Bad Movie Night Recap

 The time has once again come for Bad Movie Night: my shameless celebration of the movies that just aren't quite good enough, but also aren't so terrible they become unwatchable. It's a fine line, and sometimes it's just the right goofy element that pushes it over. Sometimes it's just who you watch it with, and the Cap'n has a fairly loyal crew of masochists willing to descend on Blogorium Headquarters every year. Even though I subjected them to Things last year, they came back. What that says about their cinematic fortitude is up to you, but I'm proud to call them my friends. This year, I opted to give them a less agonizing experience, but not without some serious brain bending. Let's take a look at what you (hopefully) missed out on:

 We started with Devil Girl from Mars, based on the hit London stage play (or, that's what I'd like to believe), and it shows. Despite the fact that a Martian spaceship lands outside of a remote Scottish Inn, most of the motley crew of patrons are concerned with their own stupid problems, leaving time for Naya, the titular character, to enter and exit through the same door, repeatedly. At least it's nice to know that Martians also call their planet Mars. They - well, she - arrived on Earth with her new prototype spaceship, which has organic metal and runs on an engine that creates nuclear reactions that explode inward, creating perpetual motion. Their science is vastly superior to ours, but in the great war of the sexes, all men were wiped out and they need some breeding stock, if you catch my drift. Perhaps if she'd landed in America, rather than Scotland, this would have been an easier task, because the citizens of the United Kingdom are more interested in cockamamie plans to shoot or electrocute her, to no avail.

 Brave newspaper columnist Mike Conner (or Carter, depending on who's saying his name) has the scoop of a lifetime, but would rather his on a fashion model hiding out in the inn. Thankfully his indeterminate accent doesn't bother her, and she even falls in love with him in the two hours between when they meet and when he agrees to join the Devil Girl on her ship. That, of course, is a ruse for him to try to steal the remote control for Johnny, a robot who "looks very similar to you Earth people," in that he looks nothing like humans but instead a guy in a robot costume. Naya has a ray gun that's effective on everything but glasses, constructs an invisible wall that the only scientist in the group somehow runs into headlong, and loves to open the same doors over and over and make sweeping pronouncements about how stupid we humans are. There are other characters, because we clearly care about an escaped adulterer who murdered his wife or some dumb kid, but the innkeeper's husband's name is Jamie Jameson, which is amusing. Also, they sit down to eat dinner at 10 o'clock at night. If only Mike and the Professor had taken the turn to "Loch Something" (actual line), they might have missed this unfortunately duller than it sounds movie.

 Speaking of dull, I hadn't seen Disney's knock-off of Star Wars, The Black Hole, in close to 25 years, so I didn't remember what a bore it was. Fortunately, I also didn't remember a lot of other things about it, like the fact that a 90 minute film had an overture and that all of the music - by James Bond composer John Barry - sounded just like any other Bond music. I did remember the robot with the Texas accent, and that Event Horizon lifted quite a bit from this terrible, terrible movie. When it's not ripping off Star Wars, it's borrowing liberally from the released-the-same year Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and Forbidden Planet, and Battlestar Galactica, and pretty much any other vaguely popular science fiction film they could think of. To be perfectly honest with you, we lost interest about fifteen minutes in, started talking about the new music on Star Wars and about The Hobbit, and eventually made some jokes about Ernest Borgnine's libido and the movie Alligator, while pausing to note just how badly one could steal from George Lucas. I might have even said something kind about The Phantom Menace, which might be a first for the Cap'n.

 High School Confidential! eased us out of the "boring" zone of bad movies - hey, I try, but sometimes things just don't land with the crowd - by being entirely too interested in being "hip" and "with it". That works wonders in its favor, because the ridiculous overuse of slang, coupled with what seems to be not even veiled suggestions about incest between Tony (Russ Tamblyn) and his aunt Gwen (Mamie Van Doren). In Tony's defense, it's mostly one way, and given there's a twist, I guess it's possible that they maybe aren't related, but why would he refer to her as his aunt behind closed doors? There are a number of questionable "bait and switch"-es in High School Confidential!, a movie about Tony moving in to town and taking over the high school drug trade in the course of two or three days. He's tough talking and backs it up, and pops his collar, even when it's on a sweater. Why? Because he's hip, daddy-o.

 There are so many ways to address how hard the writers are trying to sound "cool" and failing miserably: the hip version of Columbus that J. I. Coleridge (John Drew Barrymore) "lays" on his class, or the awful (even for Beat Poetry) performance at a "Jazz Club" the kids all go to. Or the notion that marijuana is a gateway drug to heroin, and nothing else. Tony, a "7th year" high school student, immediately starts hitting on his teacher and also moves in on Coleridge's girl, who turns out to be a junkie. The drug kingpins in town are played by Charles Chaplin, Jr. and Jackie Coogan. Yes, Uncle Fester forces Tony to shoot up to prove he's not a narc. But wait, he is! (SPOILER) Tony is really Mike, who works with the cops, and there's a big shootout at the jazz club when a deal goes bad. Fortunately, the leader of The Rangers - played by Michael Landon - is there to help out, even though they're the rival gang to Tony's Wheelers and Dealers. Also, Jerry Lee Lewis begins and ends the film playing the title song, in what appears to be the same shot.

 High School Confidential! picked up the pace a bit, and after a musical interlude, it was time to dive right into Raw Force. It's an almost perfect storm of kung-fu zombie cannibalism interspersed with gratuitous nudity and hokey special effects. And yet, some people were grumbling, perhaps because I oversold the "cannibal monks who raise kung-fu zombies" part of the movie. Yes, most of Raw Force's 86 minutes is devoted to a Kung-Fu cruise to "Warrior Island," where disgraced martial artists are buried. It's also where Hitler sells prostitutes in exchange for jade. Is his name Hitler in the movie? I honestly don't remember, but if he looks like Hitler and talks like Hitler, we're going to go with "that guy is Hitler". The cannibal monks eat the girls because it gives them power to raise the dead, which they use (eventually) for the final showdown.

 In the meantime, there's a lot of showing off of kung-fu skills, coupled with late 70s / early 80s clothes, music, and nudity aboard the cruise ship. Almost everyone on the boat - from the cook to the bartender - seem to know how to fight, and are therefore well equipped to handle Hitler's lackeys. You see, despite the fact that Warrior Island is the home of an illicit human trafficking ring, it's also the subject of its own tourism guide. Because, why wouldn't it? When the cruise ship catches on fire (or, rather, has fire overlaid over the image), some of the passengers escape, and the rest are presumably killed. We never hear from them again, so let's just assume they died. What's important is that the life raft lands on Warrior Island and the monks raise the dead. There's lots of chop sockey, some decapitations, some dynamite, and piranhas. How are there piranhas in salt water, in the ocean? My guess is they couldn't find any stock footage of sharks. So Hitler gets munched on by piranhas (SPOILER).

 Rather than launching into the "Luc Besson Presents an Affront to Science" double feature as promised, I gave them the option of getting the Trappening out of the way, which they decided was best. What they didn't know was that this year's mystery feature wasn't just a Bad Movie - it was a Great Bad Movie. By no stretch of the imagination could one call Commando a "good" movie, but I'll be damned if it isn't one of the most fun films to throw conventional cinema out the window. Continuity errors? Check. Bad one liners? Yessir. Gratuitous nudity? Well, it has absolutely nothing to do with the fight scene, so yep. The mall from Chopping Mall? Sure is! Arnold Schwarzenegger killing an entire army, single-handedly? You know it.

 To get Alyssa Milano back, Arnold will plow his way through David Patrick Kelly (John Wick), Bill Duke (Predator), Dan Hedaya (Alien Resurrection), and finally The Road Warrior's Vernon Wells (Weird Science) for the mother of all bad puns. Oh, and his name is John Matrix, because Rambo is a pansy. I firmly believe that Commando is what everybody thinks all action movies from the 80s are like (that, and First Blood Part II), and why they hold the admittedly average Expendables series to an impossible standard. Matrix is introduced hauling a log down to a cabin (on his shoulder), and then eats ice cream and feeds a deer with his daughter. Because he's tough, but sensitive. Until you steal his daughter, and then he just kills you. Rae Dawn Chong's Cindy isn't even developed enough to have Stockholm Syndrome when she assumes the role of "new mom" at the end, having been kidnapped by Matrix less than twelve hours before. Commando is all killer and no filler, but I asked attendees to give it the same scrutiny as any of our other howlers, which is exactly the point at which you realize the many logic gaps and inherent flaws that make it technically "Bad." Now that everybody was in a great frame of mind, it was time to throw common sense out the door and let Luc Besson insult our basic intelligence...

 I've been hosting official fests for nearly a decade now, and in all that time I have never heard the phrase "wait... what?" as many times as I did during Luc Besson's Lucy. Perhaps the mini-review in the "Worst Of" recap didn't quite convey just how painfully cavalier Lucy is with the concept of "science," but the reactions were hilarious. During the film, at least one large bottle of Kraken was consumed, and descriptions of what they'd seen ranged from "an atrocity" to "amazing." A friend of mine whose dissertation is on Philip K. Dick insists that it's not science fiction at all, but rather a brilliant example of "slipstream," a newer iteration of magical realism. The entire room erupted with laughter when Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) explained that she could "feel her brain" in what's supposed to be heartfelt scene over the phone with her mother. The comical, video-game-esque use of brain percentage "unlocked" was also a source of enjoyment, but nothing stood out quite as much as figuring out how long it took for Johansson to "say this horseshit with a straight face." One viewer worried that she could no longer take Morgan Freeman's Through the Wormhole seriously after seeing him in Lucy. I freely admit that Lucy is a bad movie, but it's a very entertaining one, and it was somewhat validating to see the baffled reactions as they tried to take Besson's affront to science seriously.

 That said, I made a critical mistake in putting Lockout after Lucy, because by comparison, the former is just a "run of the mill bad science fiction film". It's true that after you've heard Scarlett Johansson explain what it's like to feel your bones growing, or to become the monolith from 2001, a high speed unicycle chase just doesn't have the same impact. Even my favorite line of awful science, "the gravity should keep you floating" just can't compete with Besson's double-down on Insane Clown Posse-like disdain for science. Lockout is still a bad movie, and it's insistence on identifying everyone and every location on screen (repeatedly, in the case of the latter) is amusing, but it just wasn't the same head-scratcher that it was in 2012. On the other hand, the outcries of mental anguish reconciling what Lucy was saying vs. what they knew to be true was more than worth it.

 By the end of Lockout, just about everybody was ready to go, but a few stragglers felt like they had one more Bad Movie in them. Despite the fact that it meant Cap'n's Choice - I hadn't planned on anything past Lockout - they were willing to suffer through another one. Being that it was late, or comparatively late (we can't do movies until sunrise anymore), I opted to go short and show Cranpire a "Cranpire Movie": Sorority House Massacre II. As I'll be writing about that and the first Sorority House Massacre soon (and possibly Hard to Die), I won't go too into detail about it, but he enjoyed it. There's barely a plot, and most of the first half of the movie is devoted to showing as much gratuitous nudity as possible, followed by another 30 minutes or so of women running around a house in their nighties and going out in the rain for no good reason. Jim Wynorski (Chopping Mall) even takes a pointless side-trip to a strip club to shoehorn in more nudity under the specious logic that one of the characters from a flashback is now dancing topless. Classy stuff.

 For the immediate future, I think I've hit my quota of schlock (although that doesn't rule out watching Furious 7). There's enough time to reload the queue in time for Summer Fest, where I think 80s cheesefests Without Warning and Deadly Eyes are going to be a hit. Thanks to everybody who made it, and to the folks at home who didn't, you now have a roadmap for your own Bad Movie Night. Just have alcohol and a good support system of friends nearby. And whatever you do, don't watch Things.

Quick Review: Leviathan

 On a whim, I decided to watch Leviathan a few days ago. While I'm pretty sure I never saw it on video, there was a sneaking sense of familiarity that crept in as the film played out. Normally I'd attribute that to the fact that Leviathan is a transparent knock-off of John Carpenter's The Thing, crossed with Alien for good measure, but parts of the movie (particularly the ending) rustled up a few memories. Maybe I saw it on television, years ago, and forgot about it. That's both good and bad, because while Leviathan is not what you'd call a good movie, per se, it is exactly the kind of flick that would take Summer Fest by storm.

 Released in March of 1989, Leviathan had the unfortunate distinction of being the third underwater-based thriller, and it landed between the much worse Deepstar Six and James Cameron's The Abyss. In fact, if you remember Leviathan at all (and haven't seen it), you're probably thinking of Deepstar Six. I wouldn't say that Leviathan isn't memorable, but because it isn't as terrible / great as the movies that came out immediately before and after it that are, roughly speaking, the same kind of movie, it went largely forgotten. Directed by George P. Cosmatos (Cobra) and written by David Webb Peoples (Soldier) and Jeb Stuart (Lock Up)*, Leviathan isn't quite bad enough to be really fun, but not good enough to rise above its derivative nature. It's entertaining enough, but that's about it.

 Somewhere off the coast of Florida(?), a crew of deep sea miners are closing out the end of their 60 day shift two miles** below the surface, when they make a strange discovery: a sunken Russian vessel called, appropriately, Leviathan. It appears to have been deliberately sunken, but records indicate that Leviathan is an active ship in the Baltic sea. The corpses of the crew have unusual deformities, and the ships log (a videotape, by the way) indicate some kind of "infection." When the crew members foolishly decide to partake of the vodka pilfered from the Leviathan, strange things begin to happen, and the company they work for backtracks on their promise to extract the team. Can they save themselves, or will the fate of the Leviathan be theirs to share?

 According to IMDB (and, I guess, the credits), the crew of Tri-Oceanic Corp's mining facility have names, but to be honest you're only going to remember them by their nicknames (handily written on their suits, for some reason). Names like "Six Pack," "DeJesus", "Doc," and "Becky," given to the commander of the crew, a geologist with a demonstrable inability to lead. In no particular order, they're played by Peter Weller (Screamers), Daniel Stern (C.H.U.D.), Hector Elizondo (American Gigolo), Ernie Hudson (The Crow), Amanda Pays (Spacejacked), Michael Carmine (Invasion U.S.A.), and Lisa Eilbacher (10 to Midnight), with a special guest appearance by Richard Crenna (Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell) as "Doc." Doc is notably absent when Beck (Weller) is overseeing a routine mining operation that goes bad. DeJesus (Carmine)'s suit malfunctions and almost implodes, and Beck has no idea how to help other than to insist he's fine. He is, in fact, fine and comes back safely, but it's clear nobody trusts Beck's leadership skills. Doc doesn't really have an excuse for where he was or what he was doing (he makes some joke about "golf").

 Early on, Leviathan does its best impersonation of Alien: the crew is just a bunch of blue collar stereotypes trying to get along on the station for "three more days." We're treated to some uninteresting exposition and "character development" in the broadest sense possible: SixPack (Stern) is horny all the time, Jones (Hudson) hates bad weather, Bowman (Eilbacher) has big boobs, Willie (Pays) is British and training for NASA. Eventually Willie and Sixpack find Leviathan, and in his infinite wisdom, Sixpack steals the ship's safe, conveniently the one with all of the medical reports, captains logs, and vodka. Think of it as the "exposition trunk" from Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II. The vodka is spiked, of course, because how else would you trick Russian Naval crew members into being genetically altered?

 Yes, genetically altered. Into fish monsters. (SPOILER) That's about as good of an explanation as Doc can come up with for what happens to SixPack and Bowman, and they just barely get their fused corpses (?) out of the station before all hell breaks loose. Unfortunately for them, a tentacle breaks away and two worm-like monsters grow out of it. Also, Cobb (Elizondo) gets raked across the chest, so he also changes, and uh, yeah. Look, rules stop being important at a certain point - Leviathan kind of turns into The Thing, but without the benefit of the "who's really real and who's infected?" angle. See if you can guess who the last three people to make it to the surface are. Then guess if all three of them are rescued or not. If you've seen Deep Blue Sea, you'll have a rough idea.

 I'm not convinced that Leviathan takes place in the future, because while there weren't any deep sea mining expeditions / stations to my knowledge in 1989, everything from the technology to the fashion inside the station screams "Late 80s" and when the survivors surface, there's nothing about the rescue copter or the base they land on that similarly makes the case it wasn't contemporaneous. But then again, there's all sorts of gear used for mining underwater (including the suits) that seem suspiciously high tech in a low rent way. It's not really addressed, so you can speculate as you watch Leviathan, I guess.

 What Leviathan has going for it is that the goopy, gooey monster effects (that also remind you of The Thing) are courtesy of makeup vets Tom Woodruff and Alec Gillis (every Alien movie after the first one) and a willingness to be pretty gross. That's good, because other than rampant profanity from Weller and Hudson late in the movie, Leviathan is pretty tame. I can easily see how it can be cut down to air on television, although I have no idea how they get away with the last shot on broadcast television. The ending, in fact, is the reason I'd really recommend Leviathan - it's a one-two punch (almost literally) of "no, they aren't really going to do that" moments guaranteed to elicit laughter when it really shouldn't. One of them moves Leviathan into "also ripping off Jaws" territory. The other involves the shady Tri-Oceanic Corporation representative, played by Meg Foster (They Live). Both of them involve Peter Weller doing things I did not expect him to in any movie.

 To be honest, Leviathan isn't really anything remarkable, but it's charming in a lowbrow way. It has just enough going for it to keep you interested, but you probably won't remember a lot of the movie thirty minutes later. You'll have fun if you pair it with a few cold ones and some like minded friends, but it's hardly the sort of movie that's going to make or break your weekend. If you happen to like The Abyss, Jaws, John Carpenter's The Thing, and want to see what it looked like if the "B" team had a go at it, Leviathan is right up your alley. It's really the kind of movie that Syfy should be making, the kind of "B" movie that used to be more prevalent. Nowadays it would look a lot cheaper and be crammed on shelves with other lousy CGI "spectacles" and "mockbusters." So on that level, I guess it has an edge. So that's something Leviathan has going for it: it's the kind of "B" movie that you'd like to see more of these days.



 * Yes, that's a totally unfair representation - Cosmatos also directed the much better known Tombstone and Rambo: First Blood Part II. Peoples wrote or co-wrote Blade Runner, Twelve Monkeys, Unforgiven, and Ladyhawke. Stuart co-wrote Die Hard and The Fugitive. That said, it's a stretch to say Leviathan is anywhere near those movies.
** If you want to get technical, the opening text states the team is 16,000 Mikes Below the Surface, which is more than two miles, but at one point Jones says something about being "two miles" away from escaping.

Summer Fest 5 (Day One): Starcrash

 Starcrash (which I keep thinking I need to separate into two words) is one of those knock-offs of Star Wars that you'd like to pretend Roger Corman would be doing even if George Lucas hadn't struck box office gold two years earlier. In fact, I went so far as to "pretend" that Starcrash clearly wasn't a rip-off of "a galaxy far, far away" until I looked at the tagline for the film, one that describes it thusly:

 "Star Wars meets Barbarella in the ultimate inter-galactic adventure!"

 So never mind, let's stop pretending that Starcrash (and for that matter, Battle Beyond the Stars) is anything but a crass attempt by a legendary B-movie producer to cash in on a more popular film. It's not as though Corman was the only guy trying to make a buck off of a "space adventure" film in the late 1970s / early 1980s, he just does it so transparently that you can't even pretend Starcrash is its own movie devoid of the obvious comparisons.

 In fairness, I should point out that Roger Corman didn't direct Starcrash - that distinction belongs to Luigi Cozzi (Contamination, The Killer Must Kill Again), under the pseudonym "Lewis Coates." I suppose it's meant to hide the fact that this is an Italian co-production, although there's a degree of suspicious dubbing mixed throughout the film (that, or Shout Factory's Blu-Ray goes out of sync repeatedly during scenes with very specific actors).

The "Barbarella" component of the film comes, I suppose, from Caroline Munro, who plays Stella Star, one half of a.... uh... smuggling (?) duo of space ne'er do wells. Alongside Acton (Marjoe Gortner), her robot (?) friend, Stella cruises around the galaxy until she's captured by bounty hunter Thor (Robert Tessier) and robot policeman Robocop "L" (or, according to IMDB, "Elle"). They're tried and sentenced to separate prisons, which is really an excuse for Munro to change one skimpy bikini out for another (it really seems inappropriate for hauling around giant balls of radium, but what do I know?), something she'll continue to do for most of Starcrash.

 It's not really important why, but Stella manages to kill all of the prisoners AND guards in her prison while escaping, and then inadvertently destroys the prison itself only to be picked up by L and Thor. They've come to release her so that she and Acton can help the Emperor (Christopher Plummer) to defeat the evil Count Zarth Arn (Maniac's Joe Spinell). If they have time, they should also rescue the Emperor's son. First, they'll need to travel to the "haunted worlds" in order to find his secret weapon, which is really an excuse to visit different planets with different "menaces."

 For example, there's the planet of the Amazon Warriors, the Ice Planet, the Planet of the Cavemen, and finally some other planet where the secret weapon is. Or maybe that's the cavemen one... look, the movie doesn't make a sustained impression, I'm afraid. Mostly they serve the purpose of having cheesy fight scenes, to demonstrate some adequate stop motion animation, or to freeze L and Stella Star for the express purpose of thawing her out very slowly. It's nice to know that the defrosting machine conveniently placed in the middle of the ship can also restore her hair to optimal volume despite being covered in something that loosely fits the definition of "ice."

 In one of Starcrash's many "oh, now you're telling us this?" moments, we learn that Acton knew which planet the weapon was on THE ENTIRE TIME but neglected to tell Stella Star this. I think he just got a kick out of hearing L complain about how nervous everything makes him. He's really a pretty poorly programmed Robot Space Cop, but at least they got that "good ol' country" accent right.

 Given provocation, I could go on for days about the things in Starcrash that made us scratch our heads while watching this movie, but instead I'd like to focus on the extended cameo of Christopher Plummer. You've probably heard the phrase "phoning it in" when referring to an actor who is clearly doing a movie because he owes somebody a favor or was caught doing something he shouldn't, but Plummer really takes it to a new level.

 Apparently inspired by the stories of Marlon Brando filming The Godfather*, Plummer seems to have asked for his lines to be written on cue cards, often placed above eye level or well above the camera. He's constantly looking around at nothing, delivering a line, pausing, and then looking around again. As Starcrash progresses, it seems like having more than one line per cue card was too much for Baron Von Trapp, so he delivers one line, then looks around aimlessly until he finds the next cue card, and then reads that one. Sometimes he looks directly into the camera.

 My favorite moment is when Plummer, as a hologram recruiting Stella Star and Acton, finishes a monologue, begins to walk away, and then does a one-quarter turn back to our heroes to finish a thought. As a hologram.

He also happens to have the kind of useful weapon that could, oh,, you know, prevent THE ENTIRE FINAL BATTLE OF THE MOVIE - the ability TO STOP TIME. But he only uses it to help our heroes (and himself) escape the Count's weapon when he shows up to what is clearly a trap. He tells them "you don't become Emperor without having a few tricks up your sleeve" or something to that effect, and then freezes time on the entire planet so that they can return to his ship before it explodes.

 His son isn't much brighter, but he is David Hasselfhoff, in a third act reveal (although, if you're paying attention, you know it's the Emperor's son because he's the only hero we've been introduced to since Stella Star and company left the Emperor's ship). When Stella is captured by the cavemen (who, no joke, say "ooga booga"), the Hoff appears with a golden helmet that shoots lasers to scare them off. When he and Stella escape after they return (and in greater numbers), he promptly THROWS THE HELMET AWAY and picks up a club to fight them with. Fortunately, Acton has a lighsaber</.s> laser blade, so the fight is much shorter.

 Pretending that Starcrash is some hidden gem from the post-Star Wars era is not something you're likely to see me do (ever), but I'll admit it has its dumb charms. The film is too long and unnecessarily episodic for such a flimsy narrative, and the acting is not great, but it's watchable. You'll have a hard time not filling in the Star Wars lines that Starcrash sets up but tries very hard not to get caught copying, and with properly lowered expectations, I'd daresay you might enjoy the experience. I'm sure Roger Corman enjoyed the money I gave him to buy Starcrash on Blu-Ray, something which raised more than a few eyebrows at Summer Fest**.

 Up next, Miami Connection, a movie with a story more compelling than anything on-screen, but my goodness what ends up on-screen is something special indeed...


* Pure, but not unfounded conjecture, based on the available evidence onscreen.
** By that I mean the "why is Starcrash on Blu-Ray" eyebrow raising.

"T" is for Turkish Star Wars

 Normally, I try to do some research about the movie I'm watching. It helps to have some context going in or when trying to relay what's happening in the film, particularly if the film doesn't make much sense. For The ABCs of Movie Masochism, I've looked at it on a case by case basis, and often it helps to give you some idea why I chose the movies I did.

 But not when it comes to the 1982 "movie" Turkish Star Wars.

 The only information I sought out for this film was its actual title (Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam or The Man Who Saved the World), because I knew going in that I wouldn't be watching it with subtitles. I was just going to let the film wash over me, untranslated, and see if I could figure out the story beyond its copious (and unauthorized) use of footage from Star Wars - hence its more popular online title. I had done this before with Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Micmacs, and was mostly able to keep up, and that movie I actually cared about.

 After a long prologue that I couldn't really make sense of, other than the fact that it consisted almost exclusively of space footage from Star Wars - sometimes the same footage, but upside down and backward - the main plot finally kicks in. The "story," as best I can tell, involves two pilots attacking the Death Star who crash land on a strange desert planet. They wander around and then one of them whistles, which draws the attention of skeletons on horseback. Fortunately, they make short work of them (if excessive, considering that they didn't need to kill ALL of them just to steal some horses) and continue on their path, until robots take their horses and force them into gladiatorial combat with the planets' indigenous population.

 The evil Emperor / sorcerer / villain who was (is?) on the Death Star is now also on the planet and our heroes are trying to stop him from finding... something.  But first they meet an old man and a girl who has a young son. When the other people are killed by mummies and pink werewolves (or I guess just aliens, it doesn't really matter) they barely escape. There's a montage of the heroes training by karate-chopping rocks and kicking boulders until they explode, and the main hero (the one with the silver-y Eric Estrada hairdo) begins to feel a romantic attachment to the woman and her son. I guess, because the extent of their "romance" consists of the camera cutting back and forth between them, until he smirks and then she smiles. It's love, you see.

 Because I don't speak Turkish let's just assume that they went to the cantina from Star Wars to start a fight and get caught by the Emperor's robots, because otherwise I'm not sure how they knew he would magically appear to taunt them and make the world turn red. The guys are split up and the main hero talks tough with the Emperor (who wants a magical brain) while the other guy is seduced by a sorceress. Like every scene in Turkish Star Wars, it ends with them fighting monsters, but this time they lose and the main hero once again finds himself in the gladiatorial battle, but with a werewolf who has tinsel on its fingertips.

 Anyway, he uses his powers of off-camera trampoline jumping to defeat the wolf and once again escapes to the tomb of Jesus (and maybe Shiva, if the mural on the wall was what I thought it was) to retrieve what I'm just going to assume is the brain of Jesus and his lightning bolt sword. After he defeats two golden ninjas, he takes the sword and the brain and there's some more stolen footage from what looks like a religious epic I couldn't place (but is letterboxed where the rest of Turkish Star Wars isn't) and betrayed by his "friend" - actually a monster in disguise.

 He goes to save his friend who again betrays him and takes Jesus' brain and sword to the old man, but that's the Emperor in disguise who uses the force to throw him around. Our hero saves him and the Emperor disappears, leaving the brain and sword behind, so they go find the real old man, who is dying. Then there's an explosion and the sidekick dies and the hero melts the brain and sword and uses them to create golden gauntlets. He's the man with the golden fists, ready to do battle with all of the forces of evil, conveniently waiting outside in a ravine.

 With his gauntlets, golden boots, and trampoline skills, he chops monsters in half, rips their heads off, and generally makes short work of everybody, including the Emperor, who he CHOPS IN HALF. Yes, he chops him in half, and to demonstrate this, the camera shows half of his face and the rest of the screen is blocked by a piece of paper (or something to that effect). Our hero then leaves in the Millenium Falcon while the theme from Raiders of the Lost Ark plays.

In fact,  I really hope you like John Williams' music from Raiders of the Lost Ark, because you're going to hear it a lot during Turkish Star Wars. Whether it's the main theme, the love theme, or the music from the truck chase, the cues are re-purposed ad nausem, with only snippets of other movie scores appearing in between (I caught some from Ben-Hur, Planet of the Apes and Battlestar Galactica). Strangely, there's no music from Star Wars - I guess they felt it was pushing it enough to lift entire sequences from the film, sometimes for no apparent reason.

 While I am not terribly familiar with Turkish cinema, I have heard of its reputation for sometimes shamelessly ripping off other movies / characters without permission (for example, I have seen 3 Dev Adam, which pits Captain America and Santos the masked wrestler against Spider-Man), but Turkish Star Wars takes it to new levels. The beginning and ending of the film consist almost entirely of footage from Star Wars, often without changing it in any fashion. It's really hard to tell if the Death Star is attacking the planet they land on or if they just crashed on the Death Star because the footage is used without context in the film.

 My friends refused to watch this with me if I wouldn't watch it with subtitles, but I sincerely doubt that would have helped beyond the long, rambling prologue and maybe the speech the old man gives in a temple. It's not that Turkish Star Wars is hard to follow, per se, but so much of it is stolen from more iconic films (specifically the one in the title) that it doesn't even matter why things are happening. Nearly every sequence ends with the heroes fighting monsters, so it's not important how they got there or why. There's barely a plot and calling the characters "wafer thin" would be a gross understatement.

 In the end, Turkish Star Wars is a curiosity, one that is probably more entertaining when watched in snippets online, completely devoid of context. Trying to make sense out of the last ten minutes without watching the first 80 is vastly more entertaining than sitting through the whole film, subtitles or not, and I certainly wasn't dying to find out what was actually happening when it was over.