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Saturday, April 19, 2008

Toofan

Release Year: 1989
Country: India
Starring: Amitabh Bachchan, Goga Kapoor, Meenakshi Sheshadri, Amitra Singh, Farooq Shaikh, Kamal Kapoor, Raza Murand, Pran, Sushma Seth, Zarina Wahab, Sudhir Dalvi, Ramesh Deo, Mahesh Anand, Jack Gaud, Bob Christo
Director: Ketan Desai
Writers: Salim Khan, K.K. Shukla
Cinematographer: Peter Pereira
Music: Anu Malik
Producer: Manmohan Desai
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Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan and ramshackle low budget superhero spectacle are both subjects that get a lot of play here at Teleport City, and when a film brings the two of them together we're pretty much fated to cover it, no matter how underwhelming that film may be. Fortunately the 1989 movie Toofan comes to us wrapped in some particularly interesting context. It's mildly depressing context, mind you, but interesting nonetheless.

These days, nearly forty years into his career, it's hard to imagine Amitabh Bachchan being any more famous or respected than he is. When he's not gracing some freshly minted Bollywood blockbuster with his distinguished presence, he's appearing in public as the proud patriarch of a white hot acting dynasty comprised of his superstar son and daughter-in-law, Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai. Hell, even Stephen Colbert has given him shout-outs. This combined with the amount of attention paid to his early successes might lead one to get the impression that his was a smooth and gradual--if you will, Al Pacino-like--transition from his breakthrough days as an iconic angry young man to the role of venerated elder statesman. That impression, however, would be quite wrong. In fact, the road that lead from Bachchan's funky and fighting late seventies heyday to his living legend status today is one marked by some considerable stretches of rough pavement, of which Toofan is one small artifact.

Though the youthful Amitabh personified the hardscrabble working class hero onscreen, the reality of his circumstances was a bit different, a reality underscored by the fact that, when he first arrived in Bollywood, he did so armed with a letter of recommendation written by Indira Gandhi herself. Amitabh was a lifelong friend of Ghandi's son Rajiv Ghandi, and his family (headed by his father, the renowned poet Harivanish Rai Bachchan) enjoyed a close relationship with the Nehru-Gandhi clan. These close ties would serve to alter Bachchan's career path dramatically after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, when Rajiv, now the newly named Prime Minister of India, asked Bachchan to support him by seeking a parliamentary seat as a member of his Indian National Congress party. At the time, Amitabh was still at the peak of his phenomenal popularity. His serious injury during the filming of Coolie the previous year had lead to a national vigil that saw people lining up at temples to give prayers in his name, and the finished film was a runaway success as a result. Given that he was easily the most famous person in India at the time, popular election was a simple matter, and Bachchan ended up winning the parliamentary seat for his home town of Allahabad by the widest margin in Indian history.

Bachchan has since freely admitted that he was in way over his head in the political arena, and the rigors of his new calling ended up removing him completely from the acting sphere (though he would, thankfully, take time out from overseeing matters of state to make the wonderfully insane Mard). Things would become much worse for him with the eruption of the Bofors Scandal, ignited when evidence surfaced of Rajiv Gandhi and some associates receiving kickbacks--brokered by an Italian businessman who was a close friend of the Gandhi family--from the Swedish arms manufacturer Bofors in exchange for lucrative government contracts. The matter was one of the biggest corruption scandals in the history of Indian politics and, while Bachchan was ultimately cleared of involvement, he was tainted by association nonetheless. Thanks in no small part to the aggressive attentions of a press drunk with the smell of celebrity blood, the public perception of him shifted away from that of a populist hero toward that of a representative of an appetitive and hypocritical elite. Understandably burned by the experience, Bachchan resigned from his seat after serving three years, vowing never to return to politics again, and began the process of getting his acting career back on track.

Unfortunately, Bachchan returned to a Bollywood that had largely moved on in his absence. A new batch of young stars had emerged, and new types of films--reflecting what was considered to be a more hopeful and less "angry" time--were being made. Not helping matters was the fact that Amitabh--thanks in no small part, I'm sure, to the stress of his political adventures--had not aged all that gracefully over the intervening years. He'd put on a few pounds, and his once youthful face had become somewhat puffy and haggard looking--neither of which are good things for an actor who has made his fame as an exemplar of burning youth. In short, Bachchan was a star in desperate need of reinvention. However, what successes such a reinvention might have engendered we will never know, because what the forces guiding Bachchan's career--or, indeed, Amitabh himself--chose to do instead was to desperately cling to what had worked in the past. As a result, Bachchan closed out the eighties with a string of resounding box office failures. Among the earliest volleys in this barrage of cinematic duds was Toofan.

Toofan was one of a small handful of films directed by Ketan Desai. Though he would go on to become a successful producer, what was most noteworthy about Desai at the time was that he was the son of director Manmohan Desai, who had directed a number of Amitabh Bachchan's beloved hits, including Amar Akbar Anthony, Parvarish, and the aforementioned Coolie, as well as numerous successful masala entertainers for other stars, such as the delirious Dharmendra-fronted costume epic Dharam-Veer. Unfortunately, Manmohan had chosen the previous of Amitabh's late eighties flops, Gangaa Jamunaa Saraswathi, as his directorial swan song, and--perhaps due to failing health--served only as a producer on Toofan, which would be the last film he worked on. Manmohan's is just one example of a power who had fueled Bachchan's previous success having only a vestigial involvement in Toofan, the other being that of Salim Khan, just half of the screenwriting team--completed by Javed Akhtar--responsible for creating Amitabh's most career-defining roles, including Zanjeer, Sholay, Deewaar and Don. I'm not sure what happened between Khan and Akhtar, but they appear to have parted ways after 1987's Mr. India, which is admittedly a career peak that would be pretty hard to top.

You get a sense with Toofan of a creative team that's grasping at straws, trying to assemble various successful elements from past films, along with a few tentative new ones, all in a somewhat messy attempt to rekindle their star's earlier heat. Manmohan Desai was known for his "lost and found" dramas, which featured families torn apart by fate only to be reunited after much travail at the film's conclusion, and one example of those, the aforementioned Amar Akbar Anthony, had been one of Amitabh's most loved films, so that element is included. Bachchan also had great success with films in which he played dual roles, such as in Don and The Great Gambler, so that element is included as well. Finally, during the late years of his peak, Bachchan's stature was such that his characters--such as those in Coolie and Mard--had begun to take on an almost superheroic cast, so it seems it was decided to push things just that much further and make his character in Toofan an actual costumed superhero.

The prologue that establishes Toofan's premise is elegant in its simplicity. Psyche! Seriously, given that this is a Manmohan Desai-produced masala film in the "lost and found" mold, you can be assured that simplicity has nothing to do with it. In fact, the plot of Toofan is so serpentine in its convolutions that it makes the labyrinthine Dharam-Veer look like No Exit by comparison. Once the film starts rolling, we still have thirty minutes to go before the opening credits, so just sit tight.

Ramesh (Ramesh Deo), a magician and escape artist, and Hanuman Prasad (the mighty Pran), a noble and upright police inspector, are friends. Ramesh and his very pregnant wife leave Bombay to visit Hanuman in his hometown of Udhampur on the occasion of his also very pregnant wife giving birth. However, on arriving they find that Hanuman's wife has died in the process of birthing twin boys, and the shock of this revelation causes Ramesh's wife to faint and fall down a flight of stairs. She miscarries as a result, and in response to Ramesh's concern that his still unconscious wife will not be able to survive the news, Hanuman says, basically, "here, I have two", and gives Ramesh one of his twins to raise as his own. Time goes on, and Ramesh schools his adopted young son, Shyam, in the magician's trade, while Hanuman trains his son, Toofan, in being righteous and upright. Unfortunately, Shyam's magician training is abruptly cut short one day when Ramesh fails to execute the old "locked box submerged in a body of water" escape, a turn of events that prompts the child to vow that he will himself master the feat one day.

Young Toofan's relationship with his dad is equally short-lived. Asked by his superior, ACP Sharma (Kamal Kapoor), to escort a large shipment of gold on its way to the reserve bank, Hanuman finds himself made the patsy in a scheme between the corrupt Sharma, his lieutenant Patil, and the notorious bandit Shaitan Singh (Goga Kapoor) to steal the gold for themselves, and is fired from the force in disgrace as a result. The wild-eyed Shaitan Singh, however, has a bad habit of shooting absolutely everyone who works with or for him (a habit that makes it remarkable that he's consistently able to find new recruits for his gang), and when he does the same to Patil, the crooked cop uses his last breath to inform Hanuman of Sharma and Shaitan Singh's involvement in framing him. Rushing off to capture Shaitan Singh, who is escaping by train, Hanuman leaves a note written on a handy chalkboard for his sleeping son, detailing the particulars of Patil's confession. What follows is some classic Action Pran as Hanuman jumps the speeding train and manages to cuff Shaitan Singh before the two of them end up in a violent brawl that leaves Hanuman hanging from the train car, still cuffed to Shaitan Singh, as a train approaches in the opposite direction on a parallel track. Unfortunately for Hanuman, Shaitan Singh is just about as badass as these Bollywood bandits come, and cuts off his own fucking hand in order to send Hanuman crashing beneath the wheels of the oncoming train.

At the moment of his father's death, a violent wind blows open the shutters in young Toofan's room, awakening him, and some highly selective drops of rain manage to erase both the names of Shaitan Singh and, partially, ACP Sharma from the blackboard, while leaving the rest of his father's message intact. Toofan none too wisely runs with the blackboard to ACP Sharma, who, obviously not having mastered the poker face, freaks out and chases him away (though, strangely, without taking the blackboard, an oversight which enables Toofan to improbably hold on to it and the message it contains--apparently without once thinking to transcribe it in some more portable and permanent format--for the many intervening years between its first being scrawled and the events of Toofan's denouement). From this point on, Toofan is pretty sure that Sharma had something to do with his dad's death, and vows to find proof of that fact, along with the identity of Sharma's mysterious partner in crime. But to do so he'll need some divine assistance.

The young Toofan prays to the Hindu monkey god Hanuman for help, and in response to his plea a violent wind sweeps through the temple, causing a nifty six-shooter crossbow to fall from the shrine and land at his feet--and it's not an ornate, mythological-looking crossbow, either, but a rather sporty one with the brand name clearly visible on the front. A robed sage says something about a righteous cyclone ("toofan") sweeping through the land to clean it of wrongdoers, and there we have our origin story. Meanwhile, Shaitan Singh goes to see a doctor about the profusely bleeding stump that's cropped up where his hand used to be and the doctor, having seen Shaitan Singh's picture in the paper, dopes him up and calls the police, after which Shaitan Singh is carted off to jail, swearing eventual vengeance against the doctor.

Now, allow me to backtrack a bit to discuss the matter of Hanuman. I am woefully ignorant about the Hindu religion, and what I do know about Hanuman, as with many things, I know only from watching movies. But based upon that meager amount of no doubt highly dubious information, I think that Hanuman is awesome. As he's depicted in the several Bollywood "mythologicals" I've seen, he's similar in character to the Monkey King from Chinese folklore as he's portrayed in the Shaw Brothers "Journey to the West" movies. His unwavering sense of justice is tempered by an antic sense of mischief, and he's just as likely to shrink himself down to bite-size in order to tamper with an adversary's insides as he is to swell to enormous proportions to simply step on him or kick him into the next life. Plus, he's the only Hindu deity, as far as I know, who is friends with Ultraman, as evidenced by the Thai movie The 6 Ultra Brothers vs. The Monster Army--which, to my mind, is the highest endorsement that any religious figure could attain. If Ultraman is on board, then I'm just a miracle away from signing up myself.

Anyway, we now advance forward twenty-seven years to the introduction of Toofan as we will know him for the rest of the movie, prompted by a gang of scruffy bandits terrorizing a wedding party. Toofan's entrance is announced by a cyclone, and accompanied by a snappy theme song that is by far the highlight of an otherwise unremarkable score by Anu Malik. When we see him, it's Amitabh wearing his best mien of righteous fury, dressed in black genie pants with a bright orange cape, sash and scarf, and charging in on horseback with his trusty crossbow ready for action. As his theme song thunders away on the soundtrack, Toofan dispatches most of the bandits by means of arrows that are shot with uncanny speed and precision, then kung fus the stragglers, all the while booming away in a voice equipped with its own reverb chamber, just to further underscore his divine origins.

Now, admittedly, Amitabh does look slightly silly. But, still, Toofan the superhero sounds kind of cool, doesn't he? And, having established that, we next encounter what turns out to be the major problem with Toofan the movie. Because, once this scene has concluded, we will not see Toofan again for a solid hour, and will instead be spending hard time with Toofan's twin brother, Shyam, as irritating a comic ne'er-do-well as has ever been seen. While there is some awkwardness to the less-than-fighting-trim Bachchan's portrayal of Toofan, it's still a role that he's relatively at home with, whereas his performance as Shyam reeks of desperation. In his efforts to sell Shyam as a lovable goofball, he mugs away frantically like a coked-up borscht belt comedian, and the result is unbearably corny and cloying. Of course, we've seen Big B in comedic mode before (such as in the role of the double Vijay in Don and in much of Amar Akbar Anthony), but those performances were aided, first of all, by his confidence as an actor, which kept him short of overselling in the manner that he is here, and, secondly, by stories that kept those characters integrated within a narrative context that didn't leave them just hanging out to become little more than annoying, human-shaped roadblocks to audience involvement, which is what happens here.

I'm going to take the Shyam portion of Toofan at speed because, even though a bunch of things happen during that hour, very little of them have any impact on the larger plot of the movie. Suffice it to say that Shyam, who is making his living as a magician performing at children's parties (and whose magic consists of a combination of cheap novelty store gags and Bewitched style special effects--confusing the issue of whether he's supposed to be performing sleight-of-hand or actual magic) gets hoodwinked by a corrupt hotelier and his gang into aiding in a robbery, and ends up in trouble with the police as a result. After he is bailed out by his cab driver friend, Gopal (Farooq Shaikh), the two of them set about trying to prove his innocence, setting in motion a series of searingly unfunny slapstick episodes helped not in the least by lots of under-cranked camera work and wacky sound effects. Finally things turn serious when the gang tries to silence Shyam, and Gopal, throwing himself in front of an oncoming car to protect him, ends up losing both of his arms. After leaving the hospital, Gopal, not wanting to be a burden on his friend, goes to visit his family, who have been living at home with his father while he makes his living in Bombay. As fate and the frantic loose-end tying of screenwriter Salim Khan would have it, Gopal's father's home is in Udhampur, both the stomping ground of Toofan and the hiding place of the gold stolen by Shaitan Singh at the beginning of the movie--and Gopal's father, furthermore, is the very same doctor who turned Shaitan Singh in all those years ago. (Gopal's homecoming also provides us with a replay of that famous scene in Sholay in which the wind whips away the blanket wrapped around Sanjeev Kumar's shoulders, dramatically revealing that he has lost his arms.)

Meanwhile, back in the movie that we wish the rest of Toofan was more like, Shaitan Singh has escaped from prison, a feat he has accomplished in part by means of setting himself on fire (badass). To be honest, I'm not sure that the whole setting himself on fire part was all that necessary to his escape, but the shot of him emerging from his cell in slow motion, on fire, while shooting everyone in sight was definitely necessary to me being able to make it through the remaining hour of Toofan. Once doused, Shaitan Singh makes his way to Udhampur and regroups with the members of his old gang whom he hasn't already shot, who fill him in about Toofan. Toofan's presence, they tell him, has not only kept their criminal endeavors in check, but also emboldened the local populace, a situation that must be dealt with if they are to successfully extract their treasure from its hiding place (a task which now, for reasons I won't go into, will involve excavating a temple that has been built over the burial site). Shaitan Singh manages to draw Toofan out, after which a tremendous fight ensues, ending with Toofan dangling perilously over the edge a sheer waterfall. Unfortunately, the only thing that's keeping Toofan from falling is the fact that he's handcuffed to Shaitan Singh's prosthetic hand, which comes with a convenient spring latch that, when released, sends the poorly composited Amitabh/Toofan tumbling down into the raging waters below. Now free to terrorize as they please, Shaitan and his gang go to take vengeance against Gopal's father, killing Gopal and his wife--and orphaning his young son--in the process.

Soon after, Shyam arrives in Udhampur looking for Gopal. Since Shyam is still considered a criminal and is jumping bail, the Bombay police arrive hot on his heels, but instead find the unconscious Toofan at the base of the waterfall and take him back with them under the mistaken impression that he is Shyam. Upon finding himself in Bombay, the noble Toofan ends up taking on the guise of Shyam out of compassion for Shyam's long suffering mother, who is obviously so incapable of handling bad news that anyone within a five mile radius of her would rather attempt to shift the tides than be the bearer of it. So, in case you missed it, let me point out that we were once again given a brief scene of Toofan being awesome to the accompaniment of his snappy theme song, immediately after which he was again effectively removed from the action, not to return in superheroic form for another good chunk of the movie. Instead, as might be predicted, Shyam finds himself convinced to impersonate Toofan in order to thwart the bandits and embolden the populace, and so, not only do we have an absence of Toofan, but an absence of Toofan filled by Shyam's cloyingly goofy impression of him.

Shyam's stint as Toofan goes pretty much as would be expected, except for one odd aspect that I wanted to point out. In those instances where Shyam does do battle with Toofan's foes, he does so with his magic, and his magic, as I've alluded to earlier, appears to be actual magic, including the abilities to levitate himself and others at will, make objects in plain sight turn into other objects (such as when he turns an attacker's sword into a snake), vanish things into thin air, and instantly hypnotize people to do his bidding. In short, Shyam's powers are far more limitless and god-like than those of the real Toofan, who basically just hits people and shoots them with arrows, yet these scenes are played as zany comic relief bits. In fact, when Shyam really wants to get results, he uses his fists, even though, from what we've seen, it looks like he could simply wiggle his nose and make Shaitan Singh and his men disappear. Of all the weirdly sloppy plot elements that litter Toofan, I think this one may have been the weirdest and the sloppiest--but, then again, that may just be because it's the one that I'm focusing on at the moment.

Back in Bombay, Toofan's impersonation of Shyam leads to a lot of other business that has no bearing whatsoever on the main plot of Toofan, but to its credit does ultimately lead to Toofan, as Toofan, returning to Udhampur to settle things once and for all with Shaitan Singh. And it is here, in like fashion, that the movie Toofan finally becomes a Toofan that we can all get behind. Shaitan Singh and his men perform a daring recovery of the stolen gold by burrowing from underneath the temple through the roof of a conveniently located train tunnel, finally dumping the treasure into a waiting freight car, after which Shaitan Singh celebrates by summarily blowing away his entire crew. Shyam tries to intervene, but ends up handcuffed to Gopal's son in a model train boxcar that plunges off an elevated bridge into the river below (meaning it's time to make good on that vow to successfully execute that failed stunt of his father's). ACP Sharma shows up to claim his share of the gold from the traitorous Shaitan Singh, leading to a bloody confrontation. Finally, Shaitan Singh commandeers a plane to make his getaway, with Toofan in hot pursuit. In what is by miles the film's most memorable scene, Toofan uses his crossbow to shoot a line into the plane--the end of which spears itself not only through the floor of the plane, but through Shaitan Singh's foot as well--and then scales up the line (which hangs slack in a straight vertical line from the underside of the airborne--and no doubt rapidly moving--plane) into the plane's cabin for a final balls-out smackdown with his nemesis.

Admittedly, the final twenty minutes of Toofan are amazing--so amazing, in fact, that if the rest of Toofan were even half that good it would probably be one of my all time favorite films in which a somewhat out-of-shape guy in an ill-fitting superhero costume runs around kicking ass. By a fair account, there are probably about forty-five minutes to an hour of really good movie hidden within Toofan and, if I was inclined to do such things, I would take that forty-five minutes to an hour of really good movie and cobble together my own version of Toofan, which would consist of the fight between Pran and Shaitan Singh on the train, every scene where Toofan is riding around shooting people with his crossbow to the accompaniment of his snappy theme music, Shaitan Singh escaping from prison on fire, and those final twenty minutes. Of course, what I would then have would be something very far from the crazy Bollywood masala movie that Toofan was obviously intended to be.

That is not to say, however, that the fault with Toofan lies necessarily within the sprawl of its story or the convolutions of its plot. In fact, one of the great pleasures of watching a well made masala film of this type--like, say, Amar Akbar Anthony or Dharam-Veer--is in seeing the ingenious, albeit far-fetched, ways in which all of the many disparate strands of character and circumstance that the filmmakers have laid out ultimately end up falling into place. The problem with Toofan is that so much of what it lays out never really comes to anything, and only serves to distract from the parts of the movie that are actually entertaining. For instance, note that I am only now mentioning the film's two female leads, Meenakshi Shehadri and Amrita Singh, who are so poorly integrated into the story as to become superfluous, and who disappear from the film without remark well before the climax as a result. (It appears that no trouble was taken to even give Amrita Singh's character a name, despite the fact that it seemed like she was being set up to be Toofan's love interest.) In like fashion, the whole subplot involving the crooked hotelier who frames Shyam--which is revisited at length during the segment of the film in which Toofan is masquerading as Shyam--never ties into the larger plot in any significant way, and isn't interesting enough on its own to merit the amount of time it's given--even though it provides an opportunity for the appearance of the always welcome Bob Christo.

All of this is a shame not just for the audience, who must suffer through Toofan's vast stretches of unengaging filler, but also for Amitabh Bachchan, who so desperately needed for the movie to be a hit. Because, as I've indicated, Toofan contains all the makings of a very entertaining film; it's just that those involved in its creation were too busy throwing anything that they thought might stick at it to take stock of exactly what those makings were. And so a lot of fun, cheesy thrills--as well as a serviceably heroic performance by its star and some pretty well-staged scenes of violent action--ended up getting buried in a storm of half-baked contrivances and unnecessary shtick. As a result Toofan was a film that was pretty hard to love--and Amitabh was still left with a long climb ahead of him in his struggle back to the top.

And to belabor things, perhaps the image of Amitabh wearing a somewhat unflattering and ungainly costume while trying to climb up a rope into a moving airplane provides a suitable metaphor for that struggle. He would eventually succeed, of course, but not until a lot of time had passed in the wake of Toofan's inauspicious release. As mentioned earlier, more box office disappointments would follow, and in response Amitabh decided to take another break from acting to try his luck on the corporate side of the entertainment industry. The result was Amitabh Bachchan Corp., Ltd. (ABCL), an ambitious film production, marketing and distribution company. Unfortunately, that venture failed spectacularly due to mismanagement within just a couple of years, and Amitabh returned to acting once again, only to produce yet another string of sinkers. Strangely, the thing that facilitated Amitabh's eventual return to the diamond glow of superstardom was not any kind of breakthrough film role at all, but rather his becoming host of the Indian version of the TV quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? By becoming a familiar presence in their homes week after week, the Big B once again endeared himself to the Indian public, making them receptive again to his presence on the big screen. This was also helped, I imagine, by the fact that, with a string of grizzled patriarch roles, Amitabh was playing characters appropriate to his age for the first time in 20 years.

So there you have it, boys and girls: The legend of Toofan, a story of crashing falls from great heights, tears, struggle, and ultimate triumph over adversity, all far more interesting then the legend that the makers of Toofan the movie set out to tell. So next time you're watching some current Bollywood hit and you see Amitabh Bachchan making a cameo as an aging kingpin or a lovable uncle with an annoying catchphrase, keep in mind that this is a man for whom the privilege of phoning in performances in fluff roles that are largely the result of stunt casting has been especially hard won. But I jest, of course. Being huge fans and supporters of Amitabh, we here at Teleport City wouldn't have wished anything but a happy ending for him. That doesn't mean I'm not going to send him a bill for the time I spent watching Toofan, though.

Labels: Action: Superheroes, Bollywood, Stars: Amitabh Bachchan, Year: 1989

posted by Todd at 6:13 PM | 6 Comments

Monday, January 21, 2008

Sinbad of the Seven Seas

Release Year: 1989
Country: Italy
Starring: Lou Ferrigno, John Steiner, Roland Wybenga, Ennio Girolami, Hal Yamanouchi, Yehuda Efroni, Alessandra Martines, Teagan Clive, Stefania Girolami, Melonee Rodgers, Cork Hubbert, Daria Nicolodi.
Writer: Luigi Cozzi and Enzo Castellari
Director: Enzo Castellari
Cinematographer: Blasco Giurato
Music: Dov Seltzer
Availability: Buy it from Amazon

I can anticipate a lot of things that would potentially show up as the first shot in a Sinbad the Sailor movie (as opposed to Sinbad the Comedian movie, though I can also imagine the first shot in that movie as well, and it's Sinbad making an exaggerated screaming face and running away in fast motion from a poopy baby diaper), but one thing I never expected was a still shot of Edgar Allen Poe. It's that same one everyone uses when they need a photo of Edgar Allen Poe. Maybe that's the only one. I don't know. I also didn't know why Poe would be associated with the opening of a Sinbad the Sailor movie, though I could understand it in a Sinbad the Comedian movie, what with the macabre and all. Luckily, this film begins with a text crawl that explains to me that Edgar Allen Poe wrote a story called " The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade," and it is upon that tale this movie is based.

Within the first few minutes, I found the claim that this movie was based on a story by Edgar Allen Poe to be somewhat, for the sake of tact, let's say "dubious." Luckily, we live in the future, and while the future has let us down in so many ways -- no jet packs, no flying cars -- it has made one important concession to mankind, and that is the ability to go to the internet and instantly look up information on whether or not Edgar Allen Poe wrote a story called " The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade," and if so, if that story featured Sinbad the Sailor in a heart-to-heart gab session with a misunderstood rubber cobra.

It turns out that Poe did, in fact, write a story called "The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade." And thanks to the future, I was even able to read it without having to go down to the library and verify that it exists, then find the book, then deal with either all the crazy hobos at the public library or all the hobo-esque sleeping students at the local academic library. I am by no means a Poe scholar, and of his works, the only ones I have actually read are the ones that were eventually made into movies starring Vincent Price. So perhaps I am not one to judge the particular merits of "The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade." I hear Poe himself was rather fond of the story. I thought it was pretty dreadful, and it seems many critics agreed. The basic idea of the story is that the narrator has found a book wherein he discovers the final few pages detailing the life of Scheherazade, the woman who spun the 1001 Arabian Tales to stave off execution at the hands of her sultan husband. Poe's story is set on the night after the sultan has canceled his decree that Scheherazade be put to death. She then explains that there is more to the story of Sinbad, and proceeds to relay a rather uninspired story that has Sinbad and his crew basically traveling from one crudely sketched fantastic location to the next, with no particular point to things. This story is punctuated from time to time by grunts of disbelief from the sultan, who eventually pronounces the whole story so preposterously awful that he reinstates the execution of Scheherazade. The end. I was hard pressed to disagree with him.

I'm not sure what Poe was attempting to accomplish with this story. If we are supposed to be enthralled by this final adventure of Sinbad, then the story is an obvious failure. As adventure fare, it's terrible. Poe was a lot of things, but Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert E. Howard he wasn't. If, however, Poe was attempting to somehow satirize the genre of fantastic adventure fiction, well then reading an awful story isn't made better if the last paragraph is a guy exclaiming, "That story was crap! Awff wif 'er 'ead!" Because I assume all sultans spoke with a thick Cockney accent, or at least that the sentence "off with her head!" must always be pronounced as such. Having Poe himself explain that the story was bad is cold comfort for the time I just spent reading it, and it forgets that the golden rule of satire is that you must first be an excellent example of that which you are satirizing. As potential satire, "The Thousand and Second Tale" is less Hot Fuzz, more Epic Movie.

This opinion thusly entered into the public register and scheduled for debate at the next meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Turn of the Century Works of Fantastic and Speculative Literature, where I regularly hold court whilst smoking my pipe and discussing my latest expedition to the steppes of Mongolia, let me then say that if, perhaps, Cannon films were to come along some hundred or so years later and wreak havoc with the contents of Poe's Sinbad story while, at the same time, claiming to be an adaptation of it -- well, let's just say that I don't feel any great crime against art has been committed in this instance. Sinbad of the Seven Seas will commit many crimes against many things, but playing fast and loose with "The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade" is a misdemeanor, at worst, and given the quality of the source material, it's more like the sort of offense where a good natured 1930s cop just musses an impish kid's hair and says in his lilting Irish brogue, "Go on, lad, get a move on. Ahh, lovable scamp! I was that way when I was his age." And then, of course, he would belt out "Galway Bay," because that's what cops do, right?

Anyway, if ever there was a perfect storm of awful, it's this movie. First of all, it comes to us courtesy of the illustrious Cannon Film Group, brainchild of Israeli producers Golan and Globus. This is the studio that brought us everything from Sho Kosugi ninja films to Chuck Norris drivin' airboats for freedom. Second, it was written by Lewis Coates -- also known to many as Luigi Cozzi, the Italian exploitation writer-director who gave us the classic Star Crash and the less classic Alien Contamination. Third, it was directed by Enzo G. Castellari, the man who brought us a number of classic gritty 1970s crime films and less classic 1980s post-apocalypse sci-fi films. And mixing these ingredients into a deadly stew is star Lou Ferrigno, former star of The Incredible Hulk and, more recent and related to this film, two mind boggling Hercules films -- also courtesy of Cannon -- in which Hercules did things like fight giant robots sent down by sexy female inventor Daedalus from the home of the Greek Gods up on the Moon. Turning this lot loose on the Arabian Nights seems like a can't win must-lose situation. Sinbad with a laser gun or a curved lightsaber scimitar? Bring it on!

Unfortunately, Sinbad of the Seven Seas fails to live up to the high standards set by the two Hercules films, and if you've seen either of those, then you know what that means. This is likely due to the fact that, while the Hercules films were released in 1983, when The Cannon Group was at the apex of its Chuck Norris-fuelled power, Sinbad of the Seven Seas limped into production in 1989, at a time when personal conflict, lawsuits, and massive dollops of corruption had ripped apart the empire Golan and Globus built on the backs of ninjas, forbidden dances, and cut-rate Indiana Jones knock-offs. The halcyon days of crap cinema the likes of which Cannon excelled at were over, and while a few more Cannon productions found their way to the theaters (most notably, Albert Pyun's Cyborg starring Jean-Claude Van Damme -- more or less the last breath for Cannon), movies like Sinbad of the Seven Seas ended up going direct to video when previously they would have been shown on the big screen much to the delight and/or confusion of children standing hand-in-hand across America and demanding more Lou Ferrigno action. With no prospect for theatrical distribution, and with the studio itself in tatters, Sinbad of the Seven Seas ends up feeling like a cheap, hackneyed bit of half-assery. Oh wait, that describes pretty much all Cannon films, doesn't it? Well then imagine that instead of watching a movie that is a cheap, hackneyed bit of half-assery, you are watching a movie that is telling you about a movie that is a cheap, hackneyed bit of half-assery.

Because that's what Sinbad of the Seven Seas does. It tells you what is happening and how thrilling it all is, in order to not have to show you. The film, inspired no doubt by the success of The Princess Bride, is contained within a framing narrative in which a bored mother (Dario Argento's muse, Daria Nicolodi) reads a bedtime story to her equally bored daughter. Usually, when a film uses this framing device, the narration fades out and the movie of the story being told kicks in pretty quickly. But not here. Even though we expect it to end when it triumphantly announces, "And so our sotry begins," it doesn't. The narration -- which, mind you, is dubbed throughout by a voice actor even more bored than Daria Nicolodi -- continues for the entire movie, and it tends to be in the flavor of, "And then some things happened and Sinbad had wondrous adventures," without the movie actually showing most of those adventures. Even dialog scenes are voiced over by the narrator telling us what Sinbad and his pals are talking about, probably as both a money saver and as a way to cover for the fact that the cast probably spoke half a dozen different languages. Not that the movie is totally without action. In fact, if you get over the annoying and persistent narration, this movie, while certainly not attaining that rarefied air that is the domain of Cannon's Hercules films, is a clumsy but fair adventure and fond farewell to the days of Cannon.

Sinbad's crew is one for the ages, consisting of Sinbad himself in glorious purple pantaloons or a loin cloth, depending on how the mood strikes him on any given day, and his trusted friends the Viking named Viking (Ennio Girolami, an old Enzo Castellari hand), Prince Ali, a bald guy named The Bald Cook, Poochy the Dwarf, and the Chinese Soldier of Fortune, who is played by a Japanese guy and dressed like a Thai ladyboy on his way home from a particularly colorful Siamese gay rights parade and martial arts demonstration. Sinbad and the boys have returned to lush, beautiful Basra after many adventures we did not get to see, so Sinbad's buddy Ali can settle down with his sexy bride to be, Alina (Alessandra Martines). Unfortunately, Basra and its wise and kindly king have fallen under the spell of the king's cruel adviser and wizard, Jaffar (John Steiner). You know, you'd think that if these kings were really so wise, they'd stop picking the black-clad, giggling fiend with a penchant for maliciously twisting the ends of his dastardly handlebar mustaches to be their advisers. No sooner does Sinbad arrive at the palace than Jaffar shows up to roll his eyes, point, and trap everyone.

If there is a highlight in this movie, besides the threadbare synth score and the inevitable island of sexy Amazons, it is John Steiner's performance as Jaffar. Think of the most ridiculously over the top, cartoonish, hammiest performance you have ever seen. Now times it by infinity. That's getting close to comprehending the deliriously over-the-top histrionics of Steiner. It's like the man mainlined pure essence of William Shatner, Jack Palance, Vincent Price, that black guy who was always scared in 1940s movies, Doctor Morpheus, and Bruce Vilanch. Every single sentence is shouted, and not a second goes by that Steiner isn't pointing, clutching at the sky, bugging out his eyes, and traipsing about in the most insanely delicious style imaginable. He is absolutely off the charts here, and as lackluster and bereft of energy as the rest of the film may be, Jaffar alone is worth the price of the movie.

Anyway, while Jaffar is busy being diabolical, Sinbad rallies his men to fight back. This involves, among other things, a long scene in which Lou Ferrigno chats up a cobra in true "girl talk" fashion, only to tie all the cobras together so that he might use them as a rope to escape the dungeon and rescue his friends, who are being menaced by out-of-shape S&M dudes and sock puppet piranhas. Oh man, I've been to that club before. It's OK, but it's not as good as it was in the 70s. During this and most subsequent fight scenes, Lou Ferrigno will showcase Sinbad's sophisticated fighting style, which is to draw his scimitar, look at his opponents, look at his sword, then toss the sword away so he can charge the bad guys headlong and throw them across the set. Why does he even bother to carry a sword? The one time he uses it is when he's fighting a rock man -- the one opponent most likely not to be harmed by a sword. Incidentally, Sinbad defeats the rock man by throwing a rock at him.

While Sinbad is doing that, we pay another visit to Jaffar, who is...OH MY GOD IT'S JON MIKL-THOR! It's Jon Mikl-Thor hanging out in Jaffar's rooftop laboratory! Oh wait, no it isn't. It's a teased-blond bodybuilder chick who looks and dresses exactly Jon Mikl-Thor in Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare. I have no idea who she is supposed to be or where she came from. She shows up out of nowhere, and then hangs out in the lab for the rest of movie making doubting comments about Jaffar's plan, which Jaffar responds to with lots of eye bugging, pointing at the air, and rolling of his R's. Jaffar's nefarious scheme, we discover via ample shouting and hissing and pointing, is to scatter a sacred gem to the far corners of the world, then hook the princess up to his H.G. Wells machine to...honestly, I have no idea. All it means is that Sinbad and his crew have to travel the world to collect all the pieces of the gem so that Sinbad can then...actually, I have no idea why Sinbad needs to reassemble the gem. It'll bring happiness to Basra or something. We've all seen how well that worked out. But what I do know is that this means Sinbad and his crew will set sail, fight some zombies, some rock men, undead medieval knights, and other monsters as they strive to free Arabia from Jaffar's wicked spell. I assumed at the end Sinbad will fight Jaffar and his bodybuilder girlfriend, but it turns out she just sort of wanders off in search of a protein shake or something, leaving Sinbad to face off against -- huh, what do you know? His doppleganger. Any film that features Lou Ferrigno fighting Lou Ferrigno has got to be pretty good, right?

As cool as all that stuff above may sound, the sad fact is that much of it is pretty clumsy. Enzo Castellari was a pretty good action director, great from time to time, but with this material, he just seems to meander and have no idea what to do other than show it in slow motion from time to time (his signature). Maybe if Sinbad had been a tough as nails police inspector from Napoli, this would have worked out better for everyone. Instead, the movie lacks any real energy, and the constant bored narration saps the moments of action of the spirit they need to succeed. The final result is a movie that has the cheap look of a community theater read-through of a Sinbad movie written by one of the members. I blame...well, everyone but Lou Ferrigno and John Steiner. And that woman who plays the Amazon queen. Holy cow! Arabia is lucky I wasn't Sinbad, because given the choice between saving crappy old Basra from Jaffar and his bodybuilder girlfriend or spending a lifetime with a hot, scantily clad jungle woman prone to doing wiggly dances -- well, take a wild guess.

Castellari was at the end of a long career full of cool movies like Shark Hunter, Heroin Busters, and High Crime. After Sinbad of the Seven Seas, he was relegated to the backwaters of Italian television movies, though some of them must have been popular because he made like nine hundred TV movies in the "Extralarge" series. Similarly, Luigi Cozzi's days of writing and directing awesome films like Star Crash and less than awesome films like Alien Contamination were behind him as well. He cranked out a couple more films, but by 1990, he was pretty much done. In a way, it makes Sinbad of the Seven Seas a bittersweet picture for fans of exploitation in general and Italian exploitation in particular. I mean, here in a single film you have the sort of weak, exhausted last hurrah of Golan and Globus' Cannon Group. You have the same for writers and directors Luigi Cozzi and Enzo Castellari. They may not mean much but bad news to most people, but man alive -- I love these guys. The total number of entertaining hours given to me by these three sources is too scary to tally.

And this is it. This is the swan song. Like battered survivors in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, this is where they limp off into the sunset to be forgotten. It's a shame that there wasn't a way to make Sinbad of the Seven Seas into the completely bonkers, inept swashbuckling masterpiece these guys deserved. Everything is almost there, but the end product is less a celebration and more a world-weary sigh. This is the end of an era, boys. Sinbad of the Seven Seas is the group of battle-weary veterans realizing that their day has passed. Heck, it gets me a little misty-eyed, and that's probably why I like the thing and think it's worth checking out. I mean, there is still plenty of weird stuff. It may not be as good as the Lou Ferrigno Hercules films, but it has rubber snakes, zombie attacks, Jaffar's eye-bulging madness, that sexy Amazon chick, a fight with a slime man, and that random bodybuilder chick.

Judging most of the acting at all is pointless, as everyone was redubbed for the final product. Ferrigno, former bodybuilder and permanent fixture at any convention that waxes poetic over The Incredible Hulk, is no master thespian, but he plays Sinbad with a laid-back affability that makes him impossible to dislike and impervious to meaningful criticism. John Steiner, of course, acts at a level that can't be contained by mere speaking, so you can judge his performance despite the dubbing (and the judgment is that he's awesome). The rest of Sinbad's crew is playing to character, so the Chinese guy who is Japanese and dresses Thai is stoic; the Viking is hearty; Ali is noble in a boring way; and the cook and Poochy the Dwarf are frequently terrified and confused. Princess Alina doesn't have much to do but lay back, let her bosoms heave, and look gorgeous, but she does that with admirable skill. A couple other people show up, including a pointless comic relief guy and his daughter (played by Castellari's real life daughter), but there's not much reason to discuss them. This show belongs to Ferrigno and Steiner.

Sometimes the fights are OK, like the one with the zombies and the one where Sinbad storm the gay bondage club where his buddies are chained up and being dangled over sock puppets. The zombie one even has Sinbad punching through a zombie's chest and pulling out his heart -- which is a tiny Madball version of the zombie's face! This causes Sinbad to crush the head/heart, point directly into the camera (a taste of your own medicine there, Jaffar!) and exclaim, "Jaffar!!! You're next." When Jaffar views this event on his magic voodoo television, Sinbad is looking directly at him. This is the second or third time this happens in the movie. One expects that Sinbad would know Jaffar is watching him on a magic TV pond. That's what evil wizards do. But Sinbad's ability to know exactly where Jaffar has positioned his magical cameras is pretty impressive. unless, I suppose, Sinbad goes through the entire movie with a giant movie camera floating above him, in which case I guess it'd be pretty easy to figure which way to look when wishing to address Jaffar personally.

As for other aspects of the film...well, there aren't as many special effects as I'd like, but the ones that are there are about as horrible as I would want them to be. The rubber snakes and piranha sock puppets are a real highlight. And seriously -- those piranhas! Did the guy who made those never see a piranha before in his life? I find that hard to believe, given that this is the world of Italian exploitation filmmaking we're talking about, meaning that at least one special effects guy must have worked on at least one Italian cannibal film, and you know they love piranhas. Sinbad also fights a rock man and a slime guy, but neither of those are especially epic effects.

Then there's the rockin' synth soundtrack! Nothing says epic old world adventure quite like a keytar! The soundtrack may be anachronistic, but given that this is a movie where the prince of Basra looks like that guy from Wham (you know, the other one), it seems strangely appropriate. Most of it sounds like something written for Lucio Fulci's Conquest but ultimately rejected for being too goofy.

And of course, there's all the fun to be had with the homoerotic subtext... err, well... when a big, sweaty, muscular dude in leather chaps wraps a chain around a big muscular dude in purple tights, and then they proceed to rub against each other and grunt, and it's all filmed in slow motion -- that's, ummm... that's not subtext is it? Seriously though, as a guy who doesn't mind a little homoeroticism in his films, this is how I want all my gay films to be: manly men striking heroic poses, then wrestling with each other. When I heard Brokeback Mountain was going to be a gay cowboy film, I was overjoyed. I hoped it would be like The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, only with dudes kissing each other. Instead, it was two hours of shepherds talking about their feelings and alienation. Forget that! When I watch a gay movie, I want to be tough guys blowing shit up, wrestling, leading revolts against Rome, throwing each other at sock puppets -- I want gay action movies. I think the time is right. Gay cinema will have made a tremendous leap forward when it starts producing films that aren't about being gay, but instead are about guys punching each other in the face, jumping muscle cars through the open boxcar doors of moving freight trains and throwing swords across the room, then they plant big wet ones on each other. Is it wrong for me to dream of this utopia?

Folks, when they say they don't make 'em like they used to, they mean movies like High Sierra, and movies like Sinbad of the Seven Seas. Just as it marks the end of one era -- for exploitation film, for Cannon, for Castellari, for sword and sorcery movies -- it marks the dawn of a new one, for this is the point at which the "direct to video" production really came into its own and would be dominated by another studio not entirely unlike Cannon: Charles Band's Full Moon Entertainment and it's many subsidiaries. Golan and Globus themselves would try to make the transition to the 1990s with separate and sundry production companies, but continued incompetence, personal conflicts, and uncontrollable corruption sunk pretty much all of their respective projects before anything substantial was ever achieved. Sinbad of the Seven Seas marks the point at which cheap, shoddy rip-offs could no longer be hustled onto actual movie screens, complete with a marketing campaign, television commercials, and actual interest. It marks the point at which those films were aimed instead at the home video market, which really came into its own during the 1980s. It marks the point where the only crap films being released to theaters costs hundreds of millions of dollars instead of hundreds of thousands (or maybe just thousands) of dollars. Fare thee well, Sinbad. Fare thee well, Stryker. And so long Arabian Adventure, which I recall liking as a child but remember almost nothing about as a grown man. Was Mickey Rooney driving a giant clockwork robot around in the desert or something? Wasn't Christopher Lee named Alakazam? How is that movie not out on DVD? I have a feeling it would make an excellent double feature with Sinbad of the Seven Seas, and by excellent, I mean it would be one of those things I would make people watch, and they would vaguely resent me for it for years.

Given my druthers, I would watch Hercules and The Adventures of Hercules. That's Cannon fantasy from a time when the studio was flush with cash and drunk amid the Golden Age. Sinbad of the Seven Seas is the final gasp of a once mighty people, now decadent and wasted shells of their former selves. But you should still see it, because Jaffar is incredible and Lou Ferrigno fights Lou Ferrigno. The movie actually gets a little battier and more enjoyable every time I watch it. Perhaps some day, I will feel that it deserves to take it's rightful place alongside the Hercules films and Seven Magnificent Gladiators, thus forming a nigh invulnerable wall of Cannon-produced Lou Ferrigno sword and sorcery wonder. Plus, this movie would make an amazing stage musical. So all you people who thought Legally Blonde was worth a stage production -- your destiny is Enzo G. Castellari Presents Edgar Allen Poe's Sinbad of the Seven Seas: The Musical. Get crackin'!

Labels: Director: Enzo Castellari, Fantasy, Fantasy: Sword and Sorcery, Studio: Cannon, Year: 1989

posted by Keith at 10:56 PM | 8 Comments

Monday, February 05, 2007

Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend

DIGG THIS ARTICLE. 1989, Japan. Starring Yasunori Matsumoto, Koichi Yamadera, Yoko Asagami, Daisuke Gori, Tomohiro Nishimura, Maya Okamoto, Hirotaka Suzuoki, Yumi Takada, Norio Wakamoto. Directed by Hideki Takayama. Written by Sho Aikawa.

I was having a hard time starting this review, and I'm not sure why. I don't mean that I was caught in some moral dilemma, wondering if I should dare discuss such a filthy, irredeemable piece of trash -- I think we all know how such a moral dilemma would hash out if I'm involved. I guess it was just a case of writer's block, or exhaustion. Or maybe it was the fact that there were just so many things to say, so many approaches that could be taken in discussing the source material, that I was overwhelmed. Perhaps even spoiled for choice. And under a bit of pressure. An epic as vast and sprawling and serious as this demands an appropriately grave and serious demeanor. Would I do the subject justice? Would my review be deserving of such a monumental work of art? In the end, I simply had to accept that sometimes words don't come easy, even to a rambling windbag like me, but like the titular character of the Overfiend, while words may not come easily, they must come never the less.

Which brings me to the disagreeable preface that must be applied to a review of a film of this nature. As regular readers know, I pride myself in ardently defending the standards and decency of the community. Luckily, since the community to which I refer is the Internet, which means pretty much anything short of Hitler jerking off on Jesus while the Savior makes sweet love to a little boy can be considered decent and acceptable. Still, even with the community standards of the Internet thus established, I feel like I should warn some of our less seasoned and no doubt happier readers that the movie about which we're going to talk today is a work of questionable morality and ill repute.

At this point in my career, I don't think any recreated act on film or video could manage to shock or offend me. Amuse, perhaps. Disappoint, sure. But when you've been at this for as long as I have, the disconnect between make-believe and reality becomes crystal clear, and once you've managed that, there's not much point in getting offended by goofy make-believe sleaze. But I understand that not all of you share this particular immunity toward offense, for a variety of valid personal reasons, so allow me to warn you now: Legend of the Overfiend is utter and absolute filth. Unless, like me, what was human in you died a long time ago, you will find this series inexcusably tasteless, offensive, and perhaps even upsetting. In a couple weeks, I'll be reviewing the ridiculously fun and enjoyable Bollywood caper Shaan, and I suggest that if you have heart or soul left in your being, you simply rejoin us then and give this whole horrible Legend of the Overfiend thing a miss.

On the other hand, if you find cartoon tentacle porn more absurd than upsetting, and if you want to slog through a film that is indeed filthy and wretched, but also one of the single most important titles in the history of anime in the United States, then steel yourself, make sure your boss isn't working (I'm writing this at work -- I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be reading it there), and prepare to submerge yourself in a series that is impressive both for how callously offensive and perverse it strives to be while also striving to be colossally epic and vast in scale -- sort of like the Old Testament.

When, during the summer of 2006, Teleport City decided to dig about in the waters of anime from the 1980s, we mentioned on more than one occasion that the eighties were probably the most glorious decade of unfettered excess and decadence in the anime world. The giant robots and melancholy space pirates of the 1970s gave way to hot chicks in battle armor, exploding heads, and the now infamous birth of tentacle porn, among other things. While today's anime market may be choked with cheap hentai titles full of tentacle rape and nurses pooping on each other, it's neither as shocking nor as notable today as it was in the eighties, for two main reasons. First, the eighties did it first, and just about everything that happens today is derivative of the sleazy pioneers of the 1980s. Modern sleazeball anime may have plumbed further into the depths of human perversions and replaced magical demon bodily fluids with actual human bodily fluids, but given how mainstreamed porn and sexual deviance has become (and God bless it!), even the most shockingly sick and twisted modern hentai lacks the punch of its forefathers, if for no other reason than we've seen it all before. I don't know what it says about me or society that a title like Cool Devices can come out, and my reaction is a decadent sigh of boredom and, "Oh, ho hum. He's peeing on his sister."

Second, modern hentai (for you people who don't take time to acquaint yourself with esoteric terms, "hentai" is what people call porn anime so they don't have to call it porn anime) exists largely and almost exclusively within the confines of the porn ghetto. There is very little, if any, cross-over between hentai and the more mainstream world of shrieking blonde ninjas in orange jumpsuits telling me to "believe it!" Of course, I speak only of official production anime; if one needs to find the crossover between porn and mainstream anime, one need only turn to our dear old friend, the Internet, which will allow you to access a whole world of fanfic in which the characters of Naruto lick each others buttholes while fending off an endless attack of bad grammar and spelling mistakes. But that's fanfic, and it's a ghetto all its own. Only Dragonball filk is lower.

There was plenty of underground hentai in the 80s, of course, but there were also several titles which crossed the line (in more ways than one) and either flirted with or achieved legitimate mainstream crossover success. Here in the United States, when anime broke in the latter half of the Reagan era, it was defined primarily by three titles, though only two are ever really acknowledged as having reigned supreme, while the third is filed away as sort of this guilty curiosity that no one really saw, but don't let that sort of anime history revisionism fool you. There were three king hell titles: Akira was the obvious top of the heap, followed by the OVA Bubblegum Crisis, which dominated the home video market for reasons I still cannot fathom to this day. I guess it was all we had at the time, and it was better than watching MD Geist.

The third title comes to us courtesy of one of the creators of the classic anime series Yamato, aka Starblazers in the United States, and even though Akira is named time and again as the defining moment in 80s anime and one of the landmark accomplishments in the history of anime as a whole, it was the bastard son of a writer-director-producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki -- The Nish, as he has become known lately -- that really defined anime in the mainstream press. In between creating Starblazers, delighting generations with Odin: Photon Space Sailer Starlight, and shooting cannons off on his private yacht, Nishizaki found time to serve as producer for a new series which, unlike all his previous ideas, wasn't just a rehash of Yamato. Following the lead of Lovecraft-inspired horror that flirted with graphic sex presented to us in Wicked City, Nishizaki decided that the one thing wrong with that movie was that it only featured some sex thrown in with its violence, and never had the guts to show full-on penetration of a woman by a gigantic demon penis.

And so, as the 90s came to a close and the window for getting a high-profile work of such decadence and depravity was closing, Nishizaki collected together a crew that included director Hideki Takayama (still brand new to the game in 1989, but he's since gone on to direct all sorts of screwed-up demon rape porn, and for some reason, Sakura Wars) and writer Sho Aikawa (who was fresh off the popular title Vampire Princess Miyu and would go on to write for Fullmetal Alchemist), and together, they made a little OVA series called Urotsukidoji, more popularly known as Legend of the Overfiend.

This is a pretty dubious assembly of talent, and one sort of has to stretch the meaning of the word talent to really fit them all in. After all, Nishizaki hadn't really come up with anything memorable since Starblazers, and he seemed to be batshit insane in addition. Sho Aikawa -- who I'd like to think is the same Sho Aikawa who would go on to acting fame in Takashi Miike's Dead or Alive trilogy, but I'm pretty sure it isn't -- may have achieved some degree of respectability with Vampire Princess Miyu, but that was flirtation with respectability, at best, and you have to do much better work if you want to make people forget about you also having written Dog Soldier and Angel Cop. And director Hideki Takayama? Other than becoming the go-to guy for Overfiend sequels and rip-offs, he doesn't have much to offer. But the fact remains that while they may not have been impressive names, they were still names, and they had some legitimate work under the belt. And The Nish, crazy or not, still had Yamato era clout that helped make his own private exploration of ridiculously grotesque and pornographic extremes more of a high profile release than the average piece of hentai naughtiness.

But whatever respectability the Overfiend saga -- and porn aside, it is a saga, complete with a vast and ambitious personal mythology and epic scope -- may have squeezed out in Japan is nothing compared to what happened to the thing when it hit the United States. It became a cult phenom that, for a brief time, very nearly rivaled the status of Akira, albeit with a decidedly different tone in those who talked about it. I remember seeing it for the first time in 1990, when a friend who was heavy into trading VHS tapes to get obscure horror films, ended up with a copy on a tape where it shared space with some Japanese porn movie about a woman pursued by a garbage bag containing her murdered husband, and an underground video of some chick performing "hanadensha," or "pussy arts," such as blowing up balloons, shooting a dart gun, smoking a cigarette, and, umm, filling herself up with squirming, live eels. Yeah, I really don't have any excuse whatsoever, other than it was pretty late, and we sure did laugh a lot.

It was just the first episode of Overfiend, fuzzy and with no translation, so all we really knew was that there was a spectacle on the screen the likes of which we'd never really seen, not even in Wicked City. And we weren't the only ones. Bootleg copies of this "ridiculously screwed up thing from Japan" were circulating like wild fire throughout the cult film underworld, and while many looked on with awe-inspired disgust, that doesn't change the fact that many looked on, always corrupted by a friend waving a VHS tape and saying, "Dude, you have got to see this!" So many saw it, in fact, that the Overfiend eventually crept into mainstream consciousness and became the poster boy for how hideous and corrupt anime was. Not just porn anime, but all anime. It didn't matter if it was the gender bending shenanigans of Ranma 1/2, the turgid teen romance of Kigamure Orange Road, or the epic science fiction of Akira. Overfiend, as far as the local newscaster was concerned, embodied them all, and all anime looked like and was as perverse as Urotsukidoji. If only. I might have finished Kigamure Orange Road if that had been the case.

Of course, it's not like anime was totally innocent of the charges. The 80s were, as we've said, pretty packed to the gills with messed up stuff. If anything, The Overfiend was simply the trends of the 1980s taken to their most logical extreme, or as logical as Nishizaki was ever capable of being, and exploding in the final year of that decade with all the gruesome force of the Overfiend's orgasm blowing some chick's head off in a messy splash of blood, brains, and semen. It was the last gasp of the twisted, free-for-all of the 1980s. After that, anime settled down, and the porn settled to the bottom of the barrel. In time, when old timers would go back and talk about the seminal movies of the 1980s, they would neglect to mention the most "seminal" of them all. If Urotuskidoji was mentioned, it was usually as an offhanded aside, or a sneering condemnation of how this tasteless abomination ruined anime and made everyone thing anime fans were all a bunch of murderous pervs. Rarely will they mention that, for better or for worse, damn near everyone who watched anime in those days saw it. Rarely will they mention that it was, again for better or for worse, a defining title of the era, and that among other dubious claims to fame, it was the first anime feature (when the OVA episodes were edited together to create a feature film) to be released in both dubbed and subtitled format not just to U.S. home video -- but to U.S. movie theaters as well.

The Overfiend gets no respect, and frankly, it doesn't deserve much. The animation is sometimes hit or miss, occasionally nicely realized, and in some cases bordering on great; the story is scatter-brained; and yes, it's packed full of misogynistic violence toward women, underaged sex (though the warning at the front of the film swears the high school characters are all over the age of nineteen), and rape that culminates in exploding heads. It's just not very good. But it does have its moments, and good or not, it played a huge role in defining the formative years of anime, and deserves, if nothing else, to be recognized for its contributions (be there good or ill) and its rightful place in the history of anime. So it was that I decided that, while I wasn't going to champion the series (I save my Nishizaki championing for Odin), I would at least try to put it in it's proper context, and I would do so with the help, should they chose to offer it, of the great and mighty torchbearers of celebrating "old school" anime, the Anime World Order podcast. Of course, they're a podcast, and I'm a written review website, so I don't know exactly how this collaboration will work out, but that's all part of the fun.

Of course, as soon as Gerald from the AWO took me up on the offer, I had to figure out exactly how I was going to deal with such a notorious and admittedly irredeemable piece of filth. The Overfiend, I mean, not Gerald. In my younger years, I would have simply indulged in it with reckless abandon, celebrating the filth and the fury with slimy screencaps and interminable gusto. I am older now, and not so prone to adolescent fits of petty offensiveness, but I'm also still not offended by things that are saucy or stupid, or in the case of Urotsukidoji, both saucy and stupid. And in the end, Urotsukidoji is definitely stupider than it is offensive. In fact, I find the whole thing so absurd, so totally ludicrous as to be inoffensive, because seriously, man, how can anyone take this crap seriously? There are much scarier things in the world and much scarier things in the world of anime, and they are called moe and harem shows, but we'll come to those later.

So in deference to my more sensitive readers who do not share my callous disregard for what you humans call morality, I'll do my best to exercise some degree of restraint, which may be an odd thing to do in the case of Urotsukidoji -- but only just barely, because while I may claim that the purpose of this review is to put this much maligned piece of trash in its rightful place in the pantheon of anime, my real motivation is simply to have a good laugh, which ultimately, is about all you should get from something as completely goofy as the Overfiend.

Our story begins with narration courtesy of a guy who seems to be competing with Tomisaburo Wakiyama as Ogami Ito for the deepest voice in the world. He lays out the basics for us -- demon world and human world, one intruding on the other -- the usual. And there's a chosen one who will rise up and cleanse the world and unite us all while demons with six breasts do it doggy style to clue parents in to the fact that they shouldn't have rented this movie for their kids, even though the kids themselves are no doubt appreciative. Right away Nishizaki clues us in to the fact that there's not going to be much in the way of originality on display in this story. We then meet the nominal hero of our story, a goofy peeping tom named Nagumo, who alternates his days between peeking in the girls' locker room and being licked on the cheek by the number one ace hero of the basketball court during some weird Japanese high school sport in which basketball games are accompanied by a girls' gymnastics routine. Watching everything from up in the rafters is Amano, the new kid at school who no one seems to notice has catlike whiskers. Amano is searching for the titular Overfiend, the super-being foretold by prophecy to be the savior of the world. Amano is pretty convinced that it's that cheek-licking basketball guy, but Amano's sexy sister Megumi is convinced that it's someone else, possibly nerdy perv Nagumo. Either way, once again we see that ancient beings relying on a "chosen one" is always a stupid idea, because the chosen one is always some kind of a chump. Here we get a face-licking basketball star or a masturbating nerd. Nice going, prophecy of old.

When next we meet the brave and noble Nagumo, he is slinking into the school to peep on Ameki, the sweet girl next door on whom he has a crush, and one of the female teachers. When it turns out that the teacher intends to sex up the young student, Nagumo assumes his standard position of peeking in. But when it's further revealed that the teacher is, in fact, a hideous demonic monster that is going to rape Akemi via a twitching tangle of giant tentacle penises that spurt glowing neon goo, well, Nagumo still just sort of squats there peeping through the crack in the doorway. It's not until Amano shows up that the sexual assault is halted thanks to some good ol' magical intervention that results in exploding heads.

The good thing about Legend of the Overfiend is that it doesn't try to trick you into thinking it's something it's not. If you are going to be offended and disgusted by the movie, it makes sure you know that from the very first few minutes. That way, at least you haven't wasted your time. Pretty much everything that will jam pack the rest of the series running time is put up front for your consideration in this opening scene, so you can't say Nishizaki didn't warn you. Personally, as I said before, the whole scenario is so utterly silly and juvenile and presented in such an over-the-top manner that it's really hard for me to feel offended in any way. I would have loved to have been sitting in on The Nish and his crew when they were writing the story for this absurd exercise in the extreme. Although the story itself is presented in a serious fashion, I can't imagine anyone taking it the least bit seriously when they were writing it.

But then again, Nishizaki is batshit insane, so who knows? Whatever sexual and psychological hang-ups he and the society in which he lived might have had are certainly laid bare in The Overfiend. There is an obvious fear and lack of understanding in regards to women. Lesbians are all secretly drooling demons who have hidden their giant penises behind a veneer of femininity. And even as they paint a terrified phobia of homosexuality, they fetishize the penis to a degree that would even make Tom of Finland blush. If you are the type to analyze such things, it's worth noting that The Nish made his millions working on the Yamato series. The original battleship Yamato was a massive World War II ship that was supposed to be the pride and joy of the Japanese people and a symbol of their might. Its construction bankrupted the Japanese military, and during it's first major combat operation, it was sunk by American airplanes. Still, however, the Yamato is held up by many -- mostly men -- as a great symbol of pride despite it being a catastrophic failure. More than a few people have said that the Yamato was nothing more than the "big dick" syndrome. Theirs was the biggest and that made them the baddest. Never mind that the thing turned out to be impotent.

So decades later, Nishizaki resurrects the myth of Yamato's grandeur by creating a cartoon series in which the original ship is recovered from its watery grave and turned into a spaceship that will save humanity. If The Nish had his history straight, then there would have been tremendous fanfare and pomp as the space battle cruiser Yamato was launched. Then it would have been shot down by aliens a few minutes later. But that would have been a pretty lame television series, and since Yamato is one of my favorites, I'm glad Nishizaki didn't go that route. And ultimately, I reckon championing the old Yamato battleship is no different than any other country championing their lost causes.

Anyway, after Yamato, Nishizaki made a show about a submarine that's turned into a spaceship -- completely different from the Yamato series, right? Anyway, you may notice that Nishizaki -- who also happens to be a gun and cannon nut, as well as sporting a fondness for speed boats and big yachts -- seems to have a preoccupation with things that are long and cylindrical in shape. And then comes The Overfiend...I've never seen Nishizaki naked, and likely never will, so I can't say what he's compensating for. However, it's pretty obvious that the man has built an entire career around his obsession with his own penis. Overfiend is just the most overt example.

Anyway, having established that this movie is going to be an affront to all that is decent and tasteful in the world, Overfiend then goes on to lay out the rest of its plot, which has got to be one of the most complex and sprawling mythologies ever grafted on to cheap animation and porn. Nishizaki may be obsessed with dicks, he may fear and/or hate women, he may be ripping off Wicked City, but no one can say that the man didn't have vision or put work into the back story of his infamous masterpiece of the grotesque. Spread over the first few episodes of Legend of the Overfiend, we get a story that spans thousands of years and involves everything from depraved captains of industry to Nazi madmen, to peeping tom high school students. As Amano and Megumi continue to try and ferret out the Overfiend -- or Chojin -- other forces from the demon realm seek to do the same. This includes such demon assassin hits as messing with that basketball guy during his orgy, offering up a giant possessed demon penis that will make the school's resident nerd ultra-potent and powerful if he chops off his own useless little member and replaces it, and finally sending a wizardy uber-being out to kill Amano. Just when you think Overfiend can't possibly get any sillier, it finds a way.

Eventually, Nagumo realizes his destiny, but to the horror of Megumi and Amano, it's not the destiny they expected -- and for all that is ridiculous about Overfiend, the final revelation that basically, the people who believed in the prophecy just got it all wrong, is a pretty nice writing touch. The series ends on a cliffhanger of sorts -- with Amano shedding his human disguise and attempting to take on the Overfiend himself while vowing to survive the carnage that comes from the inevitable destruction of the world. Unfortunately, the series is never fully resolved. The final two episodes of the OVA end up being post-apocalyptic side stories that don't really go anywhere, and subsequent sequel series' were equally pointless. Eventually, the final Urotsukidoji series was just a remake of the first series. If you've seen Odin and suffered through its non-ending, then you might pick up that this is sort of a thing for Nishizaki. Unfortunately, Overfiend does not end by randomly cutting to a Loudness music video.

Not all the blame (or credit -- whatever) for Urotsukidoji can be laid at the feet of Nishizaki. Urotsukidoji was actually created by manga artist Toshio Maeda in 1986. Maeda was working as a porn manga artist and had gotten bored, he says, with drawing the same mundane crap over and over. He decided that what erotic manga needed was a dash of grotesque fantasy. Blending his erotic manga with a Lovecraft-esque sense of the horrific, Maeda more or less invented the tentacle porn genre -- yes, it's a genre now -- with tentacles and nightmarish abstractions of the penis standing in for actual sexual organs as a way to skirt Japanese censorship laws. When Nishizaki seized upon Urotsukidoji as the source for his next masterpiece of anime, Maeda's position as the father of sick and twisted cartoon porn was cemented. Maeda went on to create several more of the more infamous high-profile hentai titles of the early 1990s, including the terrible Adventure Kid, Demon Beast Invasion, and La Blue Girl. Maeda is infinitely proud of his legacy and has reportedly even said that he wants "Tentacle Master" inscribed on his tombstone. Urotsukidoji remain his defining "masterpiece."

You know, Urotsukidoji is an absolute mess. Although the high concept is interesting and intricate, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. And it's still largely just a pornographic rip-off of Wicked City with a bit of Akira thrown in (the scene in which the Overfiend comes full into power and decides to destroy the world is very reminiscent of the finale of Akira). It draws from the same Lovecraftian/H.R. Giger vision of horror as Wicked City. The characters are ridiculous -- after being raped in every orifice by a teacher who turns into a slobbering monster, Akemi shows up for school the next day and is basically no more freaked out than, "Boy, that sure was weird." Nagumo is completely impossible to like as a character. I guess the story is ultimately about Amano and, to a lesser degree, Megumi, which is OK since Amano is the only halfways decently developed character in the whole thing. The animation is often incredibly cheap, with limited motion in most scenes. Effort seems to have been put into the big battles and the demon rape, but that's about it.

But for someone as awful as me, there's a perverse enjoyment to be extracted from the nonsense. For one, I admire the ambition of the story. Most of the tentacle porn that would follow in the footsteps of Urotsukidoji was incredibly weak -- basically, they would say, "There's a demon world, and they rape humans and some people fight them," and leave it at that, knowing that the ultimate goal of their little film is to get some lonely perv off, and he's probably not even going to listen to the plot. That wasn't good enough for Nishizaki. The man had created an expansive universe for Yamato, and even for Odin, and he saw no reason that Urotsukidoji shouldn't enjoy the same epic mythology. Never mind that it was an endless parade of filthy porn and callous rape; he was still going to weave a monstrously complex tapestry to serve as the backdrop Also, as cheap as the animation is in most scenes, one does have to admire the imagination that went into the monster design. There are, after all, a lot of monsters in Urotsukidoji, and no two of them look alike. From hulking wolfman-like monsters to grotesque toadmen that dress like Humphrey Bogart, the sheer number of drooling ghouls the art team dreamed up is fascinating. Of course, at the end of the day, it's all about the giant screaming (sometimes literally) cock, but still, points for wickedly sick imagination.

Finally, there's the finale. Although it leaves almost all of the plot threads dangling and is a weak resolution to the story as a whole, the scenes of mass destruction and carnage as the fury of the Chojin and the whole demon world is unleashed on earth are pretty impressive. They obviously cut costs on the rest of the series so they could deliver on the finale, and at least in that respect, Urotsukidoji doesn't disappoint.

But it's still pretty foul. I wouldn't really recommend it, although I was just as enthusiastic in the old days about convincing unsuspecting friends that they should watch it. But there is something grotesquely fascinating about the whole artistic abomination. The incredible insanity and over-the-top spectacle of it all trumps the nasty misogynistic edge and juvenile penis-obsession and really transforms Urotsukidoji into a sleazy carnival sideshow. You hate yourself for looking, but you can't turn away. It's that car wreck everyone slows down to gawk at. As wretched as it may be, it has a strangely hypnotic power that can draw even decent people into its world of laughing demons and spurting bodily fluids.

It might be worth watching just so you can see the cast list for the English dub. Apparently, whoever worked on it was a little embarrassed, so the English cast list includes names like Chris Courage, Rebel Joy, Rosie Palmer, and my two personal favorites, Lucy Morales and Jurgen Offen. I would assume that the use of such names is perfectly in tune with Nishizaki's high school locker room level of discourse. The dubbing was done primarily for the theatrical cut of the film, which combined the first few OVA episodes into one film and cut out all the scenes of actual penetration. The Japanese cast (most of whom elected to have their names left out of the credits) actually includes a lot of experienced actors, including a lot of people The Nish roped in off the Yamato series and other Leiji Masumoto works. Tomohiro Nishimura, who voices Amano, even worked on My Neighbor Totoro! It's sort of reminds me of all the respectable actors who showed up in Caligula.

If you are interested in the history and evolution of anime, you can't help but pay attention to it. The dang thing played in American movie theaters, for criminey's sake! Newspaper and TV reporters held it up as the sole defining example of "anime," resulting in crusades to have anime banned and all anime fans branded as slobbering perverts, while at the same time, apologists tied themselves in knots trying to write pieces that deconstructed and analyzed the film and trumpeted its artistic merits (it's a cautionary tale about teenage pregnancy or a cautionary tale against blind faith, depending on who's writing the analysis). It was an absolute fiasco, and if nothing else, I always enjoy a good fiasco. As alarmist and shocked as the reaction in the U.S. was, it was even more sensational in England. In the U.K., things were a little more serious. Urotsukidoji practically destroyed the anime market in England, which was only just coming off the high of its infamous Video Nasties years. It took a long time before anime fandom in the U.K. could rebuild itself. Like its titular character, Urotsukidoji destroyed the world so it could rebuild a new and better one in its place. But the fact that it gutted the industry and made anime so incredibly difficult to obtain for many people might be the main reason, far more so than the actual pervy content of the series, so many people harbor a lingering distaste for this anime atrocity.

For me, personally, it didn't make much of a difference. I didn't suffer any of the "anime is all porn and anime fans are all perverts" stigma because, frankly, no one at my high school even know what anime was or was in any position to even hear about Overfiend or anime. everyone in Buckner, Kentucky, was too committed to the new Bocephus album at the time. So I have a much better sense of humor about this series than many other people who did get branded as freaks on account of it may have -- even if they were Miyazaki fans and had never seen Overfiend. I mean, hell, as far as anyone I knew was concerned, if you were watching cartoons, period, you were just a nerd.

At the end of the day, Urotsukidoji is all those things and more -- and less. It is filth. It is irredeemable. It does have artistic merit. It lacks artistic merit. It is shameless and offensive. It is ridiculous and harmless. It was the logical illogical extreme and the culmination of the increasingly outrageous nature of anime in the 1980s. You should avoid it like the plague. You should absolutely see it.

There's really no way to make sense of the controversy and jungle of opinions surrounding the series. At the end of the day, you really just have to see for yourself. Me, I think it's mildly entertaining in spots and ultimately harmless. In fact, as outrageous as the porn aspects of Urotsukidoji may be, when held up against certain aspects of the modern anime landscape, it seems to be little more than goofy doodling -- quaint, almost, perhaps even innocent. And that's because everything is presents is so preposterous that it can't be taken seriously or really looked at as a corrupting agent. No one is going to go out and mimic the Chojin, after all. Compare that to something like the modern moe or harem show -- things that may not feature a giant demon raping a woman and making her body explode with his semen, but instead paint a world where an unlikable loser with no redeeming qualities never the less finds himself in control of a group of slavishly devoted women who worship him like a god. Or moe, in which female characters are so overly precious and innocent and doe-eyed and pre-pubescent that the whole thing reeks of child pornography. These types of shows are far more insidious and perverse than the flashy, over-the-top idiocy of Urotsukidoji. They often appeal to a segment of the population that really does relate in some way to the lead male character and really does let the portrayal of women and little girls affect their opinions of the real world. I don't see Urotsukidoji operating in quite the same fashion.

So yeah. Whatever man. Urotsukidoji is the tawdry piece of pornographic trash you've heard it is; it's also not all that fiendish or corrupting. It's just silly. But it is a major milestone in the history of anime, so if you are the type who needs or wants to understand the evolution of anime, then you pretty much have to deal with Urotsukidoji. It's really not as painful as you think it might be. I mean, I wouldn't watch it with my parents or invite a date over to watch it, but come on: it's so loopy, so genuinely cracked in the head, and so unabashedly over-the-top, and so epic and ambitious that it really stops being offensive porn and starts being nothing more than a laughable freak show. And it does try to be something more than cheap porn. It tries to be really lavish, complex porn. earlier, I made a passing reference to Caligula. Overfiend is definitely the Caligula of anime -- fitting, even, since both films were funded with Penthouse money. They both contain about the same degree of perversion an twisted grotesquery (I'm pretty sure that's not a word -- but it is now!).

Labels: Anime and Animation, Anime: 80s, Horror: Just Plain Weird, Sexploitation, Year: 1989

posted by Keith at 2:16 AM | 8 Comments

Monday, March 27, 2006

Nigahen: Nagina II

1989, India. Starring Sridevi, Aroona Irani, Jagdeep, Pran, Sunny Deol, Anupam Kher, Gulshan Grover, Anjana Mumtaz. Directed by Harmesh Malhotra.

One of the many things that really steams my monkeys is when a movie's summary sounds like a tremendous amount of fun, but the actual experience of watching it is more akin to having someone hammer nails into your sternum. In other words -- it's an interesting story, but you really wouldn't want to experience it yourself. You know, like some time you've sat down with a friend and the friend says, "Last week I watched a movie where a roller skating chimp in a rhinestone g-string swings around a cricket bat and has to save the world from nuclear annihilation." And you, being a wise and tasteful viewer, immediately think to yourself, "Ahh, this does indeed sound like a grand ol' time at the movies!" But then your friend sighs and says, "Actually, it was pretty boring. You're better off not watching it."

So you go home for the night, but secretly you are thinking to yourself, "I don't know. That monkey has a cricket bat and a g-string. I bet it's all right." So, against the advice of your friend, you watch the movie anyway, and it turns out that, yep, it's pretty much a soul-crushing bore. And you're angry not so much because you wasted time watching the movie as you are angry that someone could make a movie with a chimp in a sequined g-string waving a cricket bat and have the execution come out so horribly boring. And not only that, but then this means that the idea for a chimp in a sequined g-string waving a cricket bat has been wasted on a rotten movie, and now someone with the potential for making a good movie about a chimp in a sequined g-string waving a cricket bat can't make that movie, because the idea has already been used up.

Nigahen is such a movie. If I say to you, "Sonny Deol fights snake spirits who shoot laser beams out of their eyes while some priest in a fake Rollie Fingers moustache rolls around a lot during wind and lightning storms," then you're going to think, "Sounds pretty good to me. And there will be musical numbers!" And I was with you, right up to the point where I started watching the movie and realized that, in reality, it was going to be a slightly tougher row to hoe than I first thought.

But let's begin with Sonny Deol rather than the movie itself. Since one of my goals for 2006 is to increase the Bollywood representation on Teleport City, it's was pretty much a given that we'd be getting to Sonny Deol pretty quickly, though I didn't expect it to be in a film like this. I assumed it would be one of the movies where he's cracking Pakistani skulls and blowing stuff up. Yet somehow the supernatural drama Nigahen came up in the queue before Maa Tujhe Salaam, Indian, Border, or any of the other roughly eighteen thousand films he made in a three-year span where he plays a heroic and patriotic Indian officer fighting evil, moustache-twirling Pakistani terrorists -- though, to be fair, Nigahen does include a moustache or two well worth twirling.

Sonny Deol is sort of the Sylvester Stallone of India. Like other muscular action heroes, he doesn't have a tough name (Sonny, Sylvester, Arnold). He's good-looking in a rough and tumble sort of way -- more of a likeable lug than an actual sex symbol. He's a bad-ass, but he's also a nice guy, willing to punch you in the face or dance with you through the Alps. Like Stallone, he went through a period where he was pretty respectable (his Rocky/Nighthawks phase), but then started appearing in more and more ludicrous flag-waving actioners (his Rambo phase). All in all, however, Sonny Deol is pretty much a Bollywood institution -- not on the level of Amitabh, but still a pretty big and enduring part of the scene.

So, with Sonny's place in Bollywood summarized, let's move on to Nigahen, which is a sequel to the film Nagina, which I have not seen since no one seems to offer it for rent, and the one or two places I looked for it to purchase, should I want to apply my dollars in such a way (and I don't know that I would), listed it as out of stock. But I think I can get the gist of thinks, thanks in no small part to the convenient visual summary of the film provided during the credits of this sequel. The basics seem to be that we have some snake spirits, they protect some people, a wizard with a handlebar moustache wants a magic gem. There may be more to it than that, but that's enough to get you to the point you need to be to grasp the sequel, which seems to be more or less the same thing, except the two leads from the previous film are killed off, presumably in between movies, but you needn't let that bother you since the same actress (the lovely Sridevi) will be appearing as the daughter of the character she played in the first film.

We meet her first as a child being adopted by her grandfather, or possibly uncle. We then skip eighteen years ahead, as the now-grown Neelam returns to her ancestral home to witness the fact that the progress of time for the other characters has been realized by having them wear really shoddy silver wigs. What she doesn't know about the house and her family history is that her mother could transform into a snake, and two more snakes (her deceased parents?) show up from time to time to watch over her and communicate to her by shooting animated blue beams that cause the film to freeze almost as if someone was simply drawing on a still photo. This highlights one of the most peculiar and impressive feats of this film, which is to take a film made in 1989 and make it look like a film from 1979.

Neelam also isn't privy to the fact that her next door neighbor is a shrieking, screaming, sweating ranting, raving holy man lunatic named Garaknath (Anupam Kher). He's got the twirling-worthy moustache here, in case you are keeping track of that sort of thing. Garaknath has a tendency to sit cross-legged on the floor until wild bolts of lightning and gusts of wind blow him over, at which time he will inevitably spring to his feet, wave his trident around, and scream, "Bhairavnath!" over and over, which happens to be the name of his mentor, killed in the first film by the heroic couple who were off-handedly disposed of between the end credits of that film and beginning of this one. Garaknath is so committed to stealing the sacred gem his guru sought in the first film that he has sworn to eat nary a morsel until it is in his hands and he can use it to become all-powerful, whatever that may mean. For a guy who hasn't eaten in a decade or more, Garaknath is looking pretty good, and by good, I mean he has mangy hair and sweats profusely, which the camera lovingly captures in a series of close-ups that would make Sergio Leone proud.

That's pretty much the plot in a nutshell: crazy holy man tries to steal sacred gem, and noble girl guided by snakes foils him. You might be thinking to yourself, "Hey, I thought Sunny Deol was in this." He does show up eventually to fall in love with Neelam, and it turns out he is a snake boy who was raised by the villainous Garaknath, who among other things, kept him in a basket for fourteen years. Who knew living in a basket for fourteen years makes you come out looking like Sonny Deol? Deol's character is pretty much a buffoon here, and Sonny has the open-mouthed, slack-jawed look of befuddlement down pat. Other than that, he doesn't have much reason to be other than to hang around and occasionally drive a tractor.

So if you think that sweaty moustachio'd madmen trying to steal magical gems from snake girls sounds like the makings of a good movie, you're right. And if you further suspect that the final results aren't nearly as much fun as they sound -- well, frankly, given how the whole intro was about that very phenomenon (which I call the "Something Weird phenomenon," in honor of the many titles released by Something Weird that sound cool but end up being godawful boring), it's not that impressive if you guess it applies to Nigahen. A lot of this movie is just flat out uninteresting, which is pretty remarkable given the number of snakes shooting magic beams out of their eyes we have on display here. There's a lot of comic relief from a guy whose shtick seems to be based entirely on an "Oh my goodness, my wife is so fat!" routine that wouldn't have even gotten a chuckle out of a Depression era vaudeville crowd. Maybe if he'd also dressed in drag and been swatted with brooms -- at least then he could have been a hit with fans of Hong Kong variety shows. But there's way too much of that in between supernatural snake action.

The editing only makes matters worse. And I say editing only under the good faith that they actually hired an editor, because any evidence of his craft is barely detectable in the film. When Neelam is hypnotized by the snakes, who then lead her on a slow somnambulistic stroll out of the house, across the lawn, and into the temple ruins where the sacred gem is hidden in a pretty obvious spot, we get to watch pretty much the whole stroll. It just goes on and on, until finally some lightning and wind kicks up to blow Garaknash over, so we cut to him rolling on the floor, then leaping up to yell, "Bhairavnath!"

And you better get used to him doing that, too, because he's pretty much the best part of the whole movie. With Sonny not being allowed to jump cars through office buildings or shoot grenade launchers, the bulk of the film's entertainment value comes form Garaknash chewing scenery with a voracious William Shatner-esque glee. Garaknesh is obviously an over-the-top comic book style villain, and actor Anupam Kher seems to operate under the assumption that the only way to play him is by going way over over-the-top. And if you think he might maybe look somewhat familiar, even though you haven't seen too many Bollywood films, then perhaps you're remembering him as the stern but loving father from Bend it Like Beckham, a movie that slightly annoys me because, seriously, no love for Parminder Nagra? Keira Knightley had to go and pull a Harrison Ford by stealing all the fame that should have been more evenly distributed. And Parminder? Hey, I have nothing against Keira (well, I have King Arthur against her), but Parminder Nagra is much hotter.

Uh, where was I? Oh yeah, Anupam Kher and his handlebar moustache, enduring through the ages. He was also in Ziddi some years later, also with Sonny Deol, where I think Sonny does get to drive a car through the front of an office building, or something like that. It was one of the first Bollywood action films I saw, and I can't remember a whole lot about it except that, well, it was kind of silly. And he was in Bride and Prejudice, so I guess there's a law saying that if you are trying to make a Bollywood/Hollywood crossover -- but not actually Bollywood/Hollywood -- then you should hire Anupam Kher. I know I would.

The other half of the film belongs to Sridevi, who spends most of the film walking around looking beautiful before she finally gets her snake powers and delivers a musical supernatural finale that actually does live up to the promise on which the rest of the film fails to deliver. Sridevi has been (and continues) acting in the Hindi film industry since getting her start as a child actor in 1967. Since then, she's made over 250 movies and was one of the biggest stars in Bollywood. She doesn't have an impressive moustache like Anupam Kher, but that's usually not what you're looking for in a Bollywood leading lady. She does have eyes to die for and is a decent actress. Together, she and Kher will pretty much make you forget poor Sonny Deol is even in this movie.

As I said, the finale of the movie, in which Garaknesh and Neelam battle one another through the use of song and dance and, weirdly enough, a magical mongoose made of bread, delivers everything you want it to. Too bad you had to sit through two hours of rather plodding production before that. To make matters worse, at least for us non-Hindi speakers, the subtitles stop about a third of the way into the film, and come back in the final third but out of phase with the action on the screen, so that the subtitles are appearing two or three lines after the dialogue they're supposed to be translating.

A pretty disappointing movie considering the premise I hear the first film was much better. Snake spirit movies are nothing out of the ordinary for Indian films, or for many other south Asian industries. Sometimes, it seems the Thai film industry is comprised of 70 percent snake spirit movies, twenty percent romantic comedies, and ten percent movies where guys smash each other with war chariots and big mallets. Even Hong Kong has more than it's share of snake spirit movies, so with so many to chose from, there's no real reason to settle for something as disappointing as Nigahen.

It's obvious that producer/director Harmesh Malhotra found himself with a surprise hit on his hands with the film Nagina and slapped this together with a minimum of effort and care in order to cash in on the success of the first film. It's a slapdash production right up until the end, which is worth skipping forward to if you happen to have the movie lying around, or if it is delivered to you one night by two snakes with mysterious intelligence. If such an event happens to you, be sure to throw your arms unto the heavens and scream, "Bhairavnath!" over and over for minutes on end. It'll be slightly more entertaining than sitting through Nigahen.

Labels: Bollywood, Horror: Just Plain Weird, Netflix Diary, Year: 1989

posted by Keith at 5:10 PM | 2 Comments

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