Ölüm Savasçisi, aka Death Warrior (Turkey, 1984)

 Karl over at the fabulous Fist of B List blog has kindly invited me, along with the rest of the members of M.O.S.S., to participate in his “Ninjavember” blog roundtable. I enthusiastically agreed, despite my feeling that ninjas, like zombies, have become sort of a generic cultural commodity—a faceless, insensate enemy seemingly readymade for wholesale, video game style slaughter—or, even worse, a lazy shorthand for a snarky kind of pop culture knowingness. Still—hey, ninjas!

I chose to write about Ölüm Savasçisi, a Turkish ninja film, because I thought that it would provide a welcome departure from all the Godfrey Ho Franken-ninja films that my co-hosting duties at the Taiwan Noir podcast have necessitated my familiarity with. Instead it turned out to be so similar to those films that it could almost be considered a Turkish remake of Ninja Thunderbolt, seeing as it largely consists of context-free fight scenes loosely held together by a lot of haphazardly assembled footage from other movies. In short, it is complete nonsense, albeit a very particular brand of nonsense.

I struggled to find a word to describe the editing rhythms of Ölüm Savasçisi. I finally settled upon “narcoleptic”, because watching it is like falling asleep in front of the TV and periodically waking up for 2-5 seconds at a time. Occasionally you will wake up to find that you are watching a scene from a James Bond movie and think, “Boy, I must have been asleep longer than I thought”—until you realize that that scene has been randomly inserted into Ölüm Savasçisi by its copyright flaunting producers. The best example of this is the film’s employment of the car chase from Diamonds Are Forever, which climaxes with two obvious toy cars being rammed together in front of a backdrop that looks like it was drawn with a magic marker.

Despite all of this, Ölüm Savasçisi differs from all of those Godfrey Ho movies in one very significant way, in that, rather than Richard Harrison, it stars Cuneyt Arkin, who essentially plays in it the pinnacle of Turkish manhood. This is usually the case with Arkin, of course, but here his innately Turkish awesomeness is put in especially stark relief by placing Ölüm Savasçisi’s action in an unnamed country with the grave misfortune of not being Turkey. Let’s call it Wimpistan, or Pussylvania.

This bloodless little country is being plagued by a series of ninja-style murders, and the only man for the case is Turkish police inspector Murat (Arkin), who must be roused from a Speedo-clad lakeside idyll with a bikini wearing honey to make the trip to Sissytopia. Murat, you see, has dealt with the ninja before and knows their ways. For the crazed Ninja cult that is responsible for the murders, this is a positive development, for it was the exact intent of their leader (Osman Betin) to draw Murat out so that he may exact upon him his vengeance for something or other. And so the wall-to-wall fighting that it is our divine right to expect from Turkish exploitation cinema begins.

Ölüm Savasçisi can be called many things, but a suspense film it is not. Murat so handily defeats all of his opponents that its outcome is as certain as sweet death itself. If there can be said to be any kind of real conflict in the movie, it is that between Murat and the police officials of Lameovia, who resent him hanging around and making them look weak and indecisive all the time (“What kind of man is he?” one asks, prior to meeting him. “Extremely honest, like all Turks,” comes the reply.) Time and again, they try to send him packing, only to have some new crisis come up for which he is needed. Finally, when the ninjas kidnap the country’s fat, sniveling president, Murat tears off on his motorcycle with a comely cult defector (Funda Firat) to lay siege to their mountain hideout.

Amidst the above described action, odd supernatural elements pop up throughout Ölüm Savasçisi like profanities from a Tourette’s sufferer’s mouth. A man is eaten by a hedge, and a zombie with a face covered in shaving cream rises from an autopsy table. Neither of these events is mentioned again. Elsewhere, much use is made of the careening “demon cam” effect from Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead, in one scene culminating with a ninja bursting up from out of the ground. Oh, and the evil cult leader can levitate rocks and turn them into incendiary bombs.

My wife watched a few minutes of Ölüm Savasçisi with me and opined that it was terrible. She was, and is, right. But it is terrible in the best kind of way. If you just want your brain wallpapered with eighty minutes of Cuneyt Arkin karate-ing ninjas into agonized heaps of human suffering, it is, in fact, a perfect movie. Because, hey, fuck those ninjas.

Essabet El Nissae (Lebanon/Turkey, 1968)

I freely admit to jumping on the Frank Agrama bandwagon, spurred on by posts from such reliable sources as the Mondo Macabro blog and loveable madman Jack J's En Lejemorder Ser Tilbage -- as well as the astonishingly well researched comments of one Doctor Kiss over at the Classic Horror Film Board. Hey, as far as being the subject of cult appreciation, Agrama is, from what I've seen, far more deserving than -- oh, I don't know -- Sompote Sands, say. And I'm certainly not above trying to squeeze my way in on the ground floor. All the better to hypocritically scoff at perceived Agrama newbies a few months down the line.

To the extent that he is known in the West, Agrama is probably most recognized for his role as CEO of Harmony Gold, the company that brought Robotech to American television and with it, the seeds of every anime body pillow subsequently sold to white wannabe otaku. (Though he might also ring a bell as being a co-defendant, alongside Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, in the massive Mediaset tax fraud case brought by Italian officials a couple years back.) Fans of Z grade horror films might also know him as director of 1981's woeful Dawn of the Mummy.

But before distinguishing himself in those ways, the Egyptian born Agrama, under his given name of Farouk Agrama, directed a series of lively pop films in his native Middle East. These were typically International co-productions that combined stars from all of the participating regions, which were then released in alternate edits that highlighted whichever actors were the biggest draw in the targeted country. The result is the sort of "when worlds collide" casting that, in 1968's Essabet El Nissae, sees Turkish action god Cuneyt Arkin trading dialogue with beloved Egyptian comic Ismail Yasin and Lebanese singer and actress Sabah. Even Egyptian action film legend Farid Chawki shows up for a brief, fourth wall busting cameo (literally: "Hey, it's Farid Chawki!") in order that publicists for the Arab language version might tout his presence.

Agrama's approach to  Essabet El Nissae exhibits a good-natured, horny aimlessness that rivals that of the Mexican popular cinema of its day. He combines in the film tropes from both Eurospy movies and haunted house comedies, but still finds plenty of time for musical numbers and abundant cheesecake. In this busy context, Cuneyt Arkin gets to do a lot less of the trademark acrobatic brawling than you'd typically see in one of his purely Turkish productions, and instead spends a lot of his time simply fulfilling his role as just one of many pieces of eye candy, either by simply sitting and looking suave and unflappable or by laying back against a scenic background as Sabah serenades him with one of her many songs.

Essabet El Nissae centers around that most beloved of 60s spy spoof totems, the highly trained army of amazonian hit women (Las Sicodelicas, Deadler Than the Male), who, of course, also double as nightclub entertainers (Black Tight Killers). Arkin plays a reporter, saddled with both a cowardly, bespectacled photographer for a comic relief sidekick and a harried boss in the form Ismail Yassin -- here in one of his last screen appearances -- who stumbles onto the trail of the female gang while on assignment in Beirut. The ladies then employ their feminine wiles to throw him off the scent, as it were, which leads to a long series of burlesque interludes. Somewhere in all of this he meets and begins to woo Sabah, who appears to be a member of the gang.

Eventually Cuneyt follows a lead to an abandoned old house that we have seen, by way of a flashback, was the site of a brutal murder. This opens the way for some goofy, spook show slapstick reminiscent of Ismail Yasin's Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein remake, Haram Alek, albeit without the participation of Yasin. This house will prove to have relevance to the overall plot later on, as perhaps will the ghost of the murdered woman, although on that last point I can't be entirely sure. Seriously, once all plot development has halted for the third time for someone to launch into an extra-narrative belly dancing routine, you will realize that none of these details matter very much. There is even an extended comic sequence in which Arkin and his sidekick don drag to sneak their way into a lady's spa. Oh, and I should also mention that the cut of the Arabic version I watched had edited into it a sequence from a different, French subtitled version that featured a woman lip synching an English language beat pop song to an audience of fright-masked dancers as Arkin engaged in a comedic brawl. So there's that.

Both the Arabic and Turkish versions of Essabet El Nissae are available in full on YouTube. (And, true to our expectations, the Turkish version is exponentially more distressed and crappy looking than the other.) While I wouldn't call it a must see, I will say that, if you can approach it with the kind of patience and goodwill that its lazily amiable approach to entertainment requires, you might, as I did, get a kick out of it. Arkin, so often comically intense, makes for an especially charming and affable presence, and as such nicely embodies the spirit of the endeavor as a whole. This is a film that seems to say that, if you don't have time to watch a few fights, chuckle at some dumb gags, listen to some songs, and look at some cool and attractive people and locations being cool and attractive, that's fine; but if you do, why not? Consider yourself Agrama'd.

An Arkin in June

Who knew that, in Turkish, that thing that looks like a C with a thread hanging off of it makes a "j" sound? Thus the phrase "Çuneyt June" is actually alliterative. And if you don't think that's enough of an excuse for a Teleport City theme month, you just don't know us very well. So, for the entirety of Summer's freshman month, we at TC will be lining up to give praise to Turkish cinema's indefatigable action hero Çuneyt Arkin, with my own contribution being a review of the 1973 swashbuckler Kara Murat Fatihin Fermani. The thrills begin here.