Cast: Mithun Chakraborty, Meghna Naidu, Vikas Bharadwaj
Director: B. Subhash

Too pathetic to be profane, too absurd to be funny and too weird to be sexy "Classic: Dance of Love" is plainly a nightmare designed to set your teeth on edge.

Wait a second. Isn't this the same B. Subhash who once made Hemant Birje swing from vine to vine in "Tarzan"? Well, he is back - this time with the music video girl-turned-actress Meghna Naidu dangling from a treetop to seduce the good, and very old, Mithun Chakraborty.

Mithun and Subhash go back a long way. They had collaborated in the 1970s for the fluke hit "Disco Dancer".

But what they've done in "Classic..." could only be described as bizarre.

You could maybe smirk your way through this outlandish, brackish brew about an Acharya (Chakraborty) who disapproves of a prostitute Doli (Meghna Naidu) keeping liaisons with a tycoon's son (the wondrously wooden newcomer Vikas Bharadwaj).

After calling her most uncharitable names, he suddenly starts to lust for her - the age-old conflict between spiritual and carnal love reduced to a booming farce in this lamentable film.

B. Subhash is clearly way out of line. In no part of the world would this incoherent bundle of joyless footage be allowed to pass off as cinema!

The film has no sense of rhythm, not even once in the dozen-odd songs composed by Bappi Lahiri that keep recurring with annoying persistence.

Meghna Naidu seems like a brutal pantomime of other femme-fatales, minus any poise or sex appeal.

As for Mithun, what exactly is he doing breaking into jigs with iron shackles around his ankles and neck, mouthing inane spiritual wisdom and lusting after Naidu in a drunken stupor?

And if that is not bad enough, the final nail on the coffin is the middle-aged Himani Shivpuri squeezed into a tight black dress to perform what could be loosely and lecherously be termed a "sexy" dance for the demented villains in the show.