They say when a man is in his death throes, he can see his entire life flash by.

Well, that happened to us last night.

Really.

No, we were not sick nor did we meet with a ghastly accident on the highway.

But we watched the Tamil film Saravana (2006).

The experience left us so shaken and at the end of the gruesome ordeal we felt our life flashing by.

Apes as Humans

Unlike the recent Hollywood film Rise of the Planet of the Apes where Andy Serkis dresses up as the ape Caesar, in Saravana two apes answering to the calls of Simbhu and Jyothika show up in human garb for the entire duration of the movie.

With their tails curled up in their dresses, the two apes ran amok on the screen, alternately screaming, laughing, eating, crying and making, well, monkeys of themselves.

From the opening scene when the eponymous hero ape Saravana (Simbhu) comes zooming into the college on a foreign motorbike to the final scene when he leaves in the company of the fat buxom female ape Sadhana (Jyothika), the movie is one epic apic torture directed by a bigger ape K.S.Ravikumar (who has a cameo in the train during the male ape’s journey to the female ape’s village).

Of course, Saravana is another obscenely crappy, crudely-made love story made for the semi-literate Tamil movie fans baboons.

What else are those bozos in Kollywood capable of churning out? That’s when the swines are not stealing Hollywood plots.

And what else do Tamil movie buffs baboons want.

The non-story is focused on obsessive distasteful love with detours over an age-old enmity between the female’s ape’s family and a neighboring bunch of whackos.

While all frames featuring Simbhu are unendurably bad, some are more unendurable than others.

For instance, the fight scenes involving Simbhu’s character are bizarrely outlandish and laughably ridiculous. To see a pencil-thin puny ape like Simbhu making mincemeat of gangs of thugs single-handedly is one of the worst punishments for humans.

When Simbhu dances, it’s with the grace of a pig wallowing in a mud swamp on a hot summer day. It’s with great difficulty we managed to avoid throwing up our dinner on the nauseating apparition on the screen.

The fat female ape Jyothika is worse. Bereft of any positives except two big udders of a milch cow, this simian creature is an affront to art and repeatedly lets down the audience.

She can’t act, she can’t dance, she can’t cry, she can’t emote one bit. Pray, what is she it doing in the movie? Oh, we forgot the udders of the milch cow. Tamil movie fans love such junk.

As if all this were not hideous enough, there are three parallel tracks to the main non-story, each vying with the other for the honor of being the most nauseating.

The first ugly track is the so-called comedy track featuring that jackass Vivek, the second centering around the late comedian Nagesh and his fondness for liquor and the third involving a maid in a village who only sees a gay in Simbhu’s character. All three were obnoxiously rotten.

Prakash Raj plays the female ape’s elder brother and is the only sane element in the entire nonsense.

Music and its accompanying dances were revoltingly bad but apparently some of the numbers like Gori Tera, which borrows from Don’t Phunk with My Heart, were popular in its time.

For those with a penchant to subject themselves to extraordinary torture, the Saravana DVD is available at Netflix.

  Jyothika, Saravana, Simbhu