Film Hiss

[Karri Pretty]

Thestory begins in Natchi, a small town in the Indian state of Kerala. George States (Jeff Doucette) is suffering from the last stage of brain cancer and has only six months to live. To prevent death and gain immortality, he decides to extract the "Nagmani" immortal blood from a nagin, a shape-shifting cobra that can change into a human. He and hired henchmen capture the nag (the male snake) so that the nagin (the female) comes after the capturer to free her mate, thus allowing him to obtain the nagmani by force. He keeps the nag in a glass box where he electrocutes and tortures him. His plan works and the nagin starts following them.

Wearing a suit that hides his heat signature, he lures her by using her dying mate as bait for a trap. He captures her and tries taking the nagmani, but at that moment, Inspector Gupta arrives and helps her. Angered by the death of her mate at the hands of George, the nagin turns into a half snake, half human hybrid creature and throws him in the glass box where her mate was kept and electrocutes him to death. She leaves the hideout, carrying her dead mate. Inspector Gupta is amazed at everything he has just witnessed. He returns to his wife Maya, who later gives birth to their baby, while the nagin, back in the form of a beautiful woman, watches over the nest of eggs she has laid, which hatch into numerous baby cobras.

The film was shot simultaneously in English and Hindi.[8] Famed special effects designer Robert Kurtzman was responsible for developing the look of the Snake Woman.[9] Hisss was shot in the jungle of Kerala, India.[10] It was also shot in Mumbai, Chennai, Madh Island, and in the studios of Filmistan.[11]

At the Cannes Film Festival, Mallika Sherawat promoted Hisss by posing with a 22-foot-long (6.7 m) Burmese python on the red carpet.[15] The film was released in India on 22 October[16] in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. The Malayalam version was released on 12 November.

The film was set to premiere at the Montreal Festival du Nouveau Cinma on 14 October[17] and at the Gotham Screen Film Festival & Screenplay Contest in New York on 15 October[18] but was pulled from both festivals shortly before they opened.[19][20]

Nikhat Kazmi of Times of India gave it 2 out of 5 stars and stated, "A film like Hisss should have scored with its special effects. But once again, the carnage that the serpent unleashes is grotesque and her transformation from seductress to venomous reptile is more funny than eyeball-grabbing."[21] Taran Adarsh from Bollywood Hungama gave it 1/2 star out of five and stated that "If there were Razzies in Bollywood, Hisss would win hands down. Films like Hisss make you realize what's going wrong in Bollywood today. On one hand, we celebrate the new stories being told in our films, and on the other, we churn out a Hisss, which is badly scripted, poorly enacted, and carelessly directed. Believe me, it's easy to solve the crossword puzzle in newspapers than it is to understand what exactly is going on in this film. As for director Jennifer Lynch, she needs a crash course in film-making pronto. The visual effects seem straight out of a B-grade Bollywood film. On the whole, Hisss is best avoided."

Rajeev Masand from CNN-IBN gave it 1 star out of five and stated that "In Hisss, directed by Jennifer Lynch, Mallika stars as a shape-shifting snake that has been separated from her reptile lover by a crazy foreigner who's seeking a naagmani that will cure his cancer. The outrageous plot involves this ichchadhari Nagin emerging as something of a feminist superhero who comes to the rescue of various tormented women, even as she's seeking out her kidnapped partner. Irrfan Khan plays the cop investigating a series of mysterious killings, and Divya Dutta plays his wife. At 90 minutes, it's mercifully short, but watch it only if you're not easily disgusted."

Anupama Chopra from NDTV gave it 1.5 stars out of five and stated that "Hisss has marginally better special effects and much more nudity but the script is so deliriously inept that, in comparison, the average Ramsay horror film looks like a class act." Mayank Shekhar from Hindustan Times gave it 1 star out of five and stated that "This is pornography for the hormonally demented teen. Or maybe this is erotica."

To get Jones the cat to react fearfully to the descending Alien, a German Shepherd was placed in front of him with a screen between the two, so the cat wouldn't see it at first, and came over. The screen was then suddenly removed to make Jones stop, and start hissing.

In the DVD commentary, director Ridley Scott explained that he had a German Shepherd on the set (securely fastened with a leash, of course) behind a board which they lifted to get the reaction of Jones hissing.

Clicker training works great, and fast! It's based on positive reinforcement, so animals dig the training sessions. Basically you wait for an animal to do the behavior you want them to do. When they do it, you click the clicker, and give them a treat. Pretty soon, they catch on and start engaging the behavior that earns them a treat. every time they do it, click - treat. Click - treat. You keep doing this until you know the animal is going to engage in the behavior, then you add in hand gestures. After that you stop using the clicker, and just use the hand signals. I can almost guarantee with 100% certainty that when you see an animal like Jonsey hissing, they're looking at their trainer just off camera, and the trainer is giving them a hand signal.

Recently I just watched a DVD with EXTREME hiss in some scenes coming from the center channel whenever dialogue was present. It was clearly being expanded downward between lines. Let's just say this film was about clocks and orphans. Anybody else notice this?

It's highly possible the tone wasn't detectable on the stage if it was large enough to be running an X-Curve. And thus if the film wasn't re-mixed for DVD/BluRay as they normally are, it's possible that tone which was always present is now audible in a near-field/mid-field home theater environment. Don't know this for a fact, could be a possibility though.

It was just for reference :), I don't think that is the explanation either. However, it's useful to know it is a feature film.... Films are usually mixed in environments similar to those of a movie theatre; if I am not wrong, speakers in theaters usually don't go up very high in the frequency spectrum, they are quite dull, so it very probable that the hiss that you can hear in those frequencies wasn't very, or maybe at all audible in the mixing stage, so maybe they didn't re-mixed it for the DVD release and that's why you get some hiss, specially if you are listening in some -pretty good- quality monitors.

Was the hiss noticeable during the louder parts, too? Or just soft parts. Could be a result of improper dither. Compressing audio for DVD, you have to dither down to 12 or 16 bit, which can cause an audible hiss in the lower levels. Just a thought. My guess is residual tape hiss if it's an older film that's been put to DVD without re-mastering (as was mentioned) if not that.

Or maybe it's all about the original location sound recording :)There is so much needed to be done while shooting. Muting HMIs, Camera noise, HD noise of RED and such, killing reverbs etc... And sometimes location recording team don't get the chance to do their job properly, unfortunately.And maybe those productions don't appreciate clean dialog so much that they'd ADR such problematic scenes...

I've noticed this as well in certain films, big and small budget. Generally seems to only happen when dialogue is played, which leads me to believe it is from the location sound. I've even once noticed it only for one actors dialogue. Seems like it would be easy to filter out with a narrow band eq or a noise remover plugin. Then again if your hearing doesn't exceed 12K, you're not getting that information.

I've only read the original Dracula once, but I don't recall any instance of the Count hissing in that seminal vampire novel. Nor does he do so in any of the plethora of novels about Dracula by Fred Saberhagen -- I've read most of those twice.

Anything newer than those is probably invalid in this context, as novels including vampires since the early 1980s are probably mostly inspired by movies, TV spoofs, or otherwise unrelated to Stoker's original character.

There's confirmation in comments to the question that Bela Lugosi appears to hiss when a cross is brandished at him -- presumably to convey the pain of exposure to this Christian holy symbol -- and he was the first Dracula in a talkie film (1931). Max Schreck, as Count Orlok, chewed the scenery in Nosferatu in 1922, but even if he did hiss, he couldn't be heard, because at that time film wasn't capable of carrying sound.

Not long before the end of the Hammer Films horror line, Grandpa Munster (Al Lewis) appeared as one of the first "silly" vampires -- but I don't recall him hissing, either. Later silly vampires (Love at First Bite with George Hamilton as the Count, for instance) seem easy to dismiss, a they were played for laughs, not scares, and anything later is either a romance (Twilight) or a spoof, until Bram Stoker's Dracula with Gary Oldman (seemingly based largely on The Dracula Tapes by Saberhagen) -- in which I also don't recall Dracula hissing, though it's possible one or more of the three vampire women at his castle did so.

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When you hear a recording with a lot of background noise, there are a lot of possible reasons for this. The room may have a lot of background noise, and you might be using a faulty wire, which can introduce an unwanted sound.

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