This is not the only remake of Lee Falk’s The Phantom that was made in Turkey. This version is Red Mask, which basically gives you a Street Fighter-style palette swap of the Ghost Who Walks. There’s also another Kizil maske that came out that very same year directed by Çetin Inanç. You can tell the difference because the former movie has a ripoff of the James Bond theme while the latter takes the Secret Agent Man theme. There’s also the 1971 movie Kizil Maske’nin Intikami (The Phantom’s Revenge).

The second Inanç-directed film also has a bad guy who looks like a Klan member with lightning bolts all over his hood and a Phantom that doesn’t even try to disguise that he’s completely taking the look and not caring about intellectual property. Actually, I kid, he has on a rad leather jacket and kind of looks like Dominic Fortune and there you go, that’s a reference that proves why I do a small website and am not shared out by the film Twitter universe just yet.

Also, all of these Turkish films are way better than the Billy Zane movie, which I refer to as Slam Evil! instead of its real title.

According to How the World Remade Hollywood by Ed Glaser, I learned that the Phantom was a big deal in Turkey. While he’s purple in the U.S., he was originally intended to be grey. To make things somewhat confusing, in other counties, the Ghost Who Walks shows up in different colors: blue in Scandanavia, green in Australia and red in Turkey. Hence the title of this film.

And if you’re wondering where those hooded bad guys come from in the Çetin Inanç-directed movie, Inanç’s former boss was Yilmaz Atadniz, who directed Kilink: Soy ve Oldur. That’s the very footage these characters are cut and pasted from before we get to the movie’s main villains, “Al Capone” Arif and Fu Manchu. An Arabian Fu Manchu at that.