J.C. Maçek III The World's Greatest Critic!

Welcome back to WorldsGreatestCritic.com's annual holiday tradition of the Christmas Turkey. Five years ago for the 2009 Turkey I presented, resented and reviewed a steaming heap of crap known as 3 Dev Adam.

3 Dev Adam, for those of you who don't know, is a horrible piece of "Super Hero Cinema" (and I use both terms VERY lightly) that featured a super-villainous Spider-Man battling against a heroic (but shield-devoid) Captain America who has teamed up with the masked Mexican wrestler Santo to battle the ridiculously misunderstood menace. Yes, it is every bit as bad as it sounds!

So, seriously, folks, what country could possibly have produced such a horrible blight on the silver face of cinema? Certainly the USA would be out considering the unauthorized use of the Marvel Comics characters (in such an atrocious and poorly realized way). Mexico? That would stand to reason considering the involvement of Santo. Nope. Santo's appearance was just as unauthorized and the masked Luchadore was portrayed by an imposter (badly).

So what nation could have produced a Turkey this foul AND fowl? Elementary my dear readers... "The Republic of Turkey"! They really seem to want to earn their country's name AND their national identity.

And now, to further whet your Turkey Cravin' appetite, I present to you the 2014 Christmas Turkey, stale from the oven. It's called "Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam" which translates to something like "The Man Who Saves The World, however, on THIS planet it is more commonly known as Turkish Star Wars because it shamelessly rips off the music, special effects and entire outer space sequences from 1977's Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope!

Yes, yes, folks, not only is Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam further proof that nobody makes a Turkey quite like Turkey, it also has the curious distinction of proving that Turkish Cinema failed to improve in the nine years after 3 Dev Adam and, in fact, had gotten much, much worse, much more blatant in its rip offs and even less coherent.

The film is completely incoherent and ridiculous. Even in the sequences that are mashups of varied scenes from Star Wars the scenes make no sense thanks to the horrible, Cuisinart-style editing. The chop job is so damned bad that it's simply impossible to tell who is who and what ship is firing upon what ship and how anything makes any sense at all.

There's a Death Star that does indeed blow up a planet in a dramatic moment (literally the same stolen Alderaan scene from the '77 flick), but because the planet all of the action takes place on seems to be blissfully unmarked by this tragedy, the destroyed globe seems to be a completely random and remote planet with no bearing on the story. We have Stormtroopers firing on Tie Fighters (from indoors) and X-Wings firing on the Millennium Falcon for no apparent reason whatsoever.

Amid this chaos we are lamely introduced to our two main "characters" (another term I use loosely) in the form of Murat (Cüneyt Arkin, who also is credited as having written the - ha, ha, ha - "screenplay" for this seat stain) and Ali (Aytekin Akkaya, who previously - and poorly - portrayed Captain America in 3 Dev Adam). When I say we are "introduced" to these clowns, what we actually see is each "actor" in a lame crash helmet sitting in front of a movie screen which displays the stolen and badly edited Star Wars space scenes and mumbling about them. I could have been fooled into thinking I was watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 were it not for the fact that the morons were facing the audience instead of the screen behind them. Yes, these guys are supposedly pilots in the space battle, though they look like they've just been darted with 78 CCs of Novocain.

This is made somewhat clear (note: this is the closest thing to clear in the entire film) when we find out that the despondent duo are now stranded on a desert planet due to a shipwreck that we never, ever, ever see.

Up until this point, as the nickname "Turkish Star Wars" might imply, we have mostly been faced with stolen music and scenes from Star Wars itself, however very soon the John Williams Star Wars themes are replaced by the John Williams Raiders of the Lost Ark music which plays incessantly throughout the rest of the film (and not always at appropriate times).

To be fair (and accurate), it's not only Star Wars and Raiders that the Turks have sacked in their pilfering crusade. No, we soon also are faced with the disco version of the Battlestar Galactica theme as well as several directly lifted dialogue cues from that show's Cylon Centurions. Scenes from The Magic Sword and Sodom and Gomorrah are lifted wholesale and stolen moments, sounds and music cues can also be heard from Superman, Flash Gordon, Godzilla, Moonraker, Ben-Hur, Planet of the Apes, Silent Running, Moses the Lawgiver, The Black Hole and The Six Million Dollar Man. There are even stolen clips from Soviet and US rocket launches recorded directly from the News. No, these don't look anything like the actual ships from Star Wars, but absolutely nothing in this movie matches any other given scene, so who gives a fuck anyway, right?

Let me be even more clear here... If the stolen moments were excised and the music were all original and the editing was cleaner... Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam would still suck elephant ass through a sewer grate in Guam!

Our Emperor/ Vader/ Ming-esque main villain looks like a gay Kabuki theater escapee with a corrugated cardboard mask with spikes all over it. His minions are partially constituted by a legion of Cylon rip offs that look like something either out of the worst Cosplay convention of all time or a high school production of R.U.R. - Rossums Universal Robots!

The "Creatures" on the planet are hilariously bad. We're talking about assholes in rubber Halloween masks popping up around boulders with "BOINGGGGG!" sounds accompanying them. When the two forlorn idiots (whom we are somehow meant to identify with) visit the Creature Cantina from Star Wars (complete with stolen music from that scene) it is hilarious how bad the match is. As displeased as Uncle George was in the Cantina scene, when you see the stolen Star Wars bits and they immediately flip to the bad Turkish costumes and masks, it's impossible not to laugh. That is until shit gets even funnier when a bunch of jackasses in furry costumes of multiple colors arrive to dick around with our "Hero" Murat.

Okay, I'm not even done yet... "Turkish Star Wars" seems to have been made with the idea that ANY costume would be acceptable and might even "improve" the movie. This doesn't matter how bad, how cheap "Halloween", how easy it is to see the seams and zippers in the "Aliens'" flesh and fur, where the rubber mask ends and the actors neck begins or how incongruous these things might be for a scene. Is Murat fighting a legion of cheap cosplay Cylons or a gaggle of British Red Coats with poorly realized Spanish Conquistador helmets on? What about the hairy monster idiots? Check it out... ZOMBIES! And look at those jerks over there! What are they? Toilet Paper MUMMIES? NO SHIT? Also we have fat guys in "skeleton" costumes with helmets on... that makes ZERO sense. And then there's the racist caricature of a Japanese Samurai and that rubber devil mask, both of which Arkin must've picked up in a second hand costume shop for kids.

What's worse, the "Director" (if you can call him that), a douche named Çetin Inanç, often has all of these illogically dressed "villains" on screen at the same time, acting like fools and humiliating their family names (even with the bad masks on). It's as if he simply yelled "Okay, everybody run into frame now and FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, would you all PLEASE ACT SILLY!"

And they do. Meanwhile Arkin, as Murat, simply bounces around through the melee (on a trampoline that is none-too-cleverly hidden) and kills them with careless ease. This includes breaking them in half, tearing their heads off, kicking his boot through them and punching his fist through them without significantly messing his hair up more than it already was.

You know there are a fuckload of movies that are so damned bad they're funny, but Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam goes from bad to funny to infuriating to mind-numbing to terrible to funny again and then rinses and repeats over and over again until the eye-gouging credits roll... over more stolen music.

So, I can smell you asking, is there a PLOT to this thing? It's almost cute how Arkin vainly took stabs at a plot. The story is essentially a series of weak ligaments that tie together silly action scenes in which he can show off his sub-Mighty Morphin Power Rangers martial arts skills. Yeah, I compared 3 Dev Adam to Power Rangers and found it sorely lacking even against that hated show. The thing is, if Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam studied real hard and tried a thousand times to improve itself, it might merely aspire to suck as much as Power Rangers in its wildest, wettest dreams.

Murat falls in some tepid, detached parody of "love" with a blonde named Bilgin'in Kizi (Füsun Uçar) who introduces him to a decrepit religious leader who shows him around his mosque and gives him a lecture on Islam (not kidding). He then sends Murat to hunt for a hidden Christian Church where he must steal a magic sword.

In that the makers of "Turkish Star Wars" hadn't the budget to fabricate (or even steal the footage of) a lightsaber, the "sword" appears to be made of papier-mâché and cardboard, then spray painted gold. It also has large triangular spikes jutting from both sides of the blade, possibly to lamely simulate the glow of a laser sword or... resemble a lightning bolt or... I don't even know, man, it makes no sense. But everybody seems to want this damned sword, possibly because as incredibly cheap as it really is, the damned thing does manage to make stolen lightsaber sounds when he waves it around limply.

In order to retrieve this stupid "artifact" as well as the golden human brain(!) that goes with it (I wish I was kidding), Murat must also do battle with two golden statues... that are actually a couple of guys in vinyl suits and hoods (also spray-painted gold) with visible zippers up their backs). He easily defeats both of these cornballs, possibly because the hoods have no eye-holes. Yes, it's safe to laugh now.

My favorite part is when (spoiler warning) Murat gets fed up with the entire movie and sets a paper fire in a trash can in order to "melt" the sword and the brain (they had to get a "brain" into this film somehow) so that he can... dip his hands into the molten metal and come out with a pair of silly and inflexible plastic gloves (spray-painted gold, of course) which allow him to basically do exactly the same feats he did before. Although we never actually see him step into the bucket, his boots turn gold, too... That is when the editors use the right footage. Watch how often he loses the gloves and boots in the space of a single minute of screentime.

And it goes on like that without getting any better at ALL! Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam is possibly the ONLY film I've ever sat through that is both a snooze-fest and a laugh-fest at the same time. You might laugh in your sleep, kids!

But am I missing the point? Could this stringy-ass bird of wretched Ottoman Celluloid really just be harmless and "for kids"? Why take that away from Turkish Children? After all, wasn't Santa Claus Conquers The Martians actually a piece of harmless, silly fun, regardless of how bad it was?

Sure... but Santa Claus Conquers the Martians also didn't steal the lion's share of its music, effects, sounds and even story from vastly superior films. Much like 3 Dev Adam, Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam pilfers the intellectual property of its betters in the attempt to easily make a film approaching a level just beneath that of TV's Jason Of Star Command and fails badly at that.

Want to judge for yourself? I encourage you to... it's free (being impossible to copyright, even in Turkey) to view on the Internet Archive. Click HERE to check it out, but don't say I didn't warn you.

While I've no doubt that the Cinema of Turkey is no longer (and possibly never was) entirely comprised of Turkeys, there is no doubt that Filmic Dogs are a Turkish Tradition. While I've delved back into the Ottoman Breach for this film (after barely surviving 3 Dev Adam) please note, these are not merely two of a kind. Also available out there somewhere are Turkish Star Trek, Turkish Wizard of Oz and Turkish Exorcist and many many more. Each of these Turkish Delights are potential Christmas Turkey fodder for the future.

Much like any of these terrible movies, Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam qualifies for the dubious title of "Istanbullshit"! You'll definitely laugh, but you'll likely also hurl when you sit down to watch Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam the gamey Turkish DOG! Don't forget, kids, on WorldsGreatestCritic.com a bad movie is still a Turkey on Christmas or any other day, but let's not forget that even the 2014 Christmas Turkey is a DOG on WorldsGreatestCritic.com! So belly up and munch lunch, True Believers!

To add just one more layer of insult to injury here, I should probably mention the film company that made this smudge of smegma was actually named Kunt Film. Once again, loyal readers, this is NOT a joke... Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam really was made by a produciton house called "Kunt Film". Still hungry? I'm not.

See you in the next reel!