Three Supermen at the Olympic Games (Turkey, 1984)

Three Supermen at the Olympic Games looks like what happens when the universe itself rises up in defiance at the existence of yet another entry in the Three Supermen series. One cannot so much review it as draw a chalk outline around it, so does it resemble a sloppy corpse left behind by a disorganized killer. Of course, many of its deficits can be understood when you consider that it was one of the few Turkish entries in the Three Supermen series, which seem to exist only to make the Italian Three Supermen films look like Avengers movies by comparison.

Still, Three Supermen at the Olympic Games is shoddy even by the standards of Turkish trash cinema. There is the usual needle-dropped score (mostly John Williams’ themes to Superman: The Motion Picture), but, beyond that, evidence of the film being used as a sort of clearing house for misbegotten footage from other films is plentiful. Actors were apparently asked to recite their dialogue in close-up against a plain green backdrop, presumably to serve as a kind of narrative glue for insertion into the film as needed. I can’t tell whether this was done out of ignorance of the meaning of the term “green screen”, or if there had been some intention to insert backgrounds behind the actors at some point and someone eventually just said ‘fuck it.” Whichever the case, this practice only serves to increase the disjointed feeling of the movie--with these pallid looking shots of the actors reciting their lines at an uncomfortably intimate remove frequently interrupting the already mismatched scenes.

Given all this, summarizing the plot of Three Supermen at the Olympic Games would be difficult under any circumstances – the IMDB threw up its hands with “Three supermen go to Olympics and mayhem ensues”—which means that watching it without English subtitles, as I of course did, makes it as indecipherable as an alien message in a Stanislaw Lem novel. Still, here’s my best shot:

The Three Supermen (Levent Çakir in a canary yellow wig; Yilmaz Koksal as the stuttering, mentally challenged Superman; and Stefano Martinenghi, the son of director Italo Martinenghi) somehow end up in the service of the Greek goddess Hera (Filiz Özten) and fend off an assortment of medieval knights and modern day gangsters before finally rescuing a stolen briefcase from some pirates. The end.

As you might have guessed from the above, Three Supermen at the Olympic Games’ sense of period is pretty fluid, allowing for elements of ancient Greece, Medieval Europe, and modern day Turkey to intermingle freely on the screen without any kind of visual transition. Probably the most welcome of these anachronisms is a LOT of recycled footage from the comparatively delightful earlier Supermen film 3 Supermen vs. Mad Girl. Returning for a well deserved encore are the colorfully garbed Mad Girl herself (Mine Sun), her army of minions in satiny green Klansmen’s robes, her boss in his dime store devil mask, and, most welcome of all, that silly cardboard box robot with his unmistakably phallic laser gun. The only problem with this footage is that it’s vibrant, comic book inspired color scheme makes the rest of Three Supermen at the Olympic Games look pretty drab by comparison.

You might think that I’m oversimplifying Three Supermen at the Olympic Games, and you’re probably right. For instance, you Syd Field acolytes out there might ask what the point of all its muddled action is—or, to put a finer point on it, what is exactly at stake in it. Could it be, as the title suggests, the Olympic Games themselves? It’s questionable, since we see only a little of those games at both the films’ beginning and end, and there’s reason to suspect that the stock footage used is not of the Olympics at all.

Also, I have to confess to my synopsis being marred by my inability to account for certain of the film’s repeated bits of business, such as the brief clip of Levent Çakir looking into the camera while “flying” (i.e. either being hoisted on a crane or lying on an elevated plank) over a small boat that pops up with numbing regularity. Especially vexing was the Fu Man-Chu wannabe using a mixing console for a control panel who shows up on a television screen at irregular intervals to spout a mouthful of (presumably) expository dialog. Admittedly, these bits, had I understood them, might have smoothed over some of the films more jarring transitions, and if so, that’s my bad. Or is it? Is it my fault that this movie was not in English? I’ll let you decide.

Three Supermen at the Olympic Games’ director Italo Martinenghi, a producer of the original Supermen films in his native Italy, had brought the series to Turkey in the hope of lowering production costs. Three Supermen at the Olympic Games’ stands as testament to the fact that he was resoundingly successful in achieving that goal. It’s hard to imagine it looking any cheaper. If I could recommend it for any reason, it’s that the footage from Supermen vs. Mad Girl it contains is, in most cases, much crisper than that seen in the version of Mad Girl that’s currently available. All the better to appreciate the mighty Dickbot in the light that he so deserves.

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.

Minik Cadi, aka Little Witch (Turkey, 1975)

My main takeaway from Minik Cadi is that its star, Cicek Dilligel, is the most horrifying child to have ever walked the Earth.

In the film, Dilligel plays "Cicek", a magical little girl who makes people's clothes disappear and then either deposits them in sexy situations or makes them want to have sex with each other. Yes, this is a Turkish sex comedy starring a child, so strap in.

Also starring in the film is Turkish beauty Meral Zeren, who plays Aysel, a timid housekeeper in love with her wealthy businessman employer, Murat (Bulent Kayabas). You'd have to flip a coin to determine whether Murat looked more like a pornstar or a pedophile, such is his mustache's sleazy ambiguity, but suffice it to say that he is a certain aspect of Minik Cadi personified--that being, the aspect of it that is not all about a horrifying little girl weirdly leering at everybody.

The version of Minik Cadi that I watched lacked English subtitles, and probably mercifully so. I might be able to describe it's plot to you had its characters not all been grotesque caricatures whose actions in no way conformed to actual human behavior. Suffice it to say that there is a corporate intrigue subplot that involves business associates of Murat's who are somehow trying to screw him over, in part by setting a honey trap for him with the aid of a stylish floozy played by sexpot Senar Seven.

There is also a kidnap plot involving Murat's young son, although the way it is staged makes everyone at first assume that the boy has drowned. We immediately know that something is afoot, though, because Murat's awful family, who live with him, present a unified front of mawkish lamentation when he is around and then party like it's 1999 whenever he leaves the room. It is at this point that Cicek makes her entrance, seemingly appearing from underneath the grieving Murat's car just as he is about to drive off a cliff.

Cicek's introduction involves a bone chilling sequence during which we watch Cicek Dilligel's face in closeup as it robotically files through a series of "expressions".  These expressions all fall into a category that would normally be considered cute, winsome, or adorable, and the problem is not that they are cloying--though they would be if they were not presented by Dilligel with all the cynicism of a 50 year old saloon girl. It is as if she is cruelly mocking anyone stupid enough to fall for her babydoll shtick. There is seriously no point at which she does not come off as venemously sarcastic.

From this point on, Minik Cadi plays out like a remake of Bewitched in which Samantha is a frightening child and Darren is played by John Holmes. As far as movie magic goes, it's certainly nothing we haven't seen before. Cicek casts her spells by wiggling her chin and the special effects are all of the type by which an actor vanishes simply by stepping out of frame when the camera is turned off. Cicek even has a hectoring mother witch who appears from time to time to set her straight, although she looks less like Agnes Moorehead than she does a senior resident of a Palm Springs trailer park.

Anyhoo, once introduced into the household, Cicek puts Murat's family through all the expected comic humilations while at the same time trying to make a love connection between Murat and Aysel.
She also magically strips Senar Seven down to her knickers and makes her materialize in a room full of horny men--which is hilarious, because they will probably rape her. On the other hand, Cicek saves Aysel from rape on two different occasions by transforming her into an animal--a dog in the first case, and a bear in the latter. Given the current sensitive climate, I am prompted to ask whether it is victim blaming to imply that Aysel would not have been raped had she not been human. Serves her right for walking around all bipedal like that.

Oh, and there is also a topless, big titted mermaid so that we can truly feel like we're watching a combination nudie cutie/children's film directed by the guy who made Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny.

Finally a pair of hit men--who I like to think of as audience surrogates--show up to assassinate Cicek. This admittedly provided some interest, though it only ended up with Cicek having a couple more foils to magically strip of their dignity. Then there's a scene where Cicek and her witch godmother wander around a rotting old house and cicek talks to a rat.

Minek Casi reached a peak of sorts for me near its conclusion, when Cicek transformed herself into a monkey wearing a Mr. Spock tee shirt. It was a nice try, but nothing Minek Casi could have done at that point would have convinced me that watching it had not been a soul wrecking waste of time. If anyone deserves Cicek Dilligel's cheerful derision, it is I.

Golden Boy in Beirut, aka Altin Çocuk Beyrut'ta (Turkey, 1967)

Back in March of 2010, when I reviewed the first Golden Boy film for Teleport City, I described it as stripping the James Bond film down to its barest elements. You wouldn't think that that would leave much material left over to fashion a sequel from. But, apparently the success of Golden Boy--and perhaps the ego of its producer/star Goksel Arsoy--was big enough to warrant one. And so I now present to you Golden Boy in Beirut.

Let me first say that the version of Golden Boy in Beirut that is currently available on YouTube made me miss anew the late Bill Barounis and his Onar Films, who would have at least given us some English subtitles and gotten rid of the tracking lines at the bottom of the screen. Nonetheless, I accept that the experience of watching Turkish pulp films is inseparable from the ordeal of decrypting them from the layers of stank that have gathered upon them over years of neglect and abuse.

Then again, with Golden Boy in Beirut, we are again working with the bare bones of genre, so the basic touchstones of the plot were easy enough to work out. There is a much sought after document--the key to reading an also much sought after code--that switches hands numerous times throughout the film, going from coveted briefcase to coveted satchel to coveted valise, all the while being sought by an assortment of black suited gunsels who will refrain from no level of meanness to get their hands on it. Eventually super agent Golden Boy (Arsoy) is put on the case.

Sadly, Goksel Arsoy didn't win me over any more than he did in his debut. He here continues to displays a chronic case of Bitchy Resting Face that makes him look like a churlish toddler. His corresponding lack of charm does nothing to distract from the fact that Golden Boy is basically just a bully, grimly trundling from one assignation to the next to push and slap people--men and women alike--until he gets the information he wants. True, the same could be said of Sean Connery's James Bond, but Connery could at least pull off a dick move with some arguably mitigating panache. I also have to again point out Arsoy's resemblance to the Fall's Mark E. Smith.

As Golden Boy goes through his routine of making snitty faces while pushing and slapping people, he is all the while shadowed by a mysterious, black clad woman, who is played by the Lebanese singer Taroub. The two meet and make a cursory love connection while on the train to Beirut, insuring that Taroub will later be captured and picturesquely tortured by the heavies. The train's arrival at its destination then heralds a flaunting of production value that amounts to four solid minutes of Goksel Arsoy walking aimlessly through the streets of Beirut.

The obsessive in me feels irresistibly compelled to point out that, when Arsoy and Taroub finally do the deed, it is to the tune of that old chestnut from dad's record cabinet, the theme from A Man and a Woman ("ba ba ba dabba dabba da..."), which marks a departure from a score that is otherwise almost entirely made up of needle-dropped cues from the Goldfinger and Thunderball soundtracks. Other exceptions include the Golden Boy theme song from the first film, the Lebanese song "Yalla Habibi", and a snippet of the Four Tops' "Reach Out I'll Be There" that plays during an early nightclub scene. Yes, I feel better now.

As always in these films, there is a mysterious "Mr. Big" behind all of the nefarious goings on, and eventually Golden Boy's ritualized routine of pushing and slapping brings him close enough to him to infiltrate his hideout, which is located deep within a ruined fortress. This he accomplishes by bringing with him the coveted briefcase and posing as--I think--a courier for the lesser villains. When revealed, the mysterious Mr. Big is this guy:

Now, I am willing to admit to you that I understood very little of what this movie was about. But I am also willing to admit that I do not care what this movie was about--because, for me, once he showed up, this movie was ALL ABOUT THIS GUY. I want to point out that he has a symbol of a gryphon both on his chest and on his cape. His cape! This he flounces behind him majestically as he paces around a hideout that looks like what Mission Control would look like if it was set up in a high school boiler room, attended by a retinue of shirtless muscle men and mini-skirted robo-babes. I wish at this point that this review could play a jackpot noise, but... well, you get the idea.

Anyway, once we have learned that Bizarro Batman is behind all of the villainous goings on, the action of Golden Boy in Beirut proceeds in fairly predictable fashion. Golden Boy has to whip the captive Taroub to prove that he is one of the bad guys, followed by a raid upon the lair by the authorities in which there is much shooting and people falling off of things. Yes, it is predictable, but would we really have it any other way? Might Golden Boy instead rip off his suit to reveal that he is really several babies standing on each others' shoulders? Might Taroub and the villain do the Bat-tusi to a rockabilly version of  "A Man and a Woman" as the hideout crashes down around them?

No. I think we should instead think about all of the other somewhat routine thrillers that could have been improved upon by the inclusion of a villain in what looks like a Halloween costume sewn by his mother and be grateful to Golden Boy in Beirut for that soupcon of compensatory ridiculousness. In this way, the chaotic virtues of world pop cinema make beggars of us all.