisingly spacious apartment in Bangkok.  They're happy, mostly, but the cracks are starting to show.  Tara wants to get married, or at least wants to introduce Nikhil to her parents or meet his parents - some sign that they've got an actual future together.  

On the other hand, Nikhil has a specific future in mind, and he's entirely focused on making it happen.  He's preparing for a big presentation at work, which means that he's far too busy to go to India to meet her parents, or remember their anniversary, or buy her flowers when she has a play opening that night, or speak to her politely for more than two sentences in a row . . .  After a brief conversation with a wise and mysterious cab driver (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) Nikhil tries to make up with Tara, but he's still prickly and focused on his own work, and once Tara realizes that he's invited his clients to their romantic post-show dinner, she storms off, gets into a cab (driven by the same mysterious cab driver) and dies when another car hits the cab.

Nikhil is devastated.  He goes home and collapses, but in the morning he wakes up with Tara next to him.  She's fine, and Nikhil quickly realizes that he has a literal second chance, and has a whole day to live over again.  But while things can change, events seem to fall into the same pattern; Tara doesn't burn her arm while making Nikhil a coffee, but she does burn her arm while ironing his shirt.  The mysterious cab driver advises him to just spend time with Tara and make her happy, so he tries.  He takes her to meet his mother (Rati Agnihotri), mending that broken relationship in the process.  He focuses on Tara's needs rather than his presentation.  He arrives on time to the play and actually pays attention.  And at the end of the evening, he gets in the cab.

Ru-Ba-Ru is tightly focused on the central story, without any of the branching subplots Bollywood movies like to indulge in.  However, there's not much top that main plot; the movie is less than two hours long, and it still feels padded in places.  

The real problem, though, is Nikhil.  He's self-centered, controlling, and tries to present every one of his mistakes as Tara's fault.  he's a walking collection of red flags, and while he does improve when given his second chance, he's still loving and attentive in a sort of controlling way, which makes it really hard to root for him.  On the other hand, he does make the right choice at the end, and he does so without expecting a happy ending.

What I like about the movie is that there's no attempt at an explanation for the repeated day.  The closest we get is the cab driver explaining that his job is to help those who have lost their way find their destination.  Is the cab driver actually Death?  Was Nikhil such a bad boyfriend that it broke the space time continuum?  It is a mystery.

It's the Village of People Who Don't Ask Follow Up Questions!

Superheroes are associated with cities; Superman protects Metropolis, Batman lurks in Gotham, and Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends hang out in New York City.  In India, though, things are different.  Sure, Krrish lives in Mumbai, but many of India's cinematic superheroes are rural, protecting India's wide open spaces.  And in Veeran (2023), the hero finds plenty of danger and adventure while confined to a single village.

When he was fifteen years old, Kumaran (Hiphop Tamizha Adhi) was struck by lightning and fell into a coma, so he was sent to Singapore to recover.  Fourteen years later, he returns to his native village of Veeranor and reunites with his childhood friends Sakkarai (Sassi Selvaraj) and Selvi (Athira Raj), along with his own skeptical father (Jeeva Ravi.)  Sakkarai assists his grandfather, who is both the village barber and the priest who maintains the shrine of local deity Veeran, though most of the villagers are completely indifferent.  Selvi, meanwhile, is about to enter an arranged marriage with an older man who doubles as comic relief (Muruganandum), though her family are fine with her hanging out with Kumaran as long as she's home to perform the necessary rituals.

The village is part of an experimental project by the JACL Corporation to produce power by firing lasers through a glass tube, but the planned route runs right through Veeran's shrine, and the priest absolutely refuses to let it be torn down. It's a technology that was designed to be used in rural areas, because if the tube loses containment it could lead to an explosion that wipes out all life along the entire line.  That's why Kumaran is here; he's been having visions of the village wiped out in a blue mushroom cloud.

It's not just the visions, though.  The lightning strike gave Kumaran a suite of low key super powers.  He can throw lightning bolts that are only powerful enough to knock people around rather than stop their hearts, control minds for ninety seconds at a time (though overuse of this ability hurts him and can lead to unconsciousness), and also has the uncanny power to befriend horses.  For reasons.  It's probably an extension of the mind control.

Thanks to his visions, Kumaran knows that JACL is up to something evil, so his plan is to disguise himself as the god Veeran in order to thwart them.  JACL doesn't appreciate the interference, and corporate bully Dhruv (R. Badree) to deal with him, later followed by Dhruv's brother Sarath (Vinay Rai), an evil scientist with a specialized poison that makes people explode within two minutes.  

Kumaran-as-Veeran is a superhero, but he's no Superman.  he's got a loosely thematic suite of abilities with some tight limits; the lightning can knock people around but isn't going to end the fight immediately, his mind control doesn't last long and can hurt him, he needs to be able to snap use any of his powers, and he has to wear a copper bracelet given to him by Sakkarai's grandfather or he'll lose control of his powers.  And all of those limitations factor into the plot.  The scope of Veeran is smaller than a lot of superhero movies.

But while the scope is smaller, the stakes are still high.  Sure, Veeran is fighting to protect one village, but the village is full of people, and they matter.  The restricted setting means that we get to meet most of them and see that they matter.  The plot doesn't have to involve collapsing multiverses to be meaningful.

Veeran is not a perfect superhero movie; I don't think we ever find out exactly what the evil plot is, and there's a lot of comic relief here that just doesn't translate well.  Still, the leads are engaging, the villains are definitely villainous, and the hero has to struggle to save the day, with a lot of help from his horse.  It's refreshingly grounded without trying to be gritty.

(An evil power company called JACL and run by a merciless scientist?  That's got to be a stealth Shaktimaan reference, right?  It's not just me?)