By Subhash K. Jha, IANS

You gawk and you gasp at the sheer temerity of this, ha ha, comedy about an aunt-niece pair conning gullible bachelors of every shape and size out of their millions.

And you wonder… Hello??? What happened to the good old comedies like Padosan, Gol Maal and even Hera Pheri where the actors pitched their parodic propensity at just the right temperature to create belly laughs that didn't make you squirm in discomfort.

Everything and everyone in BACHKE REHNA RE BABA (BRRB) is so baggy and over-the-top, you wonder what the director was thinking while shuttling from one queerly conceived shot to another in search of a laughter that's lewd rather than luscious.

And to reduce the once-luscious Rekha to this fatuous farcical state… Allah! It's worse than watching Joan Of Arc burn on the cross.

But let's not bring Joan into this. This isn't a film about witches but bitches… And I use that word without inhibitions.

Welcome to the amoral world of wanna-get-rich-at-any-cost bitches. Like Govind Menon's previous Sherawat-helmed outing KIS KISS KI KISMAT the stakes here are higher than the writer and director's imagination, so that we often end up looking at a product that's too ambitious for its good.

More crude than comic and more farcical than funny, BRRB leaves you speechless with its limp and lurid mediocrity. What's worse is its unbearable tedium. Stretching to nearly 3 hours of unalloyed bilge the crap-trap goes from caper to caper like a paper tiger trying to snarl through the plastic bars of a sham zoo.

The animal instincts, often projected through the two leading ladies' lip-smacking admiration for male sexuality, are as phoney as Ms Sherawat's bouncy assets. You can't take your eyes off them - the phoney feminine sexuality and the leading lady's in-your-face assets - because they stare you in the face in almost every single frame.

One can understand the film's younger sassier female lead mouthing embarrassing innuendos, doing her slurpy kisses with the callow new co-star and all the other things that Sherawat has patented. But what was Rekha thinking when she agreed to all the unsmart shoddy double-entendres and the obnoxious nudge-nudge-wink-wink stuff more suitable to Kader Khan and Shakti Kapoor than two leading ladies?

In one longish inter-lewd, Rekha posing as a French aristocrat bids for a statue of male nude with an erection. While the statue is being carted out the p@#$s hits the doorframe and falls into the ground.

Later we see Sherawat running around with the clay- p@#$s… The penile parody goes limp before long. Phallic farce is a new one for Hindi cinema. Wish it were even half as funny as it would sound on paper.

The collective comic aptitudes of the two leading ladies amounts to nothing more than a series of facial contortions with a whole lot of other rapidly-moving parts trying desperately to supplement the shallow hammy performances.

And hello hello? Is this the same Rekha who once gave rousing comic performances in KHUBSOORAT and BIWI HO TO AISI? In trying to go from rousing to arousing Rekha makes a mockery of her mythic stature as a diva. The director of this film should be legally punished for what he has done to one of Bollywood's most abiding star-actresses.

Paresh Rawal too is uncharacteristically out of sorts. As Rekha's love-smitten Punjabi husband, chasing her all the way to Mauritius (where much of the pathetic parody plays itself out) Rawal shines in spurts.

But clearly the guy having all the fun is Satish Shah. As a gutka-addicted Sindhi businessman being ensnared by the gold-digging Rekha, Shah gets all the expressions of celebrating mediocrity right, specially when he has to play dead.

Satish Shah had earlier played a corpse in Kundan Shah's JAANE BHI DO YAARON. This time his cadaverous act is a signal for the plot to lie down and breathe its last.

Newcomer Karan Khanna gets a chance to show his competence as a kisser. Acting? Who's doing much of that anyway?

Many portions of this film are so clumsily shot and edited you wonder what the director was thinking while concocting the cornucopia of witless corniness.