Movie Reviews:- HISSS

Critic's Rating:     ***

Reader's Rating:  ***

CAST: Mallika Sherawat, Irfan Khan, Divya Datta

DIRECTION: Jennifer Lynch

DURATION: 1 Hour 50 Minutes

REVIEW: A Sad and Lonely nagin (Mallika Sherawat) comes to the city in search of her PATIDEV Nag, who has been kidnapped by an American hunter who is desperate for the nagmani that will cure the cancer. En route to her lover, the serpant teaches a few lessons to all evil-doers who fall in her path and comes to the rescue to alll the exploited and abused women. Chasing her scaly and venom-littered trail is a befuddled cop (Irfan Khan).

Now she's a Snake pining for her lover or gorging herself on humans and when she's a women, shedding her clothes and sleepwalking through the city. That's all that Mallika Sherawat is supposed to do in a film that is neither a feminist tale nor a slice of mythology.

The only sequences where she manages to hold your attention are the shedding sequences: when she sheds her clothes to become a nagin and when she sheds her scales to become a woman. No wonder then that a fine actor like Irfan Khan is mostly confused and seems to light up only when he's spending quality time with his activist wife, Divya Dutta.

A film like HISSS should have scored with its special effects. But once again, the carnage that the serpant unleashes is grotesque and her transformantion from seductress woman to venomous reptile is more funny than "Eyeball Grabbing." Truly, when it comes to the quintessential Nagin story, it's got be Sridevi any day. Sorry, Lady !!!