Turkish exploitation movies are one of the most elusive gold mines of film history.
* * *
Currently, no exclusive history of Turksploitation cinema exists in print. The most exhaustive survey of it is interspersed throughout Ed Glaser’s book How the World Remade Hollywood (2022), about low-budget or unauthorized Hollywood remakes worldwide. Cem Kaya’s Turkish-language documentary Remake, Remix, Rip Off: Copy Culture and Turkish Pop Cinema (2014) is more scattered about its subject but closer to the source, featuring interviews with the genre’s kookiest and best filmmakers.
The history of Turksploitation is a history of what cinematic heights piracy can reach in a country that had no film law until 1986. This article attempts to fill the gaping void of scholarship about the genre as best it can by describing Turksploitation’s origins, peak, and downfall through an overview of its most infamous cinematic specimens. Mostly, it attempts to get across just how fun these movies are.
* * *
The first film made in the Ottoman Empire was The Weavers (Yanaki and Milton Manaki, 1905). It is a minute-long shot of the directors’ 114-year-old grandmother Despina weaving. The first film made in modern Turkey is Demolition of the Monument at San Stefano (Fuat Uzkınay, 1914). It shows the razing of the monument to Russian victory of the Russo-Turkish War in 1878. This stately demolition derby signified a declaration of war between the Ottoman and Russian Empires during World War I.
Subsequent films were either commemorative documentaries like Independence, the İzmir Victory (director unknown, 1922) or genre dramas like The Shirt of Flame (Muhsin Ertuğrul, 1923), a love triangle set during the Turkish War of Independence that featured the first Muslim Turkish women on screen. There was no cohesive Turkish film industry before World War II. From 1923 to 1939, Ertuğrul was the country’s only active film director. The 49 films produced in Turkey in 1952 outnumbered those in all previous years combined.
Demolition of the Monument at San Stefano (Fuat Uzkınay, 1914), the first film made in modern Turkey
Most prewar films in Turkey were minor projects by import companies guaranteed against loss by distribution chains, theater contracts, and multinational export agreements. The country’s first film system was divided into seven regions, each headquartered in that region’s city: Istanbul (Marmara), İzmir (Aegean), Ankara (Middle Anatolian), Samsun (Black Sea), Adana (Mediterranean), Erzurum (East Anatolian), and Diyarbakır (Southeast Anatolian). In 1955, the network became Yeşilçam, or “Green Pine” – effectively a Turkish Hollywood.
This setup of localized distribution and international export was a boon after the ’50s, when local productions nationally outgrossed imported films. These low-budget Turkish exports were sold to foreign countries – particularly Germany – as taxable goods subject to draconian censorship commissions, a precursor to the absurdity of the censorship to come. One distributor, for instance, was baffled that his film was deemed “inappropriate for export” because it contained Communist propaganda; he had applied to sell it to the Soviet Union.
By the ’70s, Yeşilçam produced 250-350 films annually. It worked like this: Production companies made movies that distributors wanted. Distributors wanted movies that theater owners wanted. Theater owners wanted Hollywood hits. As mentioned above, there was no cinema copyright law in Turkey until 1986, rendering all foreign film and music fair game.
This, alongside the fact that the country’s entire industry rarely had more than three consistent screenwriters (Safa Önal, Bülent Oran, and Erdoğan Tünaş) during its peak, ensured a boom in pirated low-budget Hollywood remakes. The Turksploitation renaissance ended abruptly with a far-right military coup in 1980, but films trickled on through that decade.
* * *
First, it must be said: The poverty in which these directors worked, and the lunatic ambition with which they worked, would be enough to make even a Hollywood B-movie MacGyver like Roger Corman balk.
Here’s why. During Turksploitation’s heyday, the government placed an import quota on raw film. Black-market stock, often from Germany, was smuggled like drugs. Film for one production was squirreled away for another for those who could spare it – hence the quick acting, illogical editing, and radical changes in quality and color from one scene to the next in these movies.
Nowadays, a film may take the equivalent of 350 reels to shoot. No Turksploitation director could use more than 25. It was not unheard-of for a director to trawl through Istanbul, from photo shop to photo shop, and tape together a reel from photo negatives, frame by frame. One-week shooting schedules were widespread. Tulle was put on the lens in lieu of light filters. Colored gelatin plates (which melted under the lamps) were taken from bakeries in lieu of color filters. With one-channel technology, every sound had to be recorded in one take – with actors, the sound crew, and a crackling bootlegged soundtrack record all grouped around the studio’s only microphone.
Lacking stuntmen, actors endured scenes that would make Buster Keaton tremble in his trousers. Cüneyt Arkın – a dishy blend of Bruce Lee, Clint Eastwood, and Alain Delon – was the most famous Turksploitation actor. He hung, fell, and flipped from bridges, towers, windows, horses, cars, and trains, unsecured and permitless. One extant clip from an unknown film shows him maneuvering down a rope hanging between the columns of two five-story buildings. Below him as he hangs, a few crew members stretch out and raise up the edges of a large tarp, about 12 feet long and 10 feet wide. In the middle of the tarp is a twin mattress. There is nothing else to break his fall.
All this may suffice to begin to illustrate Turksploitation, a genre so bizarrely appealing because its only impossibility is intellectual property, its only limitation money.
* * *
The history of this genre spans a long way and a short time from Tarzan in Istanbul (Orhan Atadeniz, 1952), considered to be the first Turksploitation film. It features Tarzan (played by Tamer Balcı, an Olympic hammer throw athlete), who ranges the jungle to deliver a letter to Istanbul. Although the closest thing to a jungle anywhere near Istanbul is Belgrade Forest, 20 miles from the outskirts, the crucial in-city scenes are limited to a few seconds at the end.
This movie, like those to follow, rips from other movies to an avant-garde extent.
Well over half of Tarzan in Istanbul is stock footage from wildlife documentaries and other jungle dramas. The Tarzan-Jane plot, Johnny Weissmuller’s own yell, elephant and chimp friends (one monkey is named Cheetah), the repeated word “Ungowa,” and even certain scenes are identical to those in the original Tarzan the Ape Man (W. S. Van Dyke, 1932).
The film is mostly infamous for being so hard to find, save for one bleary Internet scan. Its cousin, Dracula in Istanbul (Mehmet Muhtar, 1953), fared better. This is the first screen version of the Dracula tale, which depicts him bearing fangs (“tusks” is more accurate), scaling his castle wall, and giving a thirsty vampire girlfriend a baby to snack on in lieu of adult manslaughter. It’s also the first screen version of the tale that explicitly links Dracula (played by Atıf Kaptan) with Vlad the Impaler, about whom Turkish audiences knew more than Americans. Alongside Bram Stoker’s book, the film is also based on Ali Riza Seyfi’s novel Vlad the Impaler (1928).
Turkey being a Muslim land, the Dracula of this film is repelled not by holy water and crucifixes but by garlic and the Koran. His castle is a crudely painted backdrop. There being no room in the budget for a fog machine, 30 stagehands puffed cigarettes just out of frame for the graveyard scenes. One hunchbacked servant’s mustache alone covers both of his chins, not to speak of hair elsewhere. The credit sequence alternates psychedelically between fade-ins and fade-outs.
The hunchbacked servant from Dracula in Istanbul (Mehmet Muhtar, 1953)
Dracula himself turns out to be less a bloodsucker than a cad. There is a proto-Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962) sequence where he hypnotizes Güzin, the wife of the Jonathan Harker character Azmi (Bülent Oran), into giving a private performance. Güzin is a harem showgirl, a narrative touch later echoed by Renato Polselli for The Vampire and the Ballerina (1960), which critic Louis Paul said was among the first Italian films “to blatantly mix sex and horror.” Despite these eccentricities, the Turkish film’s faithfulness to Stoker’s story isn’t rivaled in movie history until Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 adaptation.
Whatever Turkish Dracula lacked in more blatant copyright violations, its heirs made up. Golden Boy (Memduh Ün, and Ray Bowman, 1966) has all the trappings of a Bond film: a womanizing spy vacationing in London, a bald mastermind bent on nuclear war, fast cars, suave women, scuba shots (clearly from a different movie), and a theme belted out by a Shirley Bassey-esque torch singer. There are profuse and culturally specific additions of cats and belly dancers. The film ends with the Bond-spy, played by Göksel Arsoy, breaking the fourth wall to tell the audience to watch an upcoming film, Ortasark is Burning (Zafer Davutoğlu, 1967), rather than the second (and final) film in the franchise, also released that same year: Golden Boy in Beirut (Ertem Göreç, 1967). The name’s Boy. Golden Boy.
All this is nothing compared to the Killing franchise. This was a ripoff of Umberto Lenzi’s superhero film Kriminal (1966), which was a ripoff of the Italian comic book villain Killing, who was a ripoff of the ’60s Italian comic book villain Kriminal. Killing in Istanbul, Killing vs. the Flying Man, and Killing: Strip and Kill were all directed by Yılmaz Atadeniz and all in 1967. In them, Killing wears a skeleton suit designed by Carlo Rambaldi, a special-effects artist of King Kong (John Guillermin, 1976), Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), and E. T. (Steven Spielberg, 1982) fame.
In Killing in Istanbul, Killing dies because he’s evil and deserves to. His mummy is then raised from the dead by the injection of an unidentified liquid so he can continue being evil. He wants to seize a formula that will let him rule the world, and which was developed by a scientist who used to work for him and then fled to London. Killing finds this ex-employee and kills him before even looking for the formula.
As Killing then looks for the formula, a haggard Christlike figure named Shazam gives the dead scientist’s son the power to turn into Flying Man – a Superman and Captain Marvel spoof in striped tighty-whities, a Batman mask, a diamond “S” chest patch, and a luchador’s belt – every time the son says “Shazam.” By this point, any sane viewer is rooting for Killing. The movie is bafflingly faithful to the Italian comic book.
The eponymous Killing of Killing in Istanbul (Yılmaz Atadeniz, 1967)
In Killing vs. the Flying Man, the Flying Man finds the island where Killing has whisked his fiancée and her father. He kills Killing. There are ray guns, face-sucking, and a 15-minute commentary in lieu of missing finale footage in which the viewer learns summarily that Killing has fallen to his death.
Accordingly, Killing: Strip and Kill begins with Killing’s bone-corpse mangled on the street and ringed by concerned bystanders. He then laughs, stands up, and walks it off, and spends the rest of the movie playing two rival gangs against each other like in Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa, 1961). Killing subjects every (usually half-dressed) woman he finds to lovemaking and/or death while a tinny James Bond soundtrack plays.
To describe scenes further would more serve to horrify than instruct, so we’ll describe scenes further: At one point, Killing leaps upon a buxom blonde who has just tried to kill him and exudes such promises of ecstasy that she yields to him in seconds. At another point he simply shoves a hot-to-trot gal off a balcony.
The director of the Killing franchise, Yılmaz Atadeniz, almost singlehandedly set the reckless model of the Turkish action film industry that followed. 3 Giant Men (T. Fikret Uçak, 1973) is the wildest of his heirs. Like Killing, its Spider-Guy drinks, chain-smokes, frugs, and kills with sadistic glory and glee. He gets fatally beaten to the Battle of Britain (Guy Hamilton, 1969) theme by Captain America and the Mexican wrestler El Santo, but not before he goes to the beach, buries a woman neckdown in sand, and drags the propeller blade of a boat to her face. The movie ends with Captain America assaulting a child and an overlaid “Copyright? F**k you, Stan Lee.”
* * *
Buckle up. There’s a The Wizard Of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) ripoff – Little Ayşe and the Magic Dwarves in the Land of Dreams (Tunç Başaran, 1971) – with a scene where Dorothy, upon learning that the scarecrow is gay, sews up his rear. There’s Satan (Metin Erksan, 1974), a scene-by-scene remake of The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) with a Muslim exorcism and a crackling, popping original score.
There’s Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek (Hulki Saner, 1974), with credits and special effects lifted from the original TV series and a score featuring the song “Out of Limits” by the Ventures. In the film, a doctor beams a hobo named Ömer from his earthly shotgun wedding onto the Enterprise. Logan’s Run (1967) book author George Clayton Johnson is an uncredited writer, but the plot and dialogue are ripped nearly verbatim from an original Star Trek episode, “The Man Trap.”
Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek (Hulki Saner, 1974), a remake of an early Star Trek episode featuring salt vampires, “The Man Trap”
Executioner (Memduh Ün, 1975) is another fun one, being an even more sadistic rehash of Death Wish (Michael Winner, 1974). In this one, the Charles Bronson figure snakes through the alleys of Istanbul, throws one of his family’s attackers from a fifth-story window, and wires up another to fry like a Christmas tree.
The Sting (George Roy Hill, 1974) returns, also in 1974, as Belalilar (roughly translated, “The Plagues”), with the original Marvin Hamlisch score intact. Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971) returns as Eagle House (Natuk Baytan, 1974), set not in Cornwall but Cyprus.
There’s Kiliç Bey (roughly “Mr. Sword,” Natuk Baytan, 1979), an ambiguously socialist spinoff of The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) where the Brando-figure runs an orphanage by day and whacks Istanbul’s corrupt business tycoons by night to Nino Rota’s original soundtrack.
Indeed, the godfather of Turksploitation music is The Godfather itself. The distorted, popping whine of the Rota record was found in more popular B-movies of the era than any other one soundtrack, most notably in the Dillinger (John Milius, 1973) predecessor Tophaneli Murat (Çetin İnanç, 1972).
Overall, the soundtrack to The Sicilian Clan (Henri Verneuil, 1969) was nearly as popular. For fighting scenes, the score for Enter the Dragon (Robert Clouse, 1973) was tried-and-true; those interested in its cinematic possibilities need only refer to The Sword and the Claw (Natuk Baytan, 1975), Fathers’ Father (Baytan, 1975), and Starving Eagles (Çetin İnanç, 1984).
As an aside, the mid-to-late ’70s mark the brief period when the distribution of explicit sex scenes was legal in Turkey. She Is Such a Woman (Naki Yurter, 1979) – the hardcore (and genuinely artistically superior) remake of I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978) – was the first Turkish adult film to be legally produced and distributed. More conservative state censorship organs then took power after the nationalist coup of 1980, and many pirated films from this time were destroyed.
While this brief run of salacious freedom in Turkish film ended with the coup, this very freedom was a farce. As will be shown later, the pirated hardcore film industry boomed most in Turkey not during this supposed period of free love but during the period of right-wing consolidation and censorship that followed.
* * *
Cüneyt Arkın and Aytekin Akkaya, leading hunks of Turkish Star Wars.
The crown jewel of Turksploitation is The Man Who Saved the World (Çetin İnanç, 1982), known colloquially to Turksploitation-heads as “Turkish Star Wars.” This entire section is dedicated to it, yet does not begin to do it justice. One thousand doctoral theses would not begin to do it justice.
This sci-fi kung fu movie peppers its threadbare plot with footage from the original Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) – particularly the cantina scene – and clips from Soviet and American rocket launch newsreels. It’s so spastically edited across cultural times and spaces, it so straddles the line between reach-for-the-moon sincerity and two-bit kitsch, it’s such a celluloid slap in the face of any narrative logic (the footage often repeats or plays in reverse), that it reaches postmodern heights of copyright-spurning that even directors far better known for it, like Bruce Conner or Kenneth Anger, did not.
Of course, the soundtrack is exclusively plagiarized. It includes John Williams’s original Star Wars score and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981) theme; J. S. Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” (better known as the Dracula theme); and various songs from Moonraker (Lewis Gilbert, 1979), Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959), Flash Gordon (Mike Hodges, 1980), Battlestar Galactica (Richard A. Colla, 1978), Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968), Silent Running (Douglas Trumbull, 1972), Moses the Lawgiver (Gianfranco De Bosio, 1974), and Black Hole (Gary Nelson, 1979), to name a few.
To the credit of the director, Çetin İnanç, he pirated much of the footage only after his original $300,000-budget sets and ships were destroyed in a freak storm. But even this was a pre-ripoff, as a similar storm ravaged the set of Lucas’s later Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace (1999).
İnanç obtained the Lucas footage by bribing the night watchman of a local film distribution company to let him borrow an original Star Wars print. İnanç copied the film overnight and returned it by dawn. Since the print was anamorphic (a widescreen film shot on a non-widescreen frame) whereas İnanç’s footage was in standard Academy format, the aspect ratio distorts the spliced-in footage to German Expressionist extents of surrealism. The Death Star, for example, is here a Death Egg.
Cüneyt Arkın stars in the film with Aytekin Akkaya, who resembles Ronnie Wood. The plot alone would require at least its own monograph, but roughly: Arkın and Akkaya play Murat and Ali, two middle-aged space pilots who battle with enemy forces until they crash on a desert planet uncannily similar to Cappadocia, a moonscaped sand-land in central Turkey. To find the two helmets that the duo wear, the film crew hung out on set and robbed a passing motorcyclist.
The film’s antagonists – clad in candy-colored felt suits and led by an armor-clad fellow called “The Wizard” – want to destroy the earth. They’re prevented in this quest by a shield of human brain molecules represented by the Death Star. The enemies need the hero-duo’s human brains to fight this shield.
The mildest of the resulting fights include a mummy free-for-all in a cave, a yeti-gladiator cantina brawl, and a training sequence where the shirtless and modestly beer-bellied heroes run with paper rocks strapped to their legs. By day, Arkın and Akkaya shredded the monster costumes in these fights; by night, Inanc sewed them up again. A bewildering number of the kung-fu casualties are random children completely unrelated to the fighters involved.
Evil villains in The Man Who Saved the World
The motivating MacGuffin that Arkın and Akkaya are fighting for is a brain in a box and a lightning bolt-shaped cardboard sword. Neither are explained and both are guarded by men in tinfoil suits. To prepare for the final fight, Murat – by this time Ali is dead – somehow melts the sword and brain. He dips his limbs into the liquefied mush, emerging with golden gloves and boots. A newly minted Murat then has a pretty easy time decapitating his enemies and karate-chopping The Wizard in half. Footage from another movie about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah ensues. The film critic Phil Hall did not overstate the case when he wrote in his review of The Man Who Saved the World that it “makes film criticism moot.”
* * *
Turkish Star Wars was the last masterpiece of the ’70s Turksploitation renaissance; and yet, as mentioned, Turkish copyright law wasn’t instituted until 1986. There are two reasons that Yeşilçam withered well before this: the rise of the TV industry and the Turkish coup of 1980, when martial law was declared and Kenan Evren, Chief of General Staff, became President of the Republic and replaced its constitution with a far less liberal one.
Once political censorship and trade union suppression became a matter of bloody course in Turkey and theatergoing became physically dangerous for the public, people stayed home and the national TV industry boomed. Films adapting to the TV market grew cheaper than those traversing the wilds of piracy; if not in budget, then certainly in quality.
At the Cannes Film Festival of May 1982, opponents of the new regime held a protest organized by Kurdish director Yılmaz Güney, who had already spent about 11 years in Turkish prison for political activism. He won a Palme d’Or that year for his film The Road (1982), a portrait of political prisoners on furlough in post-coup Turkey. The movie was banned in the country until 1999. It didn’t help Turksploitation audiences that, directly after 1980, several thousands of movies – including copies of all of Güney’s work – burned in a depot fire set by Istanbul government officials.
Killing a Turkish Ewok with kindness as multitudes look on in The Man Who Saved the World
Even in the years before the 1980 coup, however, a national boom in pornographic pirated films led families to watch TV at home rather than going to theaters. The popularity of these films to those who did go can scarcely be overstated. Even many non-erotic cinemas had two projectors: one with the clean film (religious ones were not exempt) and one with a pirated porno to be played at perversely auspicious moments; for instance, when a car tire bursts and the driver is supposed to pump it. Once the number of hardcore scenes one could jam into a Yeşilçam movie took precedence over any claims they could have to artistic substance, many Turksploitation auteurs effectively retired.
It must be emphasized that hardcore piracy did not boom as a result of “Western permissiveness” fought by the military coup; the films were popularized while far-right military conservatives were already gaining national control. Only once the film industry as a whole, across all genres, was criticized for immorality and corruption due to filmmakers’ opposition to the government was no film spared.
Nevertheless, some far less salacious but just as brazen ripoffs trickled on throughout the ’80s. Most of the best are directed by Turkish Star Wars auteur Çetin İnanç. There was Badi (Zafer Par, 1984), a Turkish E.T. complete with a bike-over-the-moon sequence. There was Kara Şimşek (roughly “Black Lightning,” Inanç, 1985), a Turkish Rocky (John D. Avildsen, 1976), with soundtrack themes from both Rocky and Love Story (Erich Segal, 1970). There were two 1986 versions of Rambo (Tszed Kotcheff, 1982) – Ramo (Mehmet Alemdar) and Fearless (Inanç), replete with zombie squads and a motorcycle-karate gang.
Altar (Remzi Jöntürk, 1985) is a Turkish Conan the Barbarian (John Milius, 1982) with half-naked women, moderate cannibalism, and a Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977) soundtrack. There’s Çöl (“Desert,” 1983), directed by Inanç, starring Arkin, and written by both. It’s known as Turkish Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) because footage of a model shark appears in the last nine minutes of this movie, despite the fact that it kills no one and is completely unrelated to the rest of the plot (which is underscored repeatedly with the hit Survivor single “Eye of the Tiger”).
Çetin İnanç is not only among the most prolific of Turksploitation pirates; it’s often argued that he is also the most talented. His filmography numbers in the hundreds. His camera shots alone are astonishing. In one suspenseful beach scene, for example, God knows where or why, a man approaches a sunbathing woman who has one leg’s foot on her other leg’s knee. He is filmed entirely from the triangular gap between her legs. As the camera pulls back to his wild gaze looming over her sleeping face, the frame itself trembles with lust – for blood, as it turns out.
The senselessness of İnanç’s stabbing scenes are often conveyed from the perspective of the knife. The disorientation of his sedate cowboy showdowns (of which his oeuvre has more than enough to speak of in the plural) is often conveyed by a continuous 360° rotation of the camera. Whoever denies that these films can be the work of genius cannot, in any case, watch them and deny that they offer a greater fascination than is found in what they rip off.
* * *
Perhaps Turksploitation’s last truly bonkers gasp was Homoti (Müjdat Gezen, 1987), the other Turkish E.T. In this one the alien, Homoti, is gay. His rear is Kardashian levels of huge. The film is surprisingly un-homophobic; in fact, it’s staunchly sympathetic to Homoti’s plight. Unlike the 1984 E.T. guy – Badi, who was frightening – Homoti (played by a sculptor named Saim Bugay) is a frightened, lovable, and turd-faced alien lost in ’70s Turkey. Due merely to his sexuality, society forbids him any safety, any home. Should he be discovered, he’ll be deported to his home planet and punished there.
Homoti falls in love with Ali, who is played by the director, Gezen. Ali is a journalist for Milliyet (“Nationality,” a real and extant paper somewhat like the Daily Mail today). He takes Homoti home and tells no one, despite the fact that Ali sorely needs a new and alien-themed story. At one point, under his editor’s command, he throws a trash can in the air and takes a blurry picture of the UFO.
Homoti then meets Ali’s insufferable mother Hatçe (Perran Kutman) and gay neighbour Haydar (Savaş Dinçel), who pines after Arab soccer players who all abandon him. Once it’s clear that Homoti is not simply cozy with men because he’s unaware of the difference between platonic and sexual affection on Earth, Haydar treats him as a peer and initiates him into gay culture. Homoti is nevertheless depressed because Ali is seduced by a female coworker, Ayşegül (Bahar Öztan), an intern with the far-out notion that journalism should be fair and accurate.
Homoti is then kidnapped by a rival journalist, Kadir (Suat Sungur), who wants to publicize him. Homoti escapes and returns to Ali, who is in bed with Ayşegül. In one sincerely poignant scene, the lovelorn alien applies lipstick in an attempt to relate to Ali the way that Ayşegül does. Stunted in his attempts, Homoti finally decides to take his protruding rubber rear back to his home planet, Homon. Although everyone begs him to stay, he’d only be sadder living in a world where there is no place for him; so he leaves.
To be clear, most of these movies are unintentionally hilarious two-bit ripoffs. Hopefully a case has been made, however, that “masterpiece” would not be too high a word for some of them while “naïve” would be too low a word for any. Naïvety could not produce Atadeniz’s Killing franchise, nor İnanç’s Turkish Star Wars, nor Gezen’s gay E.T. Gezen himself was jailed after the 1980 coup for writing a biography of the communist Turkish poet Nazım Hikmet, and he got more recent legal prosecution for criticizing President Erdoğan on a TV talk show in 2018.
In short, these Turksploitation pirates were dead serious. The inanity of their very best work, and the odds against which it was made, may require as committed a mind as it may take to conceive, say, Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960). However, original Turkish arthouse analogues to the mastery of films like that are relatively scarce. Two of the best are Dry Summer (Metin Erksan, 1963) and Hope (Yılmaz Güney and Şerif Gören, 1970).
* * *
A question, then: If the talent and ambition required for original masterworks was there in droves, why are you reading a history of low-brow remakes?
For one, Turksploitation directors were, without exception, constantly and endlessly stunted. The most renowned, Çetin İnanç, has said that he has “not shot a single proper movie yet. I could never realize my ideas because everything was always lacking, so I did it for my livelihood, like a singer in a drinking hole.”
As mentioned, there were two reasons for the downfall of Turksploitation: the coup and TV. There’s really one reason, however, for its rise. Despite the fact that these films are among the crown jewels of 20th-century Turkish cinema, the reason for their being is the plague of Turkish cinema: censorship. It was there in droves, even well before film copyright law.
Turkish Bonnie and Clyde in Cemo ile Cemile (Çetin İnanç, 1971), for which İnanç was physically beaten by men from an Ankara censorship office for 15 days on the grounds that he was a national traitor for showing the robbery of a Turkish bank
An anecdote from film critic Burçak Evren illustrates the demented censor-board rationale of the time: “A couple goes swimming. He goes into the water and shouts to his girlfriend: ‘Come in, the water only comes up to my knees.’ This film will be prohibited. It will tell the enemy strategic points of the Bosphorus.”
This writer, who was born in Istanbul but raised in California, recalls one childhood summer afternoon in her grandmother’s living room in the northwestern city of Eskişehir, watching a pirated ’80s movie on a grainy TV. In one scene, men sat around the table and gambled, drank, and smoked. The actions themselves were not censored; only the things. A man drew a pixelated white tube to his lips, held a pixelated lighter to the end, put them down, exhaled a pixelated cloud of smoke, chugged from a pixelated red bottle, shook a pixelated pair of dice, won a pixelated wad of bills, and crowed celebratory curses from a pixelated mouth.
In other words, censorship – and ways of circumventing it – often took forms as sublimely ridiculous as the films censored. Directors who ingenuously violated censorship laws just as ingenuously evaded them. Under the Islamist government, for example, İnanç shot different film endings for the censorship office, ending these versions with a prayer call. Producers sent fake or incomplete films to the board. Screenwriters wrote under pseudonyms.
With the military, police, justice, and even medical systems off-limits to any film that might tarnish the national image, it was inevitable that any halfway serious director worth his salt would get career-stunting flak. İnanç himself was physically beaten by men from the Ankara censorship office for 15 days for Cemo ile Cemile (1971), his remake of Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967). The officials called him a national traitor for showing the robbery of a Turkish bank.
* * *
Cüneyt Arkın plays Turkish Marlon Brando in Kiliç Bey (roughly “Mr. Sword,” Natuk Baytan, 1979), a socialist remake of The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
This article does not attempt to argue that a gay alien showing his bulbous rear in a shoddy Istanbul apartment holds a candle to Spielberg’s original. However, it does attempt to argue that the crazed ambition, unshakable faith, on-the-spot-improvisation, and outlaw originality required to conceive of let alone create these movies sometimes rivals and even, by sheer postmodern collage, trumps the work they pirate.
Far more common than verbatim Turksploitation ripoffs are patchwork remakes; say, a Turkish superhero who is a physical and moral patchwork of four American ones – Super-Bat-Phantom-Mask – or a Turkish murder mystery which is half Agatha Christie, half Bruce Lee. Cowboy Ali (Yilmaz Atadeniz, 1966), for example, in its attempts to reprise Alan Ladd’s Branded (1950), becomes an original meta-story about a prospectless Turkish man’s futile attempt to recreate the frontier fantasies of the American movies of his boyhood.
The history of Turksploitation is a history of local adoption. It wouldn’t exist if Hollywood were not such a monolithic influence. In their obsessive ridiculousness, psychedelic incoherence, and unfettered improvisation, these films offer no pat answers. They raise countless questions about what kind of person could commit such an unfiltered cultural collage to celluloid and what becomes of classical film stereotypes when they are censored so ruthlessly, pirated so faithfully. In the words of film scholar Savaş Arslan, “There is no way around the West, so you have to counter it” – whether by borrowing, bending, or karate-chopping its sacred cows. With a gay alien here, a Death Egg there, how drastically stories can change, and how drastically remain the same.
* * *
Bibliography
Ashlin, Scott. “Homoti (1987).” 1000 Misspent Hours. N.D. http://www.1000misspenthours.com/reviews/reviewsh-m/homoti.htm
Enzenauer, Saliha. “Kilink in Istanbul (1967).” Vinyl Writers. August 21, 2020. https://vinylwriters.com/kilink-in-istanbul-1967-a-delirious-and-psychedelic-celluloid-turmoil-from-turkey
Gilbey, Ryan. “Attack of the Killer Jedi! The True Story of Turkish Star Wars.” The Guardian. September 14, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/sep/14/attack-of-the-killer-jedi-the-bizarre-story-of-turkish-star-wars
Glaser, Ed. How the World Remade Hollywood. Jefferson. McFarland & Company, 2022.
Kaya, Cem, dir. Remake, Remix, Rip-Off: Copy Culture and Turkish Pop Cinema. 2014; Babelsberg: UFA Fiction.
Newman, Kim. “Your Daily Dracula: Drakula Istanbul’da.” The Kim Newman Web Site. November 19, 2020. https://johnnyalucard.com/2020/11/19/your-daily-dracula-drakula-istanbulda-dracula-in-istanbul-1953
Slater, Jay. “Yeşilçam! Turkish Exploitation Cinema.” Film Threat. March 25, 2008. https://filmthreat.com/uncategorized/yeilcam-turkish-exploitation-cinema
Smith, Ian. “The True Story of Turkish Star Wars.” Culture Slate. July 18, 2022. https://www.cultureslate.com/explained/the-true-story-of-turkish-star-wars
Troutman, Valerie. “Turkish Film Fest: Kilink in Istanbul.” Through the Shattered Lens. November 23, 2015. https://unobtainium13.com/2015/11/23/turkish-film-fest-kilink-in-istanbulkilink-istanbulda-1967-dir-yilmaz-atadeniz
