Matty chats to scripter Michel W. Potts about one of erotic thriller maestro Jag Mundhra’s worst movies. 

During the last years of his career, long after demand for the DTV erotic thriller dwindled — and over half a decade after he’d returned to India to make more ‘prestigious’, socially conscious movies — Jag Mundhra was often asked about the potential for Bollywood/Hollywood crossovers. Despite the commercial and critical success of Slumdog Millionaire (2008) being cited as an example, Mundhra was quick to assert that Danny Boyle’s acclaimed melodrama was an exception, not a rule. He was equally quick to draw attention to the film failing to capture the hearts and minds of Indian audiences quite like it did with those in the U.S. and the U.K.

As stated in a candid, posthumously aired chat with Showbiz India TV, the late, great auteur believed that the long-term financial viability of Bollywood/Hollywood crossovers was “a myth”. Mundhra explained that the demands and expectations of each market are so wildly different that the resulting film would be neither fish nor fowl; either a hit in one country and not the other, or, more likely, an out and out flop.

He was drawing from experience.

Hot on the heels of Wild Cactus (1993) — his first masterpiece — Jag Mundhra made TROPICAL HEAT (1993).

Calling it a step backwards would be an understatement. 

Tied with L.A. Goddess (1993) as the worst film on his resume, Tropical Heat is dreadful; an ugly and boring slog of a picture.

It also seriously derailed Mundhra’s career, as the film’s scripter, Michel W. Potts [1], explains:

“Tropical Heat’s producer, Ashok Amritraj, invited me to a private screening of the finished film, along with Steve Beswick of Promark and Barbara Javitz of Prism Entertainment. When the film ended, Javitz was livid. I didn’t dare ask what Beswick thought! A week or so later, Ashok told me that word had gotten out about what a crappy job Jag had done and that people had been warned not to hire him. I have no personal knowledge if Tropical Heat permanently damaged Jag’s reputation, but it’s a fact that he wasn’t hired again to make a film in Hollywood.”  

Indeed, save for Axis Films International, with whom he’d previously paired on The Other Woman (1992), tapping him up to tackle Sexual Malice (1994), every American picture Mundhra helmed post Tropical Heat was through his own design, mounted via his own production companies. Promark and Prism never bankrolled or acquired another Mundhra project [2], and Tropical Heat’s disastrous reception killed Mundhra and Amritraj’s working relationship for good. Their union was already on shaky ground in the wake of a lawsuit Mundhra filed against the producer, following Amritraj bumping him from the director’s chair on a previous Potts-penned carnal caper, Illicit Behavior (1992). 

Tropical Heat started so well, too. 

“Ashok was always keen to make a thriller in India,” says Potts. “His major obstacle was finding a story where American characters had a legitimate reason to travel there other than as tourists. I proposed the idea of tailoring the story around a Nigerian Death Kit scam. In those days, American insurance companies had been bilked out of millions by legal Nigerian immigrant residents who died accidentally while on a visit to their homeland. The surviving spouse would then provide the insurance companies with a death certificate, police reports and news clippings of the accident, and collect on the insurance policy. Later, when an unprecedented number of other ethnic immigrant resident spouses began collecting on their policies, the insurance companies became suspicious and soon discovered the documentation were counterfeits, and that what they later called “Nigerian Death Kits” had become a cottage industry in developing countries.”

“My story idea was simple: Before paying out an insurance claim to the widow of a maharaja who died in a hunting accident, an insurance company send a private detective to India to verify the death and confirm the documentation. But, as so often happens in these kinds of films, the detective becomes romantically involved with the widow, who turns out to be a scheming femme fatale.”

“Ashok loved it and commissioned me to write the script. He gave copies of it to his distributors, Prism and Promark, on a Friday afternoon. Now, I was told by Steve Beswick personally that Promark had already planned on turning down the project but read the script as a courtesy. On Monday morning, however, as Steve and the president of Promark arrived at work, they both admitted they loved the script and were committed to put up the money to make the film. Jag was hired not only to direct, but, because of his connections in the Bollywood film industry, to negotiate the best financial deals in hiring the Indian cast and crew. When he signed on, Jag made it clear that he was not happy with the ending of the film. I readily agreed that the ending needed work and said I would be available anytime he wanted to sit down and discuss any changes. Those meetings never happened. Whenever we would meet to discuss the script, Jag and Ashok got caught up in solving production problems and changes to the script were never mentioned.” 

Judged purely as a travelogue, Tropical Heat is often stunning. Think Wish You Were Here with bare boobs and simulated humping. Shot in Bangalore and Madras — where Amritraj later sent the crew of his Corman-backed action caper, Inferno (1997) — the Indian flavour is fantastic and lends the film a colour and authenticity that money can’t buy. A la the desert-bound Wild Cactus, Tropical Heat oozes an incredible sense of place. Moreover, given how chaste Indian filmmaking standards and practices were at the time, Mundhra and Amritraj documenting a pocket of their homeland against an erotic thriller backdrop feels gloriously subversive [3]. 

Alas, Tropical Heat is kneecapped by everything else. Top Gun (1986) sidebar Rick Rossovich and ex Bond girl Maryam d’Abo (The Living Daylights (1987)) — as the aforementioned private detective and scheming femme fatale — are soul-crushingly bland, both in terms of their characters and as performers. Cinematographer V. Shaukat and his Indian crew are also quite clearly unaccustomed to American-style movies. As beautifully and exotically as India is presented, it’s largely happenstance due to the inherent production value afforded by the place. Visually, Tropical Heat has a murky, artless, cheap and hurried look. It lacks Mundhra’s growing air of pomp and ceremony, and is almost completely without the technical finesse that typifies even his ropiest output. Lastly, the film is slower than a tortoise carrying four bags of heavy shopping in gale force winds. Mundhra has always exuded an offbeat rhythm, but here it’s deathly. Tropical Heat seems thrice as long as its eighty-six minute duration, and then some.        

“I thought the opening sequence of the leopard hunt was especially well done,” sighs Potts. “But from there, the film goes downhill. In my script, as soon as the maharajah was trampled by an elephant, the next scene was to take place in a high-rise office in Los Angeles, where the maharajah’s widow was tearfully explaining the circumstances of her husband’s death to the president of the insurance company. Instead of filming in Los Angeles, Jag hastily dressed a set in Madras by placing a desk in front of a shabby-looking brown curtain and recruited the sound man to play the part of the insurance company president. At that point, when I saw it, I knew the film was in trouble. In fact, the film only occasionally bears any resemblance to what I had written. Jag, for whatever reason, took it upon himself to completely rewrite the script and in doing so, resorted to every trite cliché he could think of.”

[1] Per the opening credits, Potts conceived the film’s story with Mundhra and his Night Eyes II (1991) collaborator, Simon Levy.
[2] Prism issued Tropical Heat on cassette in the U.S. in August 1993. In the U.K., the film was released via Columbia-TriStar in autumn ‘93 as ‘Tropical Nights’. A sell-through/small box materialised in January ‘99 via Marquee Pictures.
[3] Nudity from prospective Indian talent received pushback early doors. Thus, Trinidadian babe Ashaa Siewkumar ‘played Indian’ for the requisite moment of interracial bonking.