Hisss (2010) - 2.5/4

I've heard a little about Bollywood, but haven't seen much. Their cinematic form seems to have discarded all notions of consistency in tone and has instead striven to entertain in every possible way simultaneously and often conflictingly. Hisss is a Bollywood film directed by American-as-Apple-Pie Jennifer Lynch. How much of her vision remains is hard to say, but she's disowned the film. How many shots were directed by her is also hard to say. But the resulting film is nevertheless both entertaining and interesting.

"I may have brain cancer, but I can still piss like a horse." The man who utters that line is the film's villain, a psychopathic white guy (Jeff Doucette) who wants to become immortal. The best way to become immortal is to find some cobras mid-coitus, kidnap the male, put him in an aquarium, and randomly administer electric shocks. The female snake then transforms into a hot Indian supermodel (Mallika Sherawat, in this case), a snake goddess, who will find the kidnapper and trade a special diamond for her mate. This diamond can grant immortality.

Of course, it won't really go down like that. Shapeshifting snake deities will just eat you and vomit your semi-digested corpse into the nearest gutter. And that's where Hisss is a horror film. Mallika does come to the city looking for her mate. But the only trail she has is the people who assisted in the kidnapping. Instead of questioning them, she sniffs them out, swallows them, and vomits them up in nasty, slimy balls. For vore fetishists, this is no doubt very exciting stuff.

It also excites the interest of a local detective, however. Despite having little to do with the plot itself, the film is strangely concerned with the detective's personal life. He and his wife have been striving to have children, but she keeps miscarrying. Meanwhile, his mother-in-law--easily the film's finest character--believes he's really a woman, a lonely spinster in need of love. She also thinks the news broadcasts about the snake goddess's victims is a TV series starring her son-in-law.

Apparently Jennifer Lynch conceived Hisss as an absurd love story between the snake goddess and her snake lover. The producers, however, conceived of the film as a snakewoman horror film with a hot babe slinking around naked. The mixture is strangely Shakespearean in the way it appeals to high and low cultures, poetic and entertainment interests at the same time. That's not to say the film is brilliant; the producer interference has probably done a lot more harm than good. The film's finest moments are likely fragments from Lynch's vision: the poetic, fairytale moments when Mallika slithers up a tree or light post totally naked and, in silence, longs for her stolen love--the whole film, in a way, is moving toward the completion of the interrupted coitus. There are also parallels between the snake couple and the detective and his wife that are rather nebulous as the film stands, something to do with love, fertility, and respect for life. Their destinies are bound together. Alas, whatever message Lynch was going for here is tough to decipher.

One of the stranger responses I had to Hisss was to wonder why the snake goddess would work so hard to pursue her snake mate when, in human form, she has her pick of all these human males. Even though she is technically a snake, she's in human form; she could stay in human form and have a human mate. The film seems to deliberately pull these anthropocentric strings. As a man, I found myself almost jealous of the snake: why should he get this hot mate when we humans are such superior males? Perhaps this anthropocentrism as part of what Lynch wanted to explore with this film and why she made efforts to parallel the humans to the snakes. In the film's present form, it's hard to say.

However mangled and inconsistent Hisss may be, it is a fascinating mixture of conscious and subconscious, art and entertainment, poetry and exploitation. Weird, often unintentionally funny, the film is worth at least one viewing for Western horror audiences, to whom snakewomen movies, a subgenre of Indian cinema, are unusual.