In 1921, hot off Die Spinnen, Fritz Lang was set to direct an adaptation of Thea von Harbou’s novel The Indian Tomb. But producer Joe May was convinced the two-part melodrama would be huge, so he decided to direct it himself. Almost forty years later, when he had a hard time finding work in Hollywood, Lang returned to Germany to direct a new version of the Indian epic. Both films–Der Tiger von Eschnapur and Das Indische Grabmal–are brightly colored and utterly risible. There’s an awful lot of brown makeup. YouTube happens to have the scene from the ‘59 Tiger in which Seetha (Debra Paget), a dancer who has fallen in love with the European engineer, must prove her loyalty to the Maharaja by dancing with a deadly snake. It’s the best scene in the entire 3+ hours epic.
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[...] I’ll happily confess to renting this because I once came across Salma Hayek’s Satanico Pandemonium snake dance on late night TV. Should have left it at that though–the rest is trash. QT and Rodriguez are a bunch of hacks. Hacks with hustle, I give them that. Tarantino’s main mode of operation is still the assertion of authority (he probably thinks of it as the projection of cool.) The essential Tarantino scene, which repeats again and again in all of his movies, is one badass motherfucker telling the rest of the bitches to shut the fuck up, or sit the fuck down, or do whatever the fuck he says. Usually, this requires waving a .45 around, and I’m bored to tears with it. From Dusk till Dawn is a mildly satisfying B-picture, but QT’s presence as actor hurts, the script is worse than idiotic, the sfx look circa 1982, and who wants to see Clooney with tatoos? Marcy also raises a good point when she says that Debra Paget’s snake dance in The Indian Tomb is every bit as sexy. Hmm, I see a trend here: otherwise crap movies that try to get by on snake dances. [...]