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Nagin
India 1976
produced by Rajkumar Kohli for Shankar Films
directed by Rajkumar Kohli
starring Sunil Dutt, Feroz Khan, Vinod Mehra, Kabir Bedi, Anil Dhawan, Sanjay Khan, Rekha, Yogeeta Bali, Prema Narayan, Neelam Mehra, Reena Roy, Prem Nath, Aruna Irani, Ranjeet, Heena Kausar, Roopesh Kumar, Komilla Wirk, Sulochana Latkar, Maruti Rao, Gulshan Arora, Tun Tun, Satish Arora, Master Bittoo, Anita Guha, Rajan Sethi, Jeetendra, Mumtaz, Jagdeep
story by Rajendra Singh 'Atish', screenplay by Jaggi Rampal, Charandas Shokh, dialogue by Inder Raj Anand, music by Laxmikant, Pyarelal
review by Mike Haberfelner
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Professor Vijay (Sunil Dutt) saves a young man (Jeetendra) from a hawk
attack in the jungle, upon which the young man lets him in on a secret: He
is indeed a serpent in human form, and to prove this, he and his
girlfriend Nagin (Reena Roy) turn into snakes before his very eyes. Vijay
is so fascinated by this that he this night invites his five best friends
(Feroz Khan, Vinod Mehra, Kabir Bedi, Anil Dhawan, Sanjay Khan) to the
exact spot in the jungle that very night where snakeman and snakewoman are
to perform their love rite. Unfortunately, one of the friends (Anil Dhawan)
freaks out and shoots the male snake - not a good thing because it turns
out the female snake is quite a vengeful creature in general, and the
picture of the persons involved in the killing of the snakes is burned
into his retina to give his partner pointers as to who were the killers to
take revenge on. Soon Vijay's friends die like flies, and even the
OM-amulets of a local sage (Prem Nath) don't help much because Nagin is
too cunning to not find ways to persuade the men to take them off. Then
the sage captures the snake, but is not willing to hand it over to the
three surviving friends ... but against a healthy amount of money, his
helper is, and the three kill the snake. That night, one of them, Suraj
(Sanjay Khan) is killed after Nagin (who has somehow tricked the friends)
has kidnapped his daughter (Master Bittoo) and forces him to take off his
OM-amulet to save her life ... ouch! Now only Vijay and Raj (Feroz Khan)
are left alive ... and then Raj receives the visit of a beautiful woman
who claims to be his betrothed from when they were children, and she
virtually throws herself at him ... now can you really blame him for not
trusting her - even to a point where he tries to shoot her. Only then does
she manage to prove to him that she is indeed NOT Nagin in disguise - upon
which everything is well, until Nagin possesses her body and uses her to
kill him. Nagin tries the same trick again on the last of the survivors,
Vijay himself, but he is too clever to fall for it and throws Nagin, in
the guise of his fiancee (Rekha) off some cliffs to her death ... or so he
thinks, because all of this was just a ruse set up by Nagin to make him
take of his OM-amulet ... which Vijay does of course once he's to believe
she's gone. She then poses as his fiancee again and tries to poison him,
but he has anticipated that, and in the final showdown manages to kill her
for good ... Now basically, I wouldn't rate Nagin as a
particularly good film: It's story is pulpy and clichéed as can
be, some special effects (like snakes flying to the air like arrows) are
ridiculous as can be, and the thing simply hasn't got the budget to
support a film of its scale, nor the directorial skills to butter over its
shortcomings. However, at the same time, this is a fine piece of trashy
genre exotica, pretty much a comicstrip come to life (though to my
knowledge at least, this is not based on a comicstrip): The whole thing is
filled with over-the-top ideas, is based on a rather simplistic good-bad
dichotomy, there's plenty of action, gunplay and magic to keep everyone
happy, and there are song-and-dance sequences of course, at least one of
which (the one towards the finale where Nagin dances over Vijay's
presumably dead body) is quite effective in a macabre way. So no, not a
good movie ... but quite exhilarating genre entertainment all the same.
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