In the third entry of the presumably profitable Kya Kool Hai Hum franchise, best friends Kanhaiya (Tusshar Kapoor) and Rocky (Aftab Shivdasani) find themselves in Thailand, both Sodom and Gomorrah as far as Bollywood is concerned, as the stars of pornographic remakes of Hindi film hits. Neither gent shows a modicum of acting talent, whether in the smutty spoofs or in the movie itself, but as the porn producer (Krishna Abhishek) explains, the men are well-endowed, and that is all that matters. We have to take his word for it.

The men are studs on the screen and off it (the moan-heavy background score includes neighing sounds, and there is also a visual of a horse in case you didn’t get the point). But Kanhaiya faces a dilemma when he falls in love with Shalu (Mandana Karimi), whose father is a “sanskari” man who cannot sit or lie down because he has a problem with his spine (this movie has deep and unresolved issues with the idea of being upright). Borrowing an idea from Birdcage, Kanhaiya passes off his porn star crowd as his relatives, and they line up their worst imitation of characters from Sooraj Barjatya’s family-friendly films for Shalu and her father, Karjatya (Darshan Jariwala).

Packed with past and future entrants into the Bigg Boss house, Kya Kool Hain Hum 3 very briefly threatens to send up straitlaced Indian morality through Karjatya’s character, but the movie is too scattershot and puerile to realise its potential. The Indian sex comedy is usually about desperate characters whose minds are consumed by lust to the extent that they cannot set eyes on conical or spherical shapes without losing their sanity. Just who is so desperate has always been a mystery in the films written by Milap Zaveri, the Poet Laureate of this genre. Zaveri puns furiously and desperately on ordinary sounding words to mine laughs – the surname Lele or the sentence “I am coming”, for instance, are enough to give him a coronary. Fittingly, all the characters end up in a patch of quicksand, which is right where the movie belongs.

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