The curse of the fertility goddess, Nagin, states that anytime man desecrates or violates the cobra, they are doomed to suffer the petrifying curse of the snake woman, involving death and infertility. Respect is the only cure. Over 4000 years ago the inhabitants of the Indus Valley in the Far East sculpted the image of the shape-shifting, half-human, half-cobra creatures residing in mysterious temples deep within the legendary spice forests off the Malabar Coast. George States (Jeff Doucette) isn't afraid of the legend, and journeys into the jungle to snag the mate of the Nagin, hoping the goddess will take human form, chase after him, and grant him immortality. Thanks to stage 3 brain cancer, he's delusional, homicidal, and makes as little sense as the movie does trying to explain the premise.
George is successful in capturing the male cobra and returns to his stone lab where he waits for Nagin to appear. The goddess, played by Mallika Sherawat, takes many scenes to transform from snake into human, writhing in mud, sloughing off handfuls of gooey scales, tearing through molting netlike skin, and revealing naked human flesh. The makeup effects aren't entirely pathetic, demonstrating a similarity to the more impressive works in Species. It's the computer graphics later on, showing the transformation back into reptile that is particularly ridiculous. The reasons and methods for the mutations are never explained, nor are the various stages of snake/human hybrid metamorphosis. Sometimes Nagin will be completely human, or a small rubber snake, or monstrous cobra, or a woman with fangs and yellow eyes, or even a Gorgon-like mix, with snake body and human arms and head. The combination constantly changes and remains completely undefined.
In the nearby village, the festival of colors, known as Holi, is being joyously celebrated, while a local detective (Irrfan Khan) and his wife (Divya Dutta) try unsuccessfully to have a child. The festival is an easy opportunity to throw in the standard song and dance sequences expected from a Bollywood production. When Nagin appears to dance with the natives, two drunken men kidnap her. She acts like a child unfamiliar with her surroundings, more naïve than Mowgli, and never utters a word (throughout the entire film, in fact). The ensuing attempted rape results in both men being mutilated and eaten, derivative of the more memorable scenes in Anaconda. She continues to seek out her lover (an incredibly fake snake held in a glass case, periodically electrocuted for fun by States), murder various sex offenders and abusive men she stumbles across, and hunt down the participants in the original expedition that ended in the male cobra's capture. Meanwhile, the detective tries to solve the string of killings, noticing that each body contains an excessive amount of venom.
"This is some weird shit," exclaims the morgue doctor as he performs an autopsy on a mangled body, so horribly disfigured that a cell phone must be cut out of the middle of the mess. His blurb sums up Hisss, a movie that is purposely weird and terribly dull, full of brutal violence for the sake of including bloodshed, horribly plain dialogue, gratuitous nudity from random, busty extras, and pitiful special effects. While most will be pleased with Sherawat's constant state of nakedness, the editing actually tries every trick in the book to hide, obscure or cover her so that she's never seen clearly (suggestive silhouettes at best). Hisss is an embarrassment to horror films, monster movies, the Indians it portrays, and the filmmakers at its helm. It's no wonder director Jennifer Chambers Lynch (daughter of David Lynch) is rumored to have disowned it after the producers took away creative control during editing.
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