In short: Siccin 2 (2015)

aka Sijjin 2

Hicran’s (Seyda Terzioglu) happy family life with her husband Adnan (Bulut Akkale) and their little son turns into pure horror when the child is squashed by a cupboard that could not and should not have fallen.

Because grief isn’t bad enough, Adnan turns into an abusive monster who very loudly puts the fault for the kid’s death squarely on Hicran’s shoulders. Then there are the visions of nasty and angry looking women, the nightmares – waking and sleeping – and various occurrences you could only explain with some supernatural force wanting our heroine ill.

A visit to a hodja (think a mix of priest, theological scholar and exorcist for the practical purposes of the film) suggests that Hircan is cursed by a particularly terrible curse only a female relative can lay on the victim, so she begins looking into her own family history. The things she’ll eventually learn are pretty horrible, even by horror movie family secret standards.

This second in Alper Mestçi’s only thematically connected series of Turkish witchcraft/possession horror movies often runs sideways to the sensibilities of comparable movies from the US or the UK, mixing the culturally conservative and the exploitative in ways I’m by now starting to see as very specific to Turkish cinema of the 2010s. There’s always more than a whiff of paternalism and misogyny around, but this is countered by how ineffective and often absent the film’s paternalistic protector figure tends to be. The hodja just loves to give advice but never does anything practical on camera, and is absolutely useless as help against the supernatural. In this context it is also interesting to observe how much of this plays like a classic melodrama, a traditionally female-centric genre, just a melodrama where the usual reasons for turned to eleven dramatics – and boy do the film and Terzioglu love those - have been replaced by curses, witches, and so on. Which does situate Siccin 2 nicely in that very traditional exploitation cinema position where a film perpetuates but also potentially subverts conservative cultural ideas at the same time.

On the more generically horror side of the equation, Mestçi loves to edit in quick, short, shocking moments of creepy, distorted looking faces and practical gore effects in ways that not always make it clear if this is happening inside of the characters’ minds, in the reality of the film, or only for the audience. This, particularly when combined with its high tension melodrama, and the film’s general eye for creepy shots of bleak countryside and city streets, gives Siccin 2 a rather nightmarish mood, or perhaps the feeling of reality getting out of whack through the influence of the malignant forces the curse has conjured up.

In short: The Sacred Spirit (2021)

Original title: Espíritu sagrado

This sort-of arthouse dramedy with certain genre connections by Chema García Ibarra is one of those sad cases of a movie much praised by most every critic writing about it that does nothing whatsoever for me even though I do understand and see the artistry it is lauded for. Alas, it’s artistry in service of nothing I personally have any interest in.

That’s because Ibarra is all about techniques I usually – and specifically here – just can’t stand in a movie: consciously static visual language that’s supposed to distance the viewer from the characters and their world, where I see immersion into a world (even an unpleasant world) as one of the goals of cinema. The cold, emotional distance the film keeps to its character and their inner worlds, where I really want to understand their emotions and inner lives, perhaps even feel for them/with them or against them instead of just looking at them from the outside like a tourist without a guidebook. The monotonous delivery of every single line of dialogue, often described as naturalism by certain critics, even though it is no such thing for anyone not exclusively talking to robots, but rather what happens when you take amateur actors without experience and don’t show them how to emote on camera, another distancing technique I particularly loathe. Add to this humour so deadpan you probably need to be dead to laugh about it, and you can count me out, however interesting some of Ibarra’s ideas are on paper.

Siccîn (2014)

For reasons only known to herself, Öznur (Ebru Kaymakci) has been in rather mad love with her cousin, butcher Kudret (Koray Sahinbas) for a very long time. Even when a black magician (and apparently fortune-teller) foresees that her love will bring her death, she’s unrelenting.

Years later, some time after her lack of love drove her own husband to suicide, apparently, Öznur actually must have managed to sleep with Kudret, for she is now pregnant with his child. Alas, Kudret is now married to Nisa (Pinar Caglar Genctürk), with a blind daughter and a mostly paralysed and bedridden mother-in-law. He’s also, not to put to fine a point on it, a total piece of shit unwilling to take responsibility for anything he does or says: apparently, Öznur “tricked” him into sleeping with her; he’s also at best cold and often enough abusive to his wife, ignores his sick mother in law and sees her as a burden, and is even partially responsible for the sightlessness of his daughter. In any case, he prefers sitting around with his best male buddy to being at home with his family.

When Öznur tells him about her pregnancy, Kudret hits her while berating her to get an abortion, causing a miscarriage, for which he of course does not feel responsible at all.

Disappointingly, this is not a film about the bastard getting his comeuppance. Instead Öznur now goes back to the black magician from before to get him to devise a spell to make Kudret all hers. He’s going for some pig-based djinn conjuring that’s supposed to kill everyone of Kudret’s family but the guy himself. The results are nasty indeed, though not quite as Öznur wanted them to be.

This is the first of a pretty steadily running, and apparently rather popular and commercially successful, series of Turkish horror movies directed by Alper Mestçi. While I am a bit dubious about the film’s moral stance towards who is the greatest asshole in it (it certainly cuts Kudret much more slack than my concept of – admittedly very non-religious - ethical principles would allow), and do certainly find its treatment of Öznur as a character rather problematic, I really can’t argue with the film’s effectiveness as a horror movie. It has an admirable willingness to go into nasty and uncomfortable places, where the most helpless and innocent characters suffer in horrible ways as much as the guilty ones.

Interestingly, while the film’s text always seems to suggest a deeply moralizing streak based on what I assume to be the mainstream values of contemporary Turkish society, in practice, guilty and innocent are suffering alike, here, with punishment for wickedness only arriving once the less wicked characters have suffered and died. Things also do finish in a very sudden way that’s really more 70s downer horror ending than religious horror. As someone unfortunately not terribly knowledgeable about the way religion and worldly life come together to form public morality in Turkey, I’m not quite sure if the film is selling a more nihilist creed under the guise of Islamic horror (try reading something like the The Conjuring films without knowledge of Evangelical Christianity and Warren bullshit to understand what my problems with finding the proper interpretation is), or if this is how this kind of plot is supposed to work out and I’m just misreading it with culturally inappropriate eyes.

What I can say is that Siccîn does contain some highly effective and pleasantly unpleasant set pieces that suggest Mestçi to be a pretty ruthless director of the nastier business in horror. It’s not elegant filmmaking for most of the time, but then, this is clearly a film aiming for your guts and not for whatever organ is responsible for your aesthetic pleasure, really going for it quite unrelentingly once the plot gets going.

Magi (2016)

Warning: there will be spoilers!

Her sister Marla (Brianne Davis) has invited American journalist Olivia Watkins (Lucie Pohl) for a visit to her home in Turkey. Marla’s freshly divorced, very pregnant, and seems to carry some kind of hidden burden she won’t quite explain to Olivia. She does tell a creepy tale about a dress she owns that apparently once belonged to a pregnant village girl that was murdered, her baby cut from her womb. What she’s trying to say with it, Olivia isn’t sure, and Marla’s not telling. But then, Marla’s life in Turkey seems to be the kind of weird that makes a woman rather blithe about creepy, icky looking occult ritual stuff just turning up on a table.

Marla’s story must have been important, though, for just the very same night, she is killed with the help of CGI flies with half-human faces, her baby also cut from her womb, as in the story. The police very quickly decide Marla’s ex-husband is responsible for the deed, what with him committing suicide and leaving a vague yet creepy letter just shortly after Marla has been killed. Olivia’s not completely convinced, though, for there’s no trace of Marla’s dead baby to be found, and little about the murder makes sense.

So Olivia starts an investigation of her own, assisted by Marla’s colleagues and friends Emir (Kenan Ece) and Suzan (Emine Meyrem), during which she stumbles upon the trail of a cult attempting to produce human/djinn crossbreeds. She is quickly beset by a variety of supernatural occurrences, reaching from nightmares to djinn attacks. On the plus side, she’ll also find help from cameoing guest stars Michael “Exposition Machine” Madsen and Stephen “The Exorcist” Baldwin.

In most every aspect, Hasan Karacadag’s (who is also the director of the long-running – and long - Dabbe series of horror films) Magi is a messy movie. It’s longer than it needs to be, shifts protagonists at the strangest moments, changes horror sub-genres repeatedly, and throws a somewhat insane amount of worldbuilding and backstory at its viewers. It is, however, exactly this messiness that makes Magi a worthwhile and often surprisingly fun movie, its messiness also making it unpredictable and giving it a whiff of creative madness. So while it is too long from a standpoint of effective and efficient dramaturgy, it certainly never is boring.

A part of the film’s considerable charm is Karacadag’s willingness to add extraneous detail to everyone and everything, climaxing in a scene in which Madsen exposits via a slide show about the cult that includes the occult roots of Nazism, elements of Eastern and Western occult traditions, various religions, the question of who gave birth to Satan, djinns, and conspiracy elements, the film clearly having understood that adding more occult weirdness makes everything in a horror movie better. The film also – surprisingly, really – makes an honest attempt at using all these elements afterwards (and before) the big exposition sequence, never shying away from making things needlessly yet awesomely complicated. There are even nods towards The X-Files.

On a stylistic level, Karacadag is alas a friend of that desaturated colour scheme most filmmakers right now have left behind for trying to make their stuff look like it was shut by Dean Cundey (in other words awesome), but he is loading so much stuff into his grey and beige frames, I nearly didn’t notice. For when it comes to horror sequences, Magi likes to copy other films’ and filmmakers’ approaches rather obviously, but again Karacadag seems to like, quote and borrow from so many different films and stylistic approaches, the film doesn’t feel like a series of stolen bits and pieces from other films so much as it does like a series of awesome, excited and exciting moments. There are set-ups clearly made with J-horror in mind, with the The Conjuring movies, with The Exorcist, there’s a use of bad CGI like in cheap contemporary Indonesian fare or certain Bollywood horror films from half a decade ago, a couple shots basically directly out of Paranormal Activity, a short trip into a parallel dimension made out of even more bad yet imaginative CGI, scenes shot in the style of Industrial Rock videos from the early 00s, a short trip into folk horror. There’s clearly nothing Karacadag doesn’t have in his trick bag; and certainly nothing he isn’t willing to use.


In theory, all this borrowing from obvious, successful sources could, perhaps should, lead to a tepid, copyist kind of horror film, but in practice, Magi feels much too excited and excitable, throwing all kinds of tricks at its audience in a way that feels generous much more than it feels derivative. The whole thing left me with the feeling of having watched a movie just terribly excited by being all other horror movies at once, and for most of its running time I found myself sharing in its excitement pretty enthusiastically.

Three Films Make A Post: In this town a speeding ticket is a death sentence

Twin Murders: The Silence of the White City aka El silencio de la ciudad blanca (2019): This Netflix movie adaptation of a crime novel that’s apparently much better (which shouldn’t be terribly difficult to achieve) directed by Daniel Calparsoro feels like a greatest hits version of the serial killer thriller genre, and as with most greatest hits collections, there’s a lot of glitz but little substance on screen. Sure, the film does look great, but the script is a complete mess full of sub-plots that are picked up, dropped and forgotten for no apparent reason, motivations and character psychology that make little sense (and is usually neither explained nor demonstrated but just stated awkwardly). The film has the kind of overloaded stop and start pacing you often get when a book is cut down to what a screenwriter deems to be its highlights.
Otherwise, there’s only the usual overblown serial killer movie nonsense, full of grand declarations of intellectual depth that doesn’t actually exist, ridiculous murder rituals this film isn’t even clever enough to make as creepy as they should be, and taking place in a world where characters are probably even accompanied by Very Dramatic Music™ when they are on the loo.

Housewife (2017): I absolutely adored director Can Evrenol’s Baskin, but this, his second feature, is quite a step back, despite hitting some of my favourite horror and weird fic elements, namely a creepy cult, a protagonist who can’t quite understand if she’s dreaming or not, and creepy flesh masks. Evrenol seems to be trying to formally emulate the dream logic of Italian 80s horror, but for much of the film’s running time, he doesn’t hit the proper mood of a bizarre and unpleasant dream but more the randomness of actual dreams, which simply isn’t terribly interesting to watch. There are a couple or three effective scenes here to show that Baskin wasn’t an accident, but most of what we get is aimless meandering.

The film also suffers badly from the decision to have a cast of non-native English speakers speak English dialogue, adding a stilted and unnatural quality that may have been meant to add to the film’s unreal mood but in practice makes the already pretty awkward dialogue difficult to make out and puts another layer of distance between audience and characters when they badly need to feel as close to the audience as possible.


The California Kid (1974): Which leaves this post’s role of “The Good Film” to this unassuming 70s TV movie by Richard T. Heffron in which drag riding Martin Sheen takes revenge on Sheriff Vic Morrow who purposely drove his brother and others off a mountain road. It’s not a tight, Duel-style thrill ride but more interested in a  very 70s exploration of characters on the side-lines of life, while having some thoughts about the reasons why good people look away from bad acts, usually avoiding the melodrama that can come with the TV territory. Heffron’s direction is not spectacular but makes nice use of its California locations and knows how to provide space for a cast that also features a young Nick Nolte, Michelle Phillips and Stuart Margolin.

Musallat (2007)

Freshly married Suat (Burak Özçivit) has left his new wife Nurcan (Bigkem Karavus) behind in the small village in Turkey they both come from and has come to Berlin to earn the kind of money you just can’t make in a place like his home. He’s suffering rather badly under the separation from wife and home, as well as his isolation in a strange and xenophobic country whose language he doesn’t speak, with his childhood friend Metin (Ibrahim Can) his only real human contact. So it’s not much of a surprise that he falls into a deep depression.

There’s more than “just” psychological toil brewing for him, or rather, parts of this toil are caused by some kind of supernatural agency that brings with it visions and illusions, dreams-within-dreams-within-dreams and which seems to set out to further his inner and outer isolation. Eventually, things become so bad, Metin accompanies Suat to Istanbul where they seek the help of mystic (if any Turkish reader should have a better term for the man’s role, I’d be only too happy to be enlightened) Haci Burhan Kasavi (Kurtulus Sakiragaoglu). Things don’t work out terribly well for anyone involved, but at least a pretty classic Weird Tales kind of turn of events will enlighten the audience about what has been really going on here.

On a technical level, Musallat, Alper Mestçi’s first of quite a number of horror movies he has directed by now is not a terribly impressive film. It’s clearly made on a bit of a shoestring budget, cutting visual corners wherever it can, so camera work, lighting, production design and special effects tend to look cheap for most of the film’s running time, though there are a couple of pretty effective moments when it comes to the scarier stuff.

The script, however, is the good kind of interesting, much more interested in telling an actually story in a semi-twisty way than in delivering a series of shocks. This leads to a somewhat cumbersome structure with the truth of the matter taking up half an hour of the film’s running time in the end, not exactly helping make the film dramatic, yet it also provides Musallat the time to talk about some themes I haven’t seen often – if at all – treated in a horror movie before. Particularly the inclusion of Suat’s very specific to “foreigners” in Germany kind of culture shock and isolation is not something you’ll find shown in cinema, genre or not, very often and Musallat really manages to connect his feeling of having stepped into a different and crueller world very well to the supernatural shenanigans on a thematic as well as on an emotional level.

Obviously, I’m also rather fond of the film’s cultural specificity. Given that most possession movies we get to see around here feature the same (pop) cultural exorcism tropes of an Evangelical or Catholic bend, I’m all on board with learning what genre movie Ifrit are getting up to. How much or how little the film’s depiction has to do with actual Muslim and Turkish thought, practice, religion, or folklore, I’m not really in a position to judge (all my knowledge of jinn lore coming from a couple of blog posts or perhaps a Fortean Times article or two), but that it’s simply more interesting and new from my chair in Germany, I most certainly can say.


Musallat gets additional love from me for use of that much-loved (by me) and certainly well-worn trope of the tale we are watching being written down by a man in the process of bleeding out, something Lovecraft would have approved of rather a lot. Some things are clearly international.

Baskin (2015)

Warning: spoilers are an inevitable fact of life!

A group of Turkish policemen (Görkem Kasal, Ergun Kuyucu, Muharrem Baryrak, Fatih Dokgöz and Sabahattin Yakut), most of whom are thugs or at least the sort of cop letting their colleagues work out their inner thugs without protest, receive a call that sends them out to a house in very curious rural area. They are confronted with a terrible ritual in a place and time where the borders between our world and one much worse have grown rather thin. But even before they have arrived at the house, the world seems to shift around them, time and place twisting and turning into nightmares that may not offer escape for any of them.

Turkish director Can Evrenol’s Baskin – based on an earlier short film – is quite the film, as close to the recreation of a nightmare (inside of a nightmare inside of a nightmare, and so on) as possible. Even right at the start, when the plot hasn’t arrived at the point where it will actually show anything supernatural or simply horrifying, the director puts quite a bit of effort into creating a feeling of wrongness and weirdness. Some characters show frays at their edges the situation – or simple digestion problems – don’t quite seem to justify. Colour schemes, camera angles, music, and the disquieting way the camera doesn’t show the faces of certain characters seems to suggest doom, dread and create distrust in the reality of anything we see, until the simple act of meat cutting to appropriately sinister music takes on a sinister undertone, a suggestion of one isn’t quite sure what, only that it can be nothing good, healthy, or sane.

The sense of disquiet Evrenol creates is only further increased by strange jumps in time and place that leave the viewer asking if it is the film as one first assumes or the characters jumping around; the way the talk between one of the cops and his foster son seems to concern dreams, omens and the supernatural quite a bit more than fits the tough guy postures of their colleagues. The film keeps this sense of the high Weird even once the policemen have descended into cellar of a lonely house and have become the unwilling participants of a ritual that contains rather more – inventive and excellently unpleasant - gore and torture than films this heavy on an atmosphere of dread (when they’re not made by Fulci and the other typical Italian suspects at least) usually show, keeping the feeling of the ritual as disquieting as it is brutal. Not a little feat once you’ve realized that most of this latter part in actuality only consists of a bunch of people out of a 90s metal video doing metal video stuff to one another in some ruined cellar. The thing is – Baskin never feels that way at all, but really comes very, very close to the feeling of the never-ending living nightmare its content is supposed to be.

Even the slowness of Baskin’s early phases – about the only element of the film I can see anyone reasonably criticizing – fits the idea of a nightmare perfectly, leaving the audience without the crutches of a more conventionally thrilling first half while still building (and building) a feeling of wrongness. And while I can’t say I was terribly surprised by the film’s ending, I don’t think feeling surprised by it is really the point here; rather, the film seems to delight in confirming the audience’s worst fears.


All in all, Baskin is a fantastic achievement that anyone who likes their horror on the atmospheric yet gory side needs to see.

In short: Muska (2014)

Celal (Sezgin Erdemir), a sexist would-be womanizer who’ll one day grow up to be misogynist, is thrown out of her flat after his girlfriend walks in on him cheating on her.

Not having been paid for his work as a journalist for months now, and with no friends willing to put him up (nor to put up with him, one can’t help but think), Celal needs a cheap place to live right quick. Fortunately, his possibly only friend Engin (Taylan Güner) helps Celal find a place he just might be able to afford. It’s a small room in a run-down private house owned by an elderly woman called Aliye (Tanju Tuncel), who lives there with her grandchild Mehmet (Efe Karaman). Celal isn’t happy with the place at all, but a glance at Aliye other tenant, Yasemin (Asli Sahin) changes his mind right quick. Ah, the wonders of hormones.

Still, it turns out moving into this particular house is a very bad idea. Celal is plagued by mysterious shadows, dreams about a burned man and other sure-fire signs of the movie-supernatural. Things deteriorate from there.

In the last few years, there has been a good handful of horror films coming from Turkey, suggesting a minor renaissance of a genre that hasn’t been close to the country’s heart for political and social reasons. Ozkan Celik’s Muska isn’t exactly the sort of film that’ll make you ecstatic about this renaissance, but rather an embodiment of middling low budget kind of horror that’s not bad enough to be amused by or to hate and not good enough to love.

The plot is rather on the obvious side, just barely filling the barely 80 minutes of runtime, the acting’s okay, the camera work decent. From time to time, the film even achieves a truly atmospheric scene but Celik keeps everything so basic, excitement lives elsewhere.

That’s too bad too, for there are quite a few exciting and interesting directions the film could have moved in from its basic ideas, like commenting on the nature of identity, the sexist’s fear of women, and so on, but the film never digs any deeper than the surface, consequently never achieving any deeper involvement from its audience.

In short: Ada: Zombilerin Dügünü (2010)

A bunch of Turkish friends who all seem to hate one another with great passion, and never do anything but bicker and bitch, ferry over to an island to take part in a wedding. This being 2010 and all, the film does of course present everything through the lens of a hand-held digital camera supposedly used by one of the friends. Twenty minutes of bickering later, the wedding is attacked by zombies.

Lots of people die. There's more loud bitching and bickering, most of it out in the fresh, clear air, because that's how you act when the world ends. Will anyone make it to the government evacuation point on time, or will the audience's hopes to see every single one of these non-characters suffer and die be fulfilled?

Those of my peers who hated Romero's Diary of the Dead will probably not survive contact with this thing - or they might just learn to appreciate Romero's film a little more through the time-honoured powers of pure cinematic suffering.

The Internet tells me Ada is supposed to be a horror comedy, but I find that a bit hard to swallow, seeing how the film's neither funny nor horrific, but rather a film so generic that the idea it could actually evoke laughter or any other emotional expression in a viewer sounds completely preposterous to me. The only emotional exception is hatred for the characters: seldom - even in a genre so full of characters who need to shut up and get eviscerated as horror - have I seen a bunch of more annoying, hateful non-entities. Guess how much I cared about what happened to them?

I have to admit, though, that the characters are actually the least generic parts of the film. The plot is, oh, let's be honest here instead of polite: there is no plot other than random elements from other zombie films put in a row and executed without any personality or focus. Ada uses the POV horror format for nothing more than plot-related teleportation, and to excuse the shitty photography.

There is nothing of interest here, as long as there are hundreds of other zombie films, some good, some at least mediocre, many better than this one, vying for your attention.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: turkish movies,horror,in short

Ölüme Son Adim (1983)

aka Last Step to Death

aka Turkish Mad Max (as usual, there's not much Mad Max about the film, except for the way Arkin dresses in its second half and a bit of borrowed soundtrack)

Ultra hardcore mercenary Kaan/Kagan/Kahan (Cüneyt Arkin; my ears, the subtitles and movie databases aren't exactly of one mind when it comes to his character name), the kind of guy who carries an astonishing amount of large knives on his body at all times, is hired by some guy in a suit with a nervous tic to rescue a Professor who has found the cure for leukaemia from some unnamed and unexplained heavily armed evildoers holding him somewhere out in the country. Tic guy is willing to pay Kahan 100 million - who knows in what currency - for his efforts, so there's no reason for the mercenary not to take the offer.

Kahan doesn't think that this is the kind of job even he could manage alone, though, so he grabs his best friend Ali (Yildirim Gencer) - a specialist in tactics and sexual harassment - and his female friend Leyla (Emel Tümer) - a specialist in wearing clothes so skimpy she'd look less nude if she were naked, and kicking people in the face - to assist him in the case.

After some training against mechanical dolls that use live ammo, the trio's off to rescue the Professor. Fifty or so dead goons later, the Professor is in our heroes' hands. Surprisingly, he also comes with a girl who might be his daughter or his girlfriend (the film ain't tellin'), which delights Ali's grabby hands to no end.

Now it should be just a simple thing for the friends to deliver the rescued man to their client. Of course, they find themselves betrayed and will have to kill even more people to get to the end of the movie.

As it is a cooperation between Turkish exploitation god Cüneyt Arkin (of the chiselled chin, the steely gaze, the monkey-like gritted action scene teeth and the wild arm-flailing) and his favourite director mad, mad Cetin Inanc, Ölüme Son Adim is of course a film as crazy as a fever dream. Everything I've written about any film directed by Inanc still holds true here: the film's pacing is as hectic as toddler on a sugar binge, the editing as choppy and devoid of transitions as it can be, and half of the scenes are shot from the most improbable angles, preferably from below. Whenever I see one of Inanc's films I suspect one of the man's ambitions must have been to become an avantgarde director of the type who wouldn't even shoot the simplest of scenes straight, and when his path led him to exploitation filmmaking, he didn't see any reason to not shoot his exploitation films as he would have his dream avantgarde projects. Another possible explanation is of course that Inanc just didn't really know what he was doing, but because both theories lead to the same conclusion - namely that Inanc's films are inexplicably weird - I will probably never know.

Anyway (to fall into the tone the film takes for eighty minutes for a moment), what can you expect from this cinematic wonder!? Scenes shot from below a table! Crotch cam! Way-too-close-ups of faces (of course shot from below and slightly to the side! Shouting! Loud punching! Loud kicking! Loud (and very large) throwing knives! A loud bow! Arkin Fu! A grenade launcher gun! Horrible jokes! Two guys - who don't have secret sexual thing going on between them at all, no siree - permanently telling each other they are the worst friends ever and sharing cigarettes! Machine gun nests built from footage that is "borrowed" from some different (and very yellow-tinted) movie! Highly concentrated leering at Emel Tümer's ass and thighs (looks like former softcore and hardcore porn man Inanc compensated for the ban on nudity in Turkey at this point in time by fixating as much on Tümer's lower body half as possible, like Jess Franco exploring every hair of Lina Romay's nether regions, just dressed)!

Now that I think about it, Ölüme Son Adim is a lot like a Pakistani exploitation film, only without the musical numbers, the pointed fingers, the thunder claps; It's just much more condensed. This only goes to show that people want pretty much the same thing from their cheap and exciting films the world over, even if the actual expression of these wants is a little different from country to country. Humanity truly is a great and wonderful thing.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: turkish movies,cetin inanc,cüneyt arkin,emel tümer,yildirim gencer,action,reviews

Three Films Make One Very Sleepy Guy: There's No Waking Up From The SLEEP OF THE DEAD!

Ölümsüzler (1971): This Western is not exactly a shining example of the virtues of Turkish pop cinema. Though there are certainly some things to recommend it - among them Erol Tas, yes Dr. Seytan himself, mugging charmingly as the main bad guy - there's an atypical dragginess to the film's pace, and a painful fascination with scenes of people riding, riding and then riding some more while needle-dropped music you just might know from somewhat more effective Westerns plays that make it difficult to enjoy the film.

 

Red (2010): Action comedy very freely based on the graphic novel by Warren Ellis (who was able to buy his daughter a pony from the money he got out of this, so there's at least that to say for the film) and Cully Hamner. It's all highly paid actors of the good sort, silly action and flat jokes all the time, presented with exactly the type of Hollywood slickness that makes my feet fall asleep. It's quite an inoffensive film in that it is perfectly watchable, but also a terrible waste of talent and theme (what happens to men and women of violence when they get old?), seemingly too cautious or just too damn disinterested to make something out of its budget (you know, an amount several dozen indie films with ambitions could be made from). It's mainstream cinema at its most riskless, and neither as fun nor as funny as it pretends to be.

 

Dead Clowns (2003): Of course, having none of that big time Hollywood money does not necessarily save a film from being a bore. As it turns out, in the wrong hands, even zombie clowns can get frightfully boring. Ölümsüzler might drag through the sheer power of its riding scenes, but that's still better than being like Dead Clowns and dragging through the sheer power of various actors and "actors" holding incredibly tedious monologues until they are killed off by clowns. A plot that might just be enough for a twenty minute short film gets blown up to ninety horrible minutes, contemporary scream queens (= actresses who are probably great people, but haven't been in anything worth watching in their lives) appear and die or do exposition and die, there's no editor in sight, and why am I feeling so sleepy all of a sudden?

 

Technorati-Markierungen: turkish movies,american movies,western,action,comedy,horror,erol tas,bruce willis,john malkovich,in short

Vahsi Kan (1983)

aka Wild Blood

aka Turkish First Blood (and it's even true this time)

An evil rich guy named Hasmet rules a Turkish village and its surroundings with an iron hand. But his reign of smirking evilness is threatened by a middle-aged man, his daughter (Emel Tümer), and her little brother who are driving to a trial regarding one or more of Hasmet's evil deeds. Obviously, the easiest way to get rid of them is to have a bunch of henchpeople pretend to be a heap of corpses lying in the road and kill the family once they stop their car. Thanks to the surprising not-zombies, the man and his son die unpleasant deaths, but the daughter escapes.

She's soon not the only one stumbling through this particular part of the countryside anymore. Ex-commando Riza (Cüneyt Arkin) has an unpleasant run-in with some of Hasmet's men, and begins to repeatedly go Rambo on the bad guy's henchmen's asses, utilizing the awesome power of being filmed in undercranked shots when running, transforming not into a manikin like normal movie heroes do but into a ragdoll when falling from any heights, classic Arkin fu, an affinity for traps and monologue-ing  about blood, and a very big knife. When the two Hasmet-haters meet up, Riza tailors his new partner an awesome ripped red disco jungle woman outfit, proving he's a man with talents for every situation, and the sort of eye for women's clothing that would make him a reality show mainstay today.

A little later, we'll also learn that Riza is an old acquaintance of Hasmet too, and that the old evildoer is holding him responsible for his son losing both of his arms and the use of his legs. Obviously, this being a First Blood rip-off, Riza's former commanding officer will make an appearance too. But mostly, there will be ranting into the camera and killing.

Whenever Turkish exploitation master director Cetin Inanc and Turkish exploitation acting god Cüneyt Arkin made a film together, fantastic, explosive and very special things happened. And I don't just mean especially egregious cases of needle-dropped music like the cues from First Blood on the soundtrack here.

Inanc's permanently excited style of direction - heated even by the hyperactive standards of Turkish popular cinema - and Arkin's talent for steely staring into cameras, as well as the latter's ability to look ridiculous and awesome at the same time during weirdly choreographed fight scenes usually turned the films these two made together into viewing experiences even more exhausting than was the already quite exhausting standard of Turkish cinema of the time. Neither Inanc nor Arkin had much believe in standing still (or at least shutting up) for even a single second, and so their united works turn into a whirlwind of very Turkish kung fu, wild shouting, wide-eyed ranting by the film's bad guys (the wheelchair bound son - only complete with his own explosive trap - doing his thing with special enthusiasm), extreme close-ups, crotch shots, and thigh shots, all filmed with copious use of the most aggressive, probably manhandled, handheld camera and edited during an all-night cocaine binge.

It's all as ridiculous as it is intense, but Vahsi Kan is not the sort of film that leaves its viewers room or breath to contemplate its rather perfunctory script or said ridiculousness. There's only time for the most manly manliness of Cüneyt Arkin when he's really angry (you wouldn't like him when he's angry, unless he's angry at your enemies, then you'd think he's awesome when he's angry), some leering in the direction of Emel Tümer (though the leering in Turkey of 1982 was a lot tamer than it would have been ten years earlier, "thanks" to the new censorship regime), explosions, and shouting about blood and vengeance.

I have to admit that I like this version of First Blood a lot more than the original. Vahsi Kan has no time for that other film's less than believable attempts at being anti-war that were quite at odds with its obvious love for violence; there's some talk about Arkin's character's love for peace, but Inanc is nothing if not an economic director fully conscious of the fact that nobody watching his movies cares about being morally enlightened by them, and isn't ashamed to revel in the silly violence. I also suspect that Turkey's military regime of the time wouldn't have liked a film that was too clearly critical of war or the military itself.

However, if a viewer doesn't ask the film about its morals, it's certainly not going to talk about them (except for some mumbling about "blood, vengeance, wild blood, blood" while cackling insanely), and will instead merrily demonstrate everything Inanc and Arkin know about making an action film, Turkish pop cinema style, which is everything you can know about that particular aspect of the art of filmmaking without selling your soul to a godhood of your choice.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: turkish movies,cetin inanc,cüneyt arkin,reviews,emel tümer,action

In short: Ölüler Konusmaz Ki (1970)

aka Ölüler Konusmazki

aka The Dead Don't Talk

A young couple has come into a Turkish small-town for some unexplained "business". A carriage driver who likes to mention that it is the 15th of the month and he has to be home before dark a bit too often for comfort drives them to a guest house. It's one of those creepy gothic affairs, with doors that open and close without human influence, and a warm meal for the right amount of persons already ready on the table. A bit later, a rather creepy guy appears and delights everyone with slow movements and not the least bit suspicious glances at the lady of the couple. Later on, Creepy Guy (who is named Hasan, it seems) shows the lady what he loves - a painting of a woman in front of which he proceeds to have a break-down, because beautiful women always leave him.

Despite everything, the couple still decides to stay the night at the place. Not surprisingly, that's not a good idea. A dead guy wearing a hat and a trenchcoat arrives, opens his mouth very wide, laughs a lot, and kills the couple. Then follow a few random scenes of further killing and laughing. In between, a guy with a moustache (we will later learn that he is the headmaster of the local school) has heart problems.

Then, something comprehensible happens! Sema, the new school teacher arrives in town. The poor girl's new living quarters are of course in Hasan's house, and she is of course the new main goal of the dead joker's killing aspirations, but Sema turns out to be more resolute and resistant than anybody could have expected.

Turkey is still my go-to country when it comes to films that are at once frighteningly simple and utterly confusing. For most of Ölüler's running time, I didn't have much of a clue what was going on, despite the film being subtitled. Obviously, I was able to follow the part about a dead man walking around and killing people (and I even managed to understand his connection with the headmaster at a later point) while laughing a lot (and I mean a lot), but the why and wherefore and who of most everyone and everything in it was disturbingly unclear.

The film has the sort of disorienting effect that might be meant to simulate the experience of a combination of culture shock, jet lag and a dead guy laughing extensively in a viewer. Or Ölüler might be an avantgardist masterpiece. Or it might just be that writer/director Yavuz Yalinkilic's style is just completely confusing out of incompetence and/or a lack of funds.

In the end, it doesn't matter much, because this is a film about a dead guy laughing (did I mention that he laughs a lot?) and killing people, a classical folkloristic Turkish monster, screaming women, disturbed editing - in short, it's exactly what one would expect a Turkish pop/pulp cinema horror film to be, with nothing to disturb the pure experience of a horror movie pared down to some of its absolute basics. From time to time, the film is even effectively disquieting, mostly through scenes of the dead guy rubbing himself against a window, and the neverending laughter that annoys until it can't annoy anymore, but becomes uniquely unpleasant, like a dead and rotting thing dangling hypnotically before your eyes.

If you are inexperienced with the unique Turkish approach to filmmaking you will probably be better served with watching something less grating first, but if you've already developed the taste, this will mess you up pretty good.

Technorati-Tags: turkish movies,horror,in short,yavuz yalinkilic

In short: Süpermen Dönüyor (1979)

aka Turkish Superman

aka The Return of Superman

Whatever you think you know about Superman from those American movies is wrong: the last survivor of the planet Krypton (which, and I quote: "exploded seven lightyears ago") didn't grow up in Kansas, but in Turkey. His name also isn't Clark Kent, but Tayfun (Tayfun Demir). The rest of his background is mostly as you remember, though. Please just keep in mind that his kidnapping-prone journalist love interest is now called Alev (Güngör Bayrak) and the Daily Planet consists of three desks in two office rooms.

Anyway, a bad guy named Ekrem (Yildirim Gencer) has invented a ray that can transform any metal into gold and also moonlights as a death ray. Ekrem's only problem is that he needs Krypton Stone as an energy source for his ray, and the only known specimens of that element (as well as a formula to produce more of it) are in the hands of the upright Professor Hetin (Esref Kolcak) who just happens to be Alev's father. Hetin certainly isn't going to give the element or his inventions to just anyone, so Ekrem makes dastardly plans (that for some reason start with trying to kill Alev instead of kidnapping her as a hostage) to steal them from the professor.

Fortunately, Superman is there to show Ekrem and his henchpeople the errors of their ways.

For once, a Turkish pop movie known as Turkish whatever actually deserves the title, but it's also for once a movie of its type I don't care much for.

On paper, Turkish Superman contains all the mandatory elements to make me happy: utter disregard for copyright laws as demonstrated by the film's hero being Superman in exactly the iconic costume, and even parts of the music being borrowed from the US movie (the James Bond theme also features quite prominently), special effects so special the substitution of Christmas ornaments for stars and planets in the film's intro isn't even their worst moment, a jumpy plot that just can't sit still for longer than five seconds, and Kunt Tulgar, Copperhead himself, in the director's chair.

Unfortunately, all this potential adds up to less than I had hoped for. Tulgar is a much weaker director than for example Yilmaz Atadeniz or Cetin Inanc are. Tulgar's frankly boring point and shoot style is only useful to demonstrate how much more creative his peers were visually. Atadeniz' and Inanc's films were often raw and sloppy, yet also full of an energy and excitement that made their films irresistible. Turkish Superman is only hectic in comparison.

The film's not made better by the fact that its Superman Tayfun Denim spends most of his time with the creepy smirk of a serial killer on his face. I wouldn't have been surprised if he had ripped someone's head off while wearing that expression. And what do you know? Turkish Superman does kill people.

The movie further suffers from the simple problem that Superman as a character just isn't a very good fit for the two-fisted action style Turkish popular cinema is specialized in. There's not much room for longer fisticuffs or interesting stunts when your film's hero is untouchable by normal physical means and so strong he wins his fights with a single punch. The easiest way out of this particular problem is to give our hero an equally super-powered foe, but Tulgar's film doesn't use this method, either for budgetary reasons or to ape the first US Superman of the 70s more closely.

Consequently, I found it extremely difficult to get excited about Tayfun or his adventures, and excitement is usually what Turkish pop cinema has going for it.

 

Technorati-Tags: turkish movies,fantasy,action,kunt tulgar,in short

Iron Fist: The Giants Are Coming (1973)

Original Title: Demir yumruk: Devler geliyor

Two hostile groups of evil foreign evil-doers have come to Turkey to find a mysterious hidden dagger, which in turn will lead its owner to some mysterious hidden uranium mines, which again in turn will make their owner the (mysterious and hidden?) ruler of the world.

Said forces of evil are a cross-dressing (or just very gender-confusing) Fu Manchu with his army of bikini-clad, high-heeled and caped machinegun-toting women and boring normal henchmen and a sure sense for fine lair-design (and, as will later turn out, a love for torture), and the bald, scar-faced Russian Zagoff with his army of guys in mock-Cossack outfits and boring normal henchmen and a sure sense for having a guy with a steel claw hand as his right hand man. But don't worry, easily worried reader, the forces of good are on their way too, in the form of Turkish secret police agent Meral (Feri Cansel), her co-agent and philandering fiancée Ervel, their pratfalling, yet two-fisted and competent comic-relief side-kick Orhan and vengeance-seeking Murat, the son of (and I quote) "the only expert on Egyptology" whose knowledge about the dagger got him killed.

While Meral is working overtime by doing undercover jobs as a masked dancer in Fu Manchu's lair (didn't I say the guy's got style?) and as Zagoff's new secretary, the bad guys take turns kidnapping and trying to kidnap Murat and whoever is with him at that moment, in the hope that Murat will be able to tell them where that darn dagger is hidden, until the good guys manage to punch their way to freedom again, only to then be re-caught before they can even drink a nice cup of tea. That is, until (or is that until until?) Ervel is seemingly killed by Zagoff, but returns dressed in a superhero outfit that cleverly and-oh-so-subtly incorporates the logos of both Superman and Batman to do even more and better punching.

Oh yes, Turkish pop cinema. You know the drill by now I suppose, and will expect of Iron Fist exactly the mixture of straight-faced silliness, enthusiastic (and technically dubious) action sequences whose sound effects only have the slightest connection to what is actually going on on screen, blatant disregard for trademark and copyright laws, wild mugging of the bad guys, and the same "borrowed" music on the soundtrack every second of these films has, that it delivers.

If you're like me, you will be very happy with that, too, and will probably applaud the film's tendency to randomly throw completely useless stuff on screen because someone thought it would be a cool idea to have Zagoff demonstrate his invention of an iron block-hand thingie that also functions as a gun, even though it's never going to be used during the course of the film. That particular case might of course be the film's director Tunc Basaran making fun of the rule that guns hanging over fireplaces just must be fired.

It's of course all delivered in the breathless pulp style of Turkish cinema of this type and era and driven by a sense of the ridiculously awesome that was basically invented to charm the pants off of cult movie fans thirty years later.

As a bonus beside the typically awesome and weird, Iron Fist also recommends itself by letting Meral be just as competent as the guys (and quite stunning to look at, too) and by being as obvious about possible gay subtext as any Turkish film I've ever seen. I don't necessarily mean the (problematic if you want to go all serious on a film that really wasn't made for it) cross-dressing Fu Manchu, but rather the enthusiastic hugging and touching between male characters who have already been seen shouting stuff like "Let's shower together!". I'd be remiss in my duty if I wouldn't mention Orhan's very loud and big love for Ervel's bodily achievements in this context, or the fact that Murat and Ervel are suddenly the biggest buddies after a bit of training and showering ("showering"?). In all honesty, it would be no surprise at all if the four good main characters would celebrate their final victory in a good, old-fashioned orgy.

Which would be the perfect finale for a movie that already is an orgy of awesomeness.

 

Technorati-Tags: turkish movies,action,reviews,feri cansel,tunc basaran

Cöl (1983)

aka The Desert

aka Turkish Jaws (though it really, truly, is not)

Unfortunately, this film isn't available in subtitled form and my Turkish is still non-existent, so I won't be able to go into the intricacies of its plot. Fortunately, my experience with Turkish pop cinema tells me that there might not be any intricacies to go into or if they do indeed exist, understanding the dialogue might not help comprehending them at all. And really, what's more important in the end - plot or Cüneyt Arkin kicking people in places politeness doesn't allow me to mention?

What I do understand of the plot is the following: Cüneyt Arkin is the manliest man on Earth and goes around a Turkish coastal town, killing bad people. He's quite excellent at it, too. When he's not murdering people left and right, Arkin plays with his sunglasses like the cooler brother of David Caruso in that TV show about fascist killer commandos in Miami.

After some more killing and punching, Arkin hides out on a ship that is anchored close to the coast and belongs to an older friend of his and that friend's son(?). There, he has time to rest and have flashback nightmares to the terrible things the bad guys have done to him, namely torturing him, killing his mother and/or wife and separating him from his dog. Unless the boy in the flashbacks isn't supposed to be a young Arkin. In that case, they also did something terrible to his son.

In the present, our hero also finds time to romance Emel Tümer, who likes to stand on rocks, wearing a bikini with great talent.

But Arkin can't have too much peace, so his captain friends betrays him. For money, it looks like. Yet not even being tied to a piece of wood and being set adrift on the ocean can keep a real man from his vengeance, even when he has to fight an adorable plastic shark to get to it.

Cetin Inanc-directed films featuring Turkey's action hero number one Cüneyt Arkin are the movie version of having a mad guy from the street break into your flat and shout at you for seventy minutes while an old-fashioned boom box screams someone's favourite music at you. From time to time a car races through your living room. It might be a bit frightening at first, but it sure doesn't lack in excitement.

The four things Inanc likes most in life are low-angled shots, uncomfortably close close-ups, shaking his camera in the air like he just don't care and Arkin punching/kicking the camera. That doesn't mean the director has no eye for emotionally meaningful framing and composition at all. He just prefers to use outlandish yet clever ways to shoot a scene, as long as the set-up is quickly done and cheap enough to be do-able in five minutes and with no equipment to speak of. This lends Cöl the hysterically dynamic feel typical of the better part of Turkish popular cinema of this era, a style of filmmaking that isn't so much "point and shoot on amphetamines" as in the 70s anymore as it is "scream and shake and sometimes pretend you're an arthouse movie on amphetamines".

Apart from the screaming (and a bit of shooting, and car stunts), the film also delivers some of the most ridiculously awesome sped-up non-Kung Fu fights with asynchronous sound effects ever committed to celluloid. It looks like all the energy missing from boring US martial arts movies has landed in Turkey and won't leave until Cüneyt Arkin has rammed a piece of wood he's carrying in his mouth through someone's throat. That's not a metaphor, by the way.

Of course, the violent exploits of Arkin aren't all that Cöl excites with. There's also some expert, yet random low-angled bikini booty shaking at the camera by Tümer. But don't worry, the camera is shaking too; I suspect out of sheer exuberance about having! a! woman! (actually even two)! in! its! view!. And there are also at least five continuous minutes in which our hero doesn't shoot, kick or hit anyone and instead has his camera-shaking nightmares of the terrible things the bad guys did to him and his family before he can go and kill a few more people or a poor helpless plastic shark, so there are sped-up attempts at character depth too.

No Turkish movie made before the 90s would of course be complete without needle-dropped music. This time, it's a bit of the soundtracks of various Jaws movies, some rockin' guitar music and a whole lot of Eye of the Tiger. The film uses its stolen soundtrack in a way that seems at once cool and utterly ridiculous, without a care about cheesiness, copyright laws or good taste.

In this, as in a lot of other aspects, Cöl reminds me heavily of the music of Thin Lizzy. That is to say, it is at once idiotically macho and completely conscious of how much of its machismo is a lie and a ridiculous, untenable-in-real-life pose, yet can still revel in it without getting all campy and ironic on its audience.

 

Technorati-Tags: turkish movies,cetin inanc,cüneyt arkin,action,reviews

In short: Cellat (1975)

aka Turkish Death Wish

aka The Executioner

Orhan is a moustachioed, mild-mannered and civic-minded architect who loves his wife, his sister and holding speeches about the "animals" who commit violent crimes. His mild-manneredness turns into the full-out psychopathy his speeches already promised when a trio of dope fiend hippies rape his wife and his sister, killing the wife in the proceeding and driving his sister into an incurable, near-catatonic state.

When the police doesn't find the killers, Orhan gets a bit miffed and begins to roam the streets at night, randomly attacking criminals. The "attacking" turns into "murdering" after an acquaintance makes him the most typical of gifts, a handgun. Now a full-grown serial killer, and prone to short, yet self-righteous speeches at the grave of his wife, Orhan continues his killing spree.

For once, a Turkish variation on a US movie known as "Turkish whatever" does in fact keep quite close to the tone and structure of the original its ripping-off. That's rather unfortunate, seeing that the original Death Wish isn't a movie that contains much worthy of being ripped off. Sure, it's important for the development of the vigilante movie (however dubious an achievement one might find this to be), but it's just not a very good (or entertaining, or shocking) movie.

Alas, Cellat isn't any better than Death Wish. It even copies the main problem the Winner-directed film has - the fact that it wants its audience to identify with the vigilantism of its main character, but does everything in its power to make him completely abhorrent. The main problem is that we're supposed to identify with Orhan as a near-mythical angel of vengeance figure although he doesn't actively try to take vengeance on the guys who actually killed his wife or does anything to try and find them until they are dropped in his lap, and instead goes around killing random criminals (some of them in fact much less violent than he is) who have nothing to do with his personal story. That makes him just another psychopath, and hardly worthy of audience-identification.

A more clever film could probably milk Orhan's dubious motives quite well, for example putting the nature of vengeance itself in question, or picturing Orhan's slow loss of sanity and humanity, but Cellat certainly isn't that film.

But even if I'd be able to ignore the film's unpleasant politics (which are of course par for the course in this sub-genre), I don't think the rest of the film is worth the effort. Very atypical for the speed-fuelled Turkish popular cinema, Cellat's action scenes are neither insane nor intense, but mostly consist of Orhan standing around stiffly and shooting some guy armed with a knife; rinse and repeat for a dozen or so victims. It's about as interesting to watch as it sounds.

It does however fit the slow pacing and lack of dynamics the whole film suffers from (come to think of it, a problem I had with the original Death Wish, too) perfectly, making Cellat one of the few Turkish pop movies I have seen that can be called slow and boring.

 

Technorati-Tags: turkish movies,action,in short

In short: The Deathless Devil (1973)

A Professor (Yalin Tolga) has invented the most fantastic of inventions: a magicscientific lamp thing that works as a universal remote control for just about anything. The Professor wants to make this wonderful gadget a present to his beloved country, so that Turkey has an easier time controlling its military planes to slaughter minorities with, but the mysterious evil mastermind Dr. Satan (Erol Tas wearing the stolen moustache of Fu Manchu) has other plans for it, namely using the lamp to control an army of killer robots that will make him the ruler of the world (mwahahaha).

Alas, Dr. S has made the capital fault of killing the foster father of a guy named Tekin (Kunt Tulgar). Tekin had just learned that his real father was the masked do-gooder known as the Copperhead and decides to take up that mantle to right the wrong of his foster father's death by protecting the Professor and the Professor's charming daughter Sevgi (Mine Mutlu). Copperhead's job would be much easier if he wouldn't put other people's lives into the hands of his comic relief idiot friend Bitik (Erol Günayadin) - who'll spend most of the film calling himself "Bitik Holmes" and wearing a well-loved deer-stalker and cape - but what can a hero do?

At least this and the fact that Copperhead is about as effective a hero as Santo's ancestor, the Caballero Enmascarado de Plata gives Doctor Satan a chance to show his full bag of tricks, beginning with bomb belts and mind control, getting more interesting with the Professor's traitorous secretary (Tijen Doray) and a few simple death traps and culminating in an awe-inspiring/ridiculous robot that could be outrun by a snail. I promise, there will be kidnappings.

While large parts of Turkey's pop and pulp cinema of the 60s and 70s were heavily inspired by US serials of the 40s and 50s, only a few of them were actual remakes of serials. The Deathless Devil is one member of this copyright-ignoring species, and interestingly not the first one its director Yilmaz Atadeniz committed. Atadeniz had already remade (or ripped off, for those of you without a soul) the classic Spy Smasher serial with 1968's exciting Casus Kiran, and obviously had no compunction when it came to making a grab for the equally classic Mysterious Doctor Satan. Think what you will about Atadeniz, but his choice of serials to re-do shows excellent taste.

As it usually goes with Turkish cinema of this era, Deathless Devil races from one cheaply done, unconvincing looking, yet supremely fun action set piece to the next, making up for what it lacks in money and slickness with enthusiasm and the will to entertain its audience. Atadeniz follows the unwritten rule of pop cinema that no dialogue scene should take more than a minute before the next brawl starts, or before someone crashes through a window, or before a car chase begins. And really, what is there to say when there's a bad guy and good guy and a professor and short-skirted women (alas mostly without guns and completely without whips) and a cute killer robot and highly punchable henchmen (one of 'em even using deadly throwing cards like the X-Men's Gambit, automatically making him the most punchable of them all)?

The film's energy is even manic enough to help me ignore the unutterably dreadful comic relief delivered by Bitik, a creature so vile he nearly becomes charming again - an impressive feat if ever I've witnessed one.

 

Technorati-Tags: turkish movies,in short,action,pulp,yilmaz atadeniz,adventure

Örümcek (1972)

aka Spider

aka Turkish Spider-Man (although it has not much to do with the Marvel hero)

The gang of bald-headed, cigar-chomping bad guy Renzo is searching for a bunch of jewels and a golden statue of the Buddha that are hidden away somewhere underground. The closest they have gotten to the booty was curiously enough when Renzo sent his lawyer out to find it. The poor guy would have gotten to the treasure if he hadn't been attacked by members of the competing gang lead by a certain Yesim. Then the helmeted vigilante known as "Spider" (Hüseyin Zan) appeared, and every henchman ended up dead.

The rest of the film concerns itself with Spider's attempts at bringing Renzo's gang to justice (which is to say, kill them dead), Spider using his secret identity, scrapyard monkey Erol (warning: you have just been spoiled out of a last minute revelation for the very dumb), to get close to the gangsters and Erol falling in love with the lawyer's daughter, exceedingly pretty night club singer Ayfer. There's also time for some gang-internal double-crossings and Erol having fun with the sex-positive Yesim.

Ayfer is also quite prone to nearly getting raped or really getting kidnapped by Renzo's men, so our masked hero has some extra work cut out for him. It's Erol's own fault, however. Surely, you don't let the odious comic relief protect your girlfriend when you're out gangster-bashing and gangster-leader-sexing and expect everything to be alright when you return?

By the standards of Turkish pop cinema, Örümcek is a surprisingly sedate film. There are even two stretches of about ten minutes each where nobody is shooting, hitting or kissing anyone. The film also adds two nightclub numbers in its first third, all of which adds up to a comparatively slow pace.

Fortunately, what is slow for a Turkish film of this era is still fast like a meth-addicted monkey for most of the rest of cinematic history, and so Örümcek's director Taner Oguz still squeezes half a dozen action scenes, three or four making-out sessions and lots of scenery-chewing declarations into the direction of the camera into a very short running time. All these scenes fit into the 66 minutes of running time so easily because Oguz - like everyone else in Turkish pop cinema - did not believe in transitional scenes at all. The logic behind it is perfectly clear: an audience doesn't come into a film like this looking for explanations or a plot, but to experience as much thrills as it can give them. That's a lesson I wish the directors of the dumber Hollywood blockbusters would finally learn and cut out all that badly written melodrama they love to put between explosions. But I digress.

The film's action scenes are particularly nice. Erol/Örümcek is quite the enemy of gravity, flipping, flopping and cartwheeling around between shooting henchmen to death as if he had been bitten by a radioactive gymnast. The film's big finish features a very dangerous looking motorcycle stunt, very much the sort of thing you won't see coming from a more controlled movie industry than the Turkish in the 70s - and for good reasons.

On the cinematic madness scale, Örümcek is scoring pretty low. Everything on screen seems pretty normal to me, nobody and nothing is all that outrageous.

Of course, I'm at a point in my movie watching career where a film whose hero is a guy dressed in a motorcycle cop outfit with spider regalia who always appears to the dulcet sounds of the needle-dropped Iron Butterfly non-classic "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" is just another day at the (imaginary) office for me and where the absence of bile-puking midgets in a film seems downright quaint. However, this doesn't mean Örümcek isn't a lot of fun. Oguz has an excellent eye for the hysterical punch-up and shoot-out, drops the needle creatively and even seems somewhat in control of his material. What more could I want from my pop and pulp cinema?

 

Technorati-Tags: turkish movies,action,in short,taner oguz,hüseyin zan

In short: Daglarin Oglu (1972?)

A hairy, cackling, knife-throwing rogue named Cuchillo (Yilmaz Köksal?) is riding through the mountains of "Mexico" on a rickety wooden non-coach. Cuchillo is mad at a certain Don Pedro, whom he makes responsible for having spent the last six months in jail. Something to do with stolen mules, it seems. Of course, this treachery cannot stand, and Cuchillo returns to Pedro-Land to take vengeance. But Cuchillo is easily distracted and so finds time to meet up with his main girlfriend (Nalan Cöl?) and get his horse stolen by another hairy guy, Chico. The latter does of course call for vengeance, unless when it doesn't, and both men decide that they have a larger dislike for Pedro than for each other. Chico has somehow acquired a cache of gold Don Pedro would very much like for himself, so Pedro's men are after him.

Of course, this being something of a Spaghetti Western, there will be betrayal and torture, and at a later point in the movie, there will also be talk of the necessity of revolution. That, and a Catholic bishop whom Cuchillo's girlfriend calls "Daddy".

Of course Turkish cult movie directing machine Cetin Inanc did make his own Spaghetti Western, and of course it is the attention deficit disorderly mad brother to the films of so ponderous a director as Sergio Corbucci.

I had the pleasure to see the film with subtitles whose quality is very close to the film's directing style - rough, confused and confusing. The mangled English fits the cackling, shouting and swaggering that stands in for acting perfectly. Honestly, I'm not too sure I'd want to see this film with subtitles that try to make more sense. True, the film randomly inserts moments of melodrama into scenes of Cuchillo jumping around like a flea, of mine fields randomly placed somewhere in the country and of hot knife-throwing action filmed through someone's legs, yet I'm somehow quite sure these moments wouldn't be any more convincing (in a naturalistic sense) if I understood what is actually being said in them.

Turkish pop cinema of this era just doesn't roll that way. It's all about the thrills that can be produced without much technology, and the ability of the audience to see just how friggin' cool movies are, without the need to try to be "believable", or sane.

Daglarin Oglu is all grown men having fun pretending they are cowboys (and pretending that Turkey looks like Mexico), reproducing random elements (and stealing the soundtracks) of a sub-genre that had an element of playing cowboys and Indians (or Mexican revolutionaries) even in its original form in Italy. It might look like a pretty naive way to go about filmmaking - it probably is naive - but films like this exude a sense of excitement that I'm not going to argue with. Daglarin Oglu is not the product of people just making a movie, it's the product of PEOPLE MAKING A MOVIE!!!(!!!), and that is a pretty exciting thing to watch.

 

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