{"id":5570,"date":"2012-10-06T16:46:13","date_gmt":"2012-10-06T20:46:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=5570"},"modified":"2018-11-15T13:12:49","modified_gmt":"2018-11-15T18:12:49","slug":"film-hisss-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=5570","title":{"rendered":"Film: Hisss (2010)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Return to: <\/strong>Home <\/a>\/\u00a0Blu-ray, DVD, Film Reviews<\/a> \/ <\/em>H<\/a><\/p>\n

.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Film: Poor \/ DVD Transfer: n\/a \/ DVD Extras: n\/a<\/p>\n

Label: n\/a\/ Region: n\/a\u00a0\/\u00a0Released: n\/a<\/p>\n

Genre: Horror \/ Supernatural<\/p>\n

Synopsis: \u00a0A greedy American snatches the slithery love of a snake goddess to lure the powerful deity to his lair, and facilitate a cure for his terminal disease. Yes, that’s really the storyline.<\/p>\n

Special Features: n\/a<\/p>\n

.<\/span><\/p>\n

.<\/span><\/p>\n

Review:<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an undeniable mystique surrounding Hisss<\/strong>, the Bollywood horror \/ comedy \/ drama \/ \u2018rumoured\u2019 musical that was taken away from writer & director Jennifer Chambers Lynch by the producers and edited without her consultation. Footage from the film was barely glimpsed in the making-of doc Despite the Gods\u00a0<\/a><\/strong>(2012), so there\u2019s genuine curiosity in seeing whether the movie has any merit in any one of the genres Lynch tried to fuse into her exotic riff on the Far Eastern myth of a snake goddess. In the film story, she\u2019s forced to take on human form when her slithering lover is taken from her by a murderous American (Jeff Doucette, who\u2019s just horrible<\/em> in every scene) dying of brain cancer, luring her to his basement lair where he plans to trap her and extract some MacGuffin that gives the bearer immortality.<\/p>\n

Lynch\u2019s cut reportedly ran longer, had less schizophrenic transitions and spastic editing, and devoted more time towards the romance between the snake goddess (Mallika Sherawat) and a detective (Irfan Khan) whose wife is unable to conceive. Despite the Gods<\/strong> showed the thickening tension between Lynch and co-producer \/ actor Govind Menon, with the latter becoming increasingly impatient with the former\u2019s more measured directorial style.<\/p>\n

In its current form, Hisss<\/strong> feels like the hybridized work of Ed Wood, Jr. and Uwe Boll \u2013 glossy, ineptly constructed, and occasionally comedic for all the wrong reasons \u2013 and exactly how much of the blame is shared between director, producers, and the wildly uneven cast is unknown, but Lynch should\u2019ve fought to replace all of her billing with an Alan Smithee-like pseudonym, as father David Lynch chose to do when producer Dino DeLaurentiis recut Dune<\/strong> for TV, slapping on the name \u201cJudas Booth.\u201d (An appropriate, tongue-in-cheek variation for daughter Jennifer could\u2019ve been \u2018Julie\u2019 Booth.)<\/p>\n

Despite starring two of India\u2019s top actors, Hiss<\/strong> offers nothing but embarrassment for everyone except cinematographer Madhu Ambat, whose classical widescreen compositions give the film the gloss and production strong values. Sometimes the music score works, and other times it\u2019s jarring and wholly wrong (particularly cues with a wailing electric guitar, redolent of bad eighties B-movies), although the so-called Bollywood musical interlude is an exaggeration: it\u2019s more of a Hindu street party than a song & dance routine that would otherwise stops the film dead. The producers nixed any musical numbers early into pre-production, but the surviving sequence is pivotal because it lures the goddess out from the forest into the city streets, and leads her to the first of several sexually brutal men.<\/p>\n

Thematically, Hiss<\/strong> has little bits of gender commentary \u2013 Sherawat\u2019s lithe body is given specific attention when she climbs, crawls, or simply wanders among mountain ruins \u2013 whereas the men tend to be sexually brutal, deserving the fanged carnage that ensures \u2013 but like the character scenes, they\u2019re all spastic. Lynch tries to interweave shifting contrasts between the goddess\u2019 sexual richness with domestic scenes involving the detective\u2019s near-barren wife, and there\u2019s the quirky stepmother whose delusional view of her son in-law as a daughter<\/em>, but in the current edit they rarely click.<\/p>\n

Although she\u2019s generally onscreen in human form, the goddess also becomes a vengeful defender of abused women by transforming into a giant snake, killing rapists and wife-beaters, but these scenes also presume she\u2019s either trolling the streets at night in search of suitable food, or the city\u2019s filled with male violence. (In one comic book-styled street chase, the goddess wears a ninja-niqab, but the edits and coverage for her pursuit of a snake charmer are a little awkward.)<\/p>\n

Only a few ideas translate well \u2013 the goddess\u2019 scaling a street lamp at night, the literal usurping of whole men and expurgating undigested remains as fused glopnick \u2013 but they\u2019re covered in perfunctory shots that never allow for any lingering impact. When all characters finally converge on the finale, it\u2019s more a rhapsody of bathos than tragedy. The evil American is costumed in a ridiculous silver suit & nightvision goggles for a maneuver seemingly borrowed from Predator 2 <\/strong>(1990), and things reach an apex of silliness when Sherawat attempts to resuscitate the rubber snake that\u2019s supposed to be her lover (and later screams in full agony as it dies), and Khan screams the obligatory, slo-motion \u201cNooo!!!! when his idealistic partner \u2013 a character spastically needle-dropped into the narrative \u2013 also expires from gunshot wounds.<\/p>\n

The dialogue is an awful mash-up of Hindi and English, and there are major character relationships which are never clarified because the dialogue and hasty English subtitles drop references that presume prior information was already delivered (but perhaps lies in the Delete Bin on the producer\u2019s hard drive).<\/p>\n

Although the slimy, scaly snake transformation makeup by Robert Kurtzman of KNB is generally quite effective, as for the gore, one gets the sense the crew didn\u2019t really have much experience in crafting the realistic images and props Lynch wanted. The blood looks like vintage stage blood from 1952, and the transformation CGI effects (supervised by the producers during the re-editing phase) are just a hair better than the blocky Atari-style animation Tobe Hooper had to settle for in Crocodile<\/strong> (2000) \u2013 which in no way was passable. In the doc Lynch clearly struggles to get more detail, more blood, more nuances from the practical effects as everyone looks on, suggesting there was more than straight Hollywood-Bollywood culture clashes affecting this $3 million production.<\/p>\n

Although not bitter about the experience, Lynch has said she\u2019ll never watch the producer\u2019s cut (now available on DVD); she shouldn\u2019t; as it stands, Hisss<\/strong> is awful. At best, Hisss<\/strong> is a peculiar footnote in cinema, if not a testimony to the incompatibilities that can arise when a project starts with the best of intentions.<\/p>\n

An audience Q&A<\/a> with Despite the Gods<\/strong> director Penny Vozniak during the 2012 Hot Docs Film Festival adds another angle on Hisss<\/strong>\u2019 troublesome production.<\/p>\n

.<\/span><\/p>\n

.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a9 2012 Mark R. Hasan<\/p>\n

.<\/span><\/p>\n

External References<\/em>:<\/p>\n

IMDB<\/a> — Composer Filmography<\/a><\/p>\n

.<\/span><\/p>\n

Return to<\/strong>:\u00a0Home <\/a>\/\u00a0Blu-ray, DVD, Film Reviews<\/a> <\/em>\/\u00a0H<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Return to: Home \/\u00a0Blu-ray, DVD, Film Reviews \/ H . Film: Poor \/ DVD Transfer: n\/a \/ DVD Extras: n\/a Label: n\/a\/ Region: n\/a\u00a0\/\u00a0Released: n\/a Genre: Horror \/ Supernatural Synopsis: \u00a0A greedy American snatches the slithery love of a snake goddess to lure the powerful deity to his lair, and facilitate a cure for his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[18],"tags":[1564,1566,1567,1565],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8nuyW-1rQ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5570"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5570"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5570\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18605,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5570\/revisions\/18605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}