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Who Broke The (short-lived) Silence of The Lampoons?



Neither author Thomas Harris nor filmmaker Jon Demme nor actor Anthony Hopkins had any idea this would happen. They thought that after Silence of The Hams (which Erik claims is the number one worst movie of all time) was made in 1994, people would steer clear of spoofing The Silence of The Lambs. Five years went by, the lampoons were silent. And nothing much happened on that front. Then came along master ripoff Mahesh Bhatt, who happens to be on the same list as other impostors and fakers like Kamal Haasan and A. R. Rehman. Now wait, I am not too pissed off at him for actually having the nerve to get WRITING CREDITS for a story that he probably just dictated to some flunky while reviewing a pirated video casette of Silence, with his finger on the PAUSE button so that, from time to time, he could add the appropriate Hindi masala and some melodrama that looks almost Tam-filmy.

Why would I be pissed off at a movie that clearly makes Akki look soooo coool?! Let's not forget, no matter how pissed off Imight be at the filmmaker(s), the movie starred Preity Zinta. And no one in their right minds would object to that! I am only irritated by people that take this shit seriously.

Here's a review I found (source: http://www.chennaionline.com/moviereviews/hinmov10.asp)

Tanuja Chandra, the petite director is back with yet another typical potboiler. Sanghursh is roughly based on The Silence of the Lambs with all the desi masala added to it. In fact this version has more blood, flesh and gore than the original. 

Ashutosh Rana plays the Hannibal the Cannibal role to perfection, using his biig eyes to terrorize everyone in sight. He believes that he will attain immortality by sacrificing young children to Goddess Kali, in a scene we can see him behaving like a cannibal also. Priety Zinta plays the CBI researcher on the trail of this child killer, and Akshay Kumar, a felon helps her in her search. Just a small hitch they fall in love. In between all this the local law is distrustful of the lady investigator and interferes citing her turbulent family history as a reason. 

After Dushman, Tanuja Chandra has yet again proved that she is a full fledged commercial film director. The camera work in the movie is excellent with the effective use of light and shadow especially in the scenes where Ashutosh Rana appears making him look more menacing. The movie has all the ingredients of a masala thriller and wonder of wonders Akshay kumar can actually act, I am serious. If you don't believe me checkout for yourself.



Let's analyze this one sentence at a time. First of all, this movie is definitely not a potboiler. It is more funny than it is scary. Other than the facts that it was ripped off from a major Hollywood movie and it has Preity Zinta and Akki in it, there is nothing special about this movie, it is just another failed Bollywood attempt at "greatness", whatever that means.

As to the claim, "In fact this version has more blood, flesh and gore than the original.", it is pure bullshit. I didn't see any scene in the film that had Akshay Kumar biting someone's tongue off while they were trying to resuscitate him, or flay someone's skin and wear it on his own face. The "original" definitely had more flesh (especially when Buffalo Bill parades around topless saying "fuck me, fuck me", and of course the very fact that Buffalo Bill used female flesh to stitch himself a new body. Neither of these things happened in Sangharsh.) By the way, why is it that Bollywood writers try their worst to come up with the weirdest names for their villains? Sir Juda, Shaakaal, Mogambo, Sir John, Kesariya Vilaayti, and now Lajja Shankar Pandey.

"Ashutosh rana plays the Hannibal...sight"
I didn't find Ashutosh Rana scary, just irritating, especially that weird yodelling thing that he does that supposedly scares the cops shitless. That was almost as irritating as the sonsofbitches who blared "Pardesi pardesi jaana nahin" on their loudspeakers, radios, PA systems and casette/CD players in Bombay for almost a year after that shitty movie Raja Hindustaani was released. He overacts quite a bit, following some ancient Indian film philosphy that overdone is well done.

Jodi Foster's character (Clarice Starling) dreams of lambs screaming because as a young orphan she witnessed her uncle's sheep being sheared or killed or something sissy like that. You would think that it would be very very difficult for someone to come up with a fear EVEN MORE CONTRIVED than that, but you thought wrong. Mahesh Bhatt went for the Gold here. Preity Zinta's character (Reet Oberoi, a not-so-pseud name, I guess, compared to Lajja Shankar Pandey at least) is afraid of the dark. "Come on Sundar", I can hear you say, "That's not contrived, a lot of people are afraid of the dark!" Stay with me on this one. Apparently, her elder brother was one of those Sikh terrorists during the mid 80s, the ones that TV serials like Saanjha Chula and Chunni refer to, and one *DARK* night, he comes running into the house, fights with his dad, has a gun in his hand, and runs upstairs while the young Reet watches from the ground floor. The lights go out, and it's very *DARK* at home. The police enter the house, and follow her brother upstairs, and woh encounter mein maara jaata hai. Reet witnesses the shooting by watching the DARK shadows on the wall. Get it? DARK. Yep, that's why she's afraid of the dark, because her brother came out of the dark into the house one dark night, followed by some dark policemen who went upstairs and shot him in the dark, or something as melodramatic as that.

Akki was the best and funniest thing in the movie. There are quite a few scenes where it is clear, contrary to what the review above says, that he can't act, BUT HE'S JUST SOOOO COOOLLLL!!! Cheesy dialogues are delivered with the right amount of what we call Cooliyat. Like the scene where he is introduced.

Let me pause at this moment to comment on his nickname. Hannibal the Cannibal was called that because he really did take bites out of his victims. In Sangharsh, Akki is called Professor Aman Verma. He's a dangerous kingpin or something who is also dangerously intellegent, so everyone in PRISON, even, calls him Professor.

His introduction: he is standing inside his cell, which is full of books, I guess. Preity Zinta starts talking about the killer she wants him to help catch, and immediately Akki says, "Bataao, Indian ki population kya hai?" PZ goes, huh? and guesses 90 Crore. "Galat!" and Akki rattles off some larger number that is accurate to the units place, and appends an "Aaj ke akhbar mein chapa hai!" to the estimate. Akki basically then goes on to perform the filmi equivalent of estimating the number of piano tuners in Pasadena, ie he solves a Fermi problem and estimates the number of police officers (or maybe it's all central government officials), and then estimates the amount of taxes that people pay to provide salaries for these employees, and wonders out loud how much money they are really wasting if they can't do their jobs and have to approach a common criminal to catch a serial killer. PZ stumps him by saying, well, we feed you prisoners for free, so you are also living on people's taxes, so it's about time you were of some use to us. Akki turns around, and says, "Smart."

Then there's another dialogue: "Don't talk to me about the law, I know the law like the back of my hand!"

When Subroto was originally telling me the story in 1999, 4 years before I saw this film, he happened to comment on how the makers of this movie decided that while they were ripping one Anthony Hopkins film, they might as well make references to another one of the movies he has been in! During the chase sequence when both Akki and PZ are on the run from the cops, they are forced to go into disguise and do a song-and-dance routine a la Khaike paan Banaraswala. Akki dresses up in a zorro costume (Remember, Hopkins was the original Zorro in The Mask of Zorro?!)...

Another great melodramatic scene:
Akki gets shot, and PZ drives him in her jeep to the nearest pharmacy. This pharmacy looks more like a small library than a pharmacy, and the guy behind the counter isn't really behind a counter, he is in the middle of the fucking room on a small computer table with a small computer on it! Anyway, he sees the suspicious second person in the jeep, sees only PZ come into the pharmacy, and realizes who they are (the news has been warning everyone of The Professor's escape) so when PZ comes up to the counter to ring up her purchases, he says the charge is something ridiculous, maybe "Pachaas hazaar Rupay" PZ asks him what the hell he is talking about and he blackmails her. She immediately goes into some holier-than-thou talk about how he is taking unfair advantage of someone in need. Dude, you're on the run! How the fuck is he supposed to know if you are innocent?! Anyway, he ends up verbally abusing her, and just then a fist comes out of nowhere and lands on his face. Bhishoom!..oom!...oom! The next set of dialogues is really hilarious and irrelevant (and is copied from a scene in Falling Down when Michael Douglas walks into a local Asian-owned liquor/convenience store looking for enough change to make a phone call)

Akki picks up a random bottle from the display case. "Yeh Glycodin. Bacchon ke khaansi ki dawai. Bazaar mein bikti hai Rs. 43.50 ke liye. Tum bechte ho Rs. 50 ke liye!" and he throws the bottle onto the floor, where it crashes into pieces, supposedly spraying Glycodin everywhere. Next bottle. "Yeh (I don't know, Pudeen Haara?). Bazaar mein bikti hai Rs. 16.35 ke liye. Tumhare yahan daam hai Rs. 18!!" (CRASH!) "Yeh, Dettol. Bazaar...Rs. 23.15...tum...Rs. 25!!" (CRASH) and a few other bottles, until Akki delivers the piece de resistance:

"KAB TAK LOOTOGE!!!!!"

We were at the IISc medical store one afternoon in 2000, when Subroto bought some cough medicine. Subroto asked the shopkeeper how much it was, and the latter quoted a price slightly higher than that displayed on the bottle. I whispered, "Kab tak lootoge" and both of us could barely control our laughter until we left the store.

In the original film, Buffalo Bill uses flesh from his chubby female victims to stitch himself some feminine skin. Mahesh Bhatt probably decided he had used the ambiguous sex thing before in his life (You're thinking Sadak, with the eunuch Maharani played by Sadashiv Amrapurkar - Main yahan ka maharaja hoon. Mera naam Maharani hai - but I am talking about his daughter/son Pooja Bhatt, who looks like a woman with a lisp, but is actually a man. With a lithp.), so he went with another angle: In the Hindi ripoff, Lajja Shankar Pandey is a devotee of Mata Kali (And you thought the Mola Ram character from The Temple of Doom was an insult to Indian culture!) and believes that he will achieve immortality by sacrificing 40 children (or some random number like that, I don't think it was a 100, besides I would think Hindu Gods always went for a 101 or 51 or something!) to her, one on each occurence of a solar eclipse. Someone should tell the writers that solar eclipses occur only once in a few years, because they claim in the movie that Lajja Shankar's character has already killed 30-odd children in the past three years or so. Unless he comes from Calcutta where it is probably dark all the time because of the cloying presence of all the Bongs travelling in subway trains crowded with other Bongs, making their stupid art films, loving their Uttam Kumar, smoking their pot and listening to Floyd and Robindro Shongeet when they're not too busy bitching about how everyone who is not a communist should read works of communism and eat fish, there's no way he witnessed so many solar eclipses in so little time.

Anyway, it is left to PZ's character to figure out the pattern of this psychotic killer. How, you ask, does she figure out that he only kills kids on days of solar eclipses? Well, her boyfriend (she's a total prude and never shows her boyfriend any emotion or even lets him touch her) is an amateur astronomer!!! And how, you ask, do the filmmakers make us believe he is an amateur astronomer? OF COURSE!!! His bedroom has stars and galaxies and shit like that on the wallpaper, and he has planets and five-pointed stars hanging from his low cieling!!! I was surprised the stars don't poke his eyes out when he walks around the room talking to PZ on his phone!

I think that's all the funny stuff I have to point out in the movie. There might be a lot of other stuff in there that I just forgot to mention. Akki is just AWESOME.

The final scene is one of the funniest. Akki dies during the climax scene, and PZ is left alone later at an awards ceremony where she gets commended for Lajja Shankar's capture. She turns to the sky, AND SEES AKKI'S SMILING GHOST GIVING HER A SALUTE.



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