Chandra Mukhi

Directed by: Debaloy Dey
Starring: Salman Khan, Sridevi, Gulshan Grover, Mohnish Behl
Released: 1993
My rating: 1,5/10





The moment you see that on your screen you get an uneasy feeling. Regardless if you hate or love Salman Khan, he has not really been good with filmy ideas. Ever. But possibly nothing he ever came up after Chandra Mukhi was just as bad. Although I was told beforehand it was a try at sci-fi genre, and despite being generally very open to such ventures and being very tolerant overal, this film has taken the place of the most silly film I´ve seen, previously occupied by Rajkumar (with Madhuri Dixit and Anil Kapoor in the lead). There was one big hole where plot holes were meant to be. Basically nothing made sense. I keep wondering why would Sridevi even agree to make such a film!

Somewhere in space, undetected by NASA apparently, there is a golden realm where a Queen is ruling through a golden leaf that grants you every wish, and where the Princess flies through the air and is longing to go down „to the Earth“ and meet the humans. To prevent her from going anywhere the Queen decides to hand over the Golden leaf to her, thus making her a Queen. Because there is a catch you see – if she decides to go to the Earth, she has to return soon unless the kingdom will be destroyed.

The Princess is subsequently attacked by a macho guy with supernatural powers, who of course desires the Leaf, and she actually falls down to the Earth, loosing the Leaf in the process. On the Earth she encounters a little boy Raja with a sad, sad fate. His parents died a long time ago, and recently his disgustingly rich grandpa went missing as well. He is so terrorized by his evil uncle and his friends. Outraged by this injustice the Princess, who by now has began to call herself Chandra Mukhi, makes her jaddoo. Poof! Raja wakes up being an all grown up and unwaxed Salman Khan! Together with several kids Raja decides to go and find his grandfather, and very conveniently Chandra Mukhi decides to go look for her lost Golden leaf at the same place. They are chased by evil uncle and his companions as well as the macho guy who threw the Princess down from the high heavens in the first place...

The evil characters have all one quality in common: they are all incredibly idiotic and incapable of actually doing something evil. Heck, none of them even managed to kill the kids! And "ruling the world" is apparently limited to make things go boom with the Golden Leaf. And you can spend a whole day like it. But the good guys are not much smarter anyway. For example it is totally cool to forgive people who tried to kill you and your grandson repeatedly. And Sridevi basically tells us the best thing when face to face with death is to start dancing. Every single time. She is in her „let´s be cute“ mode throughout, something that does not necessarily work for her in this, and instead of innocent and good she comes across as immature and silly. True enough, her expressions are adorable, but somehow you feel cheated knowing what she´s capable of. She and Salman were hugely criticized as a couple, under a pretext that she is too old for him. I beg to differ. Sridevi is only 2 years older than Salman and if the story was different, they would actually create a nice jodi. However what betrays them as a couple is the main and most important twist of the whole thing.

The idea of little boy completely skipping growing up and the very next day romancing a grown woman in a very physical way just felt pedophilic. Even more so since he actually changes back into a boy in the end. One of the songs clearly implies that Chandramukhi and Raja most probably indulged in physical love – which basically makes you sick. He is just a boy imprisoned in a adult body after all! I don´t think I´ve ever seen anything more wrong in any film ever.

Songs were plenty and badly forced into the story, but on their own they were quite good and so a highlight. The technical aspects and special effects did not stand the test of time, be it the lasers flashing from Sridevi´s eyes or even the depiction of the spacy kingdom.

WTF-ery of the first class, that did not forget to show that even the beings from outer space need Hindu Gods to solve their problems.