A lot of people — me included — get excited about Turkish riffs on films, even if Turkish Star Wars is so much more its own movie — Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam — than just slavish devotion to remaking Lucas’ movie. Yet most of the movies that are being remade, remixed and ripped off are ones that people have some level of affinity for. Creating a new version of Mr. Majestyk is a much bigger swing.

Directed by Yilmaz Atadeniz and written by Ahmet Ündag, Karpuzcu starts with an incredibly long scene of men picking fruit — yes, this is also about watermelons, just like the Bronson-starring inspiration — with star Dilber Ay sweating under the sun as a woman holds two large melons to her chest, laughing.

Whereas Vincent Majestyk’s main concern was getting his crop in on time so he can survive another season, this has our hero’s woman abducted and sexually assaulted in a scene that goes on forever and worse, it’s pretty close to hardcore — indeed, this movie has inserts from another reel with the exact same actors — and it causes Dilber Ay’s character to get his revenge. He has a little over an hour — well, like half of that by the time the scene is over — to kill them all.

The name of the movie, according to the translation site I am using, is Watermelon Maker.

You can download this on the Internet Archive.

Kartal Yuvasi means Eagle’s Nest but a quick look at this movie will clue you in that director Natuk Baytan and writer Tarik Dursun Kakinç are really making their own version of Straw Dogs.

Yet this movie is very much its own movie.

That’s because it’s filtered through the lens of creators coming from a country quite unlike our own. At the time of filming, the setting of Cyprus was in the middle of a battle between Greece and Turkey with the Turkish Muslims being forced out of their homeland. That’s quite a different setting than Wakely. And there is no David Sumner character in this, instead two women, one young and another old.

The closest thing this movie has to Dustin Hoffman’s character is Murat, a doctor who is returning home along with his new English fiancee Mary. When he’s called away for an emergency, Mary must stay with Murat’s mother Makbule, a Muslim woman who the town already distrusts and outright hates. Even worse for them, the very idea that mary would convert from Catholicism for her husband is enough to rile them up into outright sexual assault, a much different reason for the crime than Peckinpah’s film.

During the climactic attack on the house, the mother even reveals a Turkish flag under her clothes and plays matching band covers of their national anthem while getting thrown off the steps by men much larger than her. Then the movie juxtaposes this battle with actual footage of Turkish soldiers retaking the town from the Greek army. That’s the second weirdest crosscutting in this, as Mary’s rape is played against the birth of a baby.

I’ve debated in my head if Straw Dogs is art or exploitation. This film definitely leans toward the latter, yet is also a political message, which is pretty fascinating.

You can watch this on one of the best channels on YouTube, White Slaves of Chinatown.

Aç Kartallar (Hungry Eagles) was directed and written by Çetin Inanç, the man who also brought us Kara Simsek, Kizil maske, Vahsi Kan and 150 or so other films from 1967 to 2002. He’s best known in America for Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (The Man Who Saved the World) which is also called Turkish Star Wars.

Nihat Yigit plays our stand-in for Bruce Lee, as this is Brucesploitation of the highest order. He was a huge fan of Lee, taking up martial arts after the star’s death in 1973. He fought in karate tournaments all over Europe before Inanc discovered him and cast him as a villain opposite his greatest star, Cuneyt Arkin.

This has the most basic of all martial arts plots: When their martial arts master is murdered by a rival clan, that man’s top three students vow to get revenge.

Inanc can’t help but make his fight scenes work harder than anyone else’s and by that, I mean he speeds them up to Benny Hill on amphetamines level. There’s something he does that I’ve never seen in another director’s style: you feel like you are in the middle of the fights, as if your neck snaps with the punches. They can be exhausting and I mean that in the best sense of the word.

Beyond seeing a Turkish Bruce Lee, this also proves that Turkish filmmakers care about copyright about as much as Godfrey Ho. This has music from Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars, Enter the Dragon and, perhaps most incredibly, Suspiria.

Nearly every country in the world has created their own Bruce Lee. Yes, it took Turkey way longer than nearly every other place in the world, but let’s give them credit for this, a movie where a man throws what appears to be actual dynamite at other people while the camera keeps rolling.

Bülent has an abusive dad and Ali just has a mom and a dog. Well, he had a dog until a policeman shoots and kills it. They’re in the same school and become friends and bond over the alien that they meet, Badi, who completely seriously shoots smoke out of his penis at one point.

In a kids’ movie.

He also eats Turkish Treat instead of Reese’s Pieces and looks through a porn mag, so…I wonder how much of E.T. that director Zafer Par and writer Baris Pirhasan saw before they made this. Probably just as much as Müjdat Gezen when he directed and wrote Homoti.

The craziest. thing is that Badi gives multiple heart attacks to humans both good and bad who are so overwhelmed by his appearance that their hearts literally stop working. The scene where he causes a teacher to have cardiac arrest is played for comedy, just after his appearance upsets a janitor so much that he falls down the steps to possibly his death.

Bülent and Ali give inflammatory speeches to the local kids, who take over an amusement park so Badi can use a Ferris wheel as an antenna to, well, phone home. When the villagers come with torches, along with cops, the kids put on masks and start throwing smoke bombs at adults — this movie is absolutely wild as it has kids rioting in the streets — and help Bodi get back home.

It’s…something.

You can watch this on the Internet Archive.

Korkusuz is also known as Rampage and Fearless, is the second movie that director Çetin İnanç made that follows the blueprint of Rambo: First Blood Part II. Starring bodybuilder Serdar Kebapçılar as Serdar, this has some pretty realistic looking locations and weapons, thanks to the movie being filmed in a real commando camp in Foça. I say realistic except for the rocket launcher, which is made of wood and painted.

Serdar is on an undercover mission to destroy the terrorist element in Turkey. He saves the life of the leader of the terrorists’ brother. Ziya is at least a good enough leader to not believe that this man who came out of nowhere and can’t be cut by knives isn’t a government agent, so he’s waiting to turn on him. He even buries him in mud up to his neck and hits him with a hose of water at one point, but as we all know, Serdar is going to end this guy before the end of the film.

Serdar also was in Kara Simsek, which is Rocky inspired; Intikamci (The Avenger) which has elements of Road Warrior and also has Commando as one of its titles and Asi Kabadayi, which is called Turkish Wolverine despite the fact that it was made in 1986 and the only tie to the Canadian superhero is that Serdar has a metallic spiked glove that also has claws and shoots arrows, which Weapon X cannot do.

*The other is Vahşi Kan (Wild Blood). That movie has Cuneyt Arkin and zombies in it, so guess which one I like more?

Obviously, Dracula in Istanbul is a Turkish version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It’s based on Ali Riza Seyfi’s Kazıklı Voyvoda (Impaler Voivode), which is nearly a translation of the Stoker book the Mina Harker analogue being a showgirl named Güzin.

It’s also the first Dracula movie to explicitly show his fangs and also the first film to link Dracula with Vlad the Impaler.

A lawyer named Azmi travels to Romania for real estate business with Count Dracula, who is feared by everyone who hears his name. Much like the Universal adaption, Dracula welcomes him to his castle and even says the line, “Listen to them— the children of the night!” as wolves howl. Azmi is attacked by vampiric women, watches the Count scale down the walls of his castle and even empties his gun into the man himself with no reaction before he runs.

His wife Güzin is awaiting his return when she sees four men carrying a coffin filled with dirt from Romania. Dracula soon has his way with her best friend Sadan, eventually turning Sadan and giving her mother a heart attack. Where this film differs somewhat from the expected story is that it seems like garlic plays more of a role in stopping the vampire. That’s because this was made in an Islamic country where crucifixes wouldn’t make sense.

Directed by Mehmet Muhtar, who wrote the screenplay with Turgut Demirag and Ümit Deniz, this has some incredibly ingenious ways of getting effects, like thirty crew members chainsmoking to create fog.

You can learn more about this movie from the always incredible Deja View. You can also purchase a digital version of the film here.

The joy of Antonio Margheriti’s Raiders of the Lost Ark remixes — you can add The Ark of the Sun God and Jungle Raiders to this film — is that you get sequels without waiting for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Starring David Warbeck as Bob Jackson, an American soldier who is hired by British Captain David Franks (John Steiner) to make another try at finding the Golden Cobra, an artifact he almost got a year ago. Jackson has been thinking about another mission since then, as well as the gorgeous non-native woman who somehow was living amongst the tribe of Awoks. No, not Ewoks. Awoks. She saved his life as she was able to command the cannibal tribe, who follow her like a goddess.

But then he meets her twin sister (they’re both played by Almanta Suska from The New York Ripper). She and her uncle Greenwalter (Luciano Pigozzi, as always showing up in a Margheriti movie) have been trying to find her for years and Jackson seems like the best bet.

You know, I’m all for the Philippine jungle being used to great effect in Italian movies, as well as Margheriti’s great use of budget, miniatures and effects. There’s an entire room of cobras and a dummy drop to end the film!

Writers Gianfranco Couyoumdjian (The Last Hunter, The Last Blood, Code Name: Wild Geese) and Tito Carpi (Alien from the Deep, Atlantis Interceptors, Marta) have the Italian movie magic language to make this movie sing. As far as I’m concerned, this crew could have made twenty of these movie serial style movies, particularly when they include scenes where a crazed cult leader interrupts a slide show presentation. Also: Warbeck and Steiner are a fabulous adventure team and their dialogue is sparkling.

Aatank means Terror but what you may think it means when you see the poster for this Bollywood movie is Jaws. Directed by Prem Lalwani and Desh Mukherjee and written by Sachin Bhowmick, the truth is that sharks are just part of this movie.

Jesu (Dharmendra) and Peter (Vinod Mehra) are childhood friends who have become fishermen. Their entire town is run by organized crime figure Alphonso (Amjad Khan, who died during the time this was filmed in the 80s and released in the mid-90s, so his voice is dubbed). Whenever someone sees a little bit of success like when the fishermen find pearls, that fortune eventually goes to Alphonso. And when the gangster overfishes the ocean for those pearls, a man-eating shark is disturbed enough to start eating his divers.

Jesu is the only person willing to stand up to Alphonso. But even he can’t stop what happens next. Peter gets married to Suzy D’Silva and after the ceremony, he and his wife start to consummate their marriage on the beach. And that’s where, nearly an hour into this movie, the shark does what sharks do in movies. As Peter passes out on the beach, drunk from his wedding night, his bride is devoured by a shark that was paying attention to Jaws: The Revenge and roars like a lion.

Peter goes to get revenge and then, as you can expect yet again, is also bitten into pieces. I mean, just look at this shark. It’s nearly a megalodon. At the same time, the government has finally cracked down on Alphonso and his men, so their getaway by helicopter seems to be cosplaying one of the best moments of Jaws 2. Or The Last Shark.

At other times, the shark sounds like Godzilla. I love that choice, I also adore the miniature ships being tossed around on the waves, challenging The Ghost Galleon for realism. The shark attack scenes are also completely wild, mixing quick cuts, multiple looks and seemingly an endless array of colors and angles.

Aatank at times may not seem like it’s the shark movie you’re looking for, but be patient. It gets pretty amazing before it’s all over.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Altin Çocuk means Golden Boy, who is the name of the superspy played by Goksel Arsoy. His mission? Stop Demetrius (Altan Gunbay), a supervillain who plans to destroy Turkey by firing missiles into Istanbul’s biggest nuclear reactor. Golden Boy was also Arsoy’s nickname, so this is his show. He also produced it.

This even gets the James Bond formula down so well that it starts with credits over a gorgeous woman and has an action scene before the main story, as an evil spy named The Wolf rises from the waves and tries to kill our hero with a speargun. But wait — it turns out that The Wolf was actually wearing a Golden Boy disguise and the killer is our hero. Hit the strip club sounding music and we’re off to the Eurospy — err, Turkspy? — action.

They even shot some of the opening in London to give this a more continental air. We get to see Golden Boy drive a sportscar and win over some British ladies before we get down to the actual spy intrigue. But once he gets back to Turkey, he learns that his fellow agent S-99 has been killed and starts to investigate. He also meets a capable female (Sevda Nur) who fights by his side for the rest of the movie.

Directed by Memduh Un, this even has an ending where Golden Boy and his female friend SCUBA into Demetrius’ underwater lair just like Thunderball.

Golden Boy would return in Altin Çocuk Beyrut’ta (Golden Boy in Beirut).

Made in Indonesia two years after Hellraiser by director Susilo S.W.D. and writer Djoko S. Koesdiman, this remake remix ripoff follows the same beats as the original, but has a heart and energy that makes you love it. While later sequels seemed to not even be about the Cenobites — and often weren’t as they were films that started as other stories and had the Lament Configuration shoved in — and the recent film that has none of the lunatic joy and sexiness of the first two or three movies, it seems like everyone is having a blast making this.

Nadia — who is Kristy — has a bad relationship with her recently widowed father Bramasto — Larry — who has married an evil stepmother named Astria or Julia, as we know her in the Clive Barker-directed inspiration. Astria has a secret, as she slept with Bramasto’s brother Lukito — Frank — before her husband and the affair has continued beyond his death, as she’s now part of his occult rituals from beyond the grave.

https://singyourwayhome.tumblr.com/post/40142742220

The sex has been toned down, as you can imagine with this being made in a highly Muslim country, and the effects and Cenobites do their own thing. The Lament Configuration looks like a vegetable with a strange face in it, the Cenobites appear to be zombies in latex masks joined by a pretty decent female follower of Leviathan.

The effects are pretty fun, too. They often take the form of puddles of blood with eyes in them, which is kind of scary when you think long enough about it. Frank, I mean, Lukito’s transformation is also pretty close to the real thing.

You can get this on DVD from Sloppy Second Sales.