I make no allusions about my passion for Superman. I love the character, I’ve followed him since I was five, and I’ve seen everything I could get my hands on involving him. I even brag to people about it and gladly welcome their mocking. Most recently I was able to grab a copy of “Turkish Superman” a cult classic that has managed to remain an underground joke among movie collectors for decades since its release. A cinematic embarrassment up and down, it’s tough to really hate this when you consider all the quirks behind the production.
Like Roger Corman’s version of “Fantastic Four,” this is a movie that’s so grueling to sit through yet you can’t pry yourself away from it to end the pain. At a merciful hour long running time, “Turkish Superman” gets the entire mythos behind Superman wrong, and it’s quite a spectacle. I mean it’s about as good a movie as you can expect from a director named Kunt. For those not aware, Turkey has a bad habit of remaking hit American films. Rather than inventing their own ideas they take the ideas from America and basically remake them in to piss poor reproductions and just narrowly avoid lawsuits from studios in the states. Available online or through bootleg thanks to online stores, their films that have taken on “Star Wars,” “Rambo,” “E.T.,” and “Spider-Man” have become very well acclaimed cult films that are laughed at but admired for their audacity to risk being sued up the wazoo all to remake films for their country’s audience.
This is a film that’s impossible to really describe, but I’ll try my best. Tayfun Demir plays a young reporter named Tayfun, who, born out of the galaxy made of Christmas ornaments is sent to Earth to fulfill his destiny as Supermen. I’m not kidding, director Kunt literally begins the film explaining the origin of Krypton by panning in and zooming past a black sheet with various Christmas ornaments glimmering in the light. You can see the strings, and the fake glitter on them, and once he zooms in on Krypton you can see the dark blue ornament dangle and even shake by the motions of the camera. Tayfun is your average reporter donning painfully outdated glasses and a horrible spit curl who is bestowed a green gem one fateful day by his father Jor-El.
The man from the technologically advanced world of Krypton apparently failed to mention that the world lacked proper dental care because it’s most humorous to see Tayfun’s birth father missing all of his front teeth. Tayfun, we’re told, is a down home farm boy and resembling a forty year old is told by his dad that he is young and must go out in to the world. Here’s where it gets confusing: Tayfun’s dad tells him he wants to reveal something, Tayfun tells him he knows the secret, his dad marvels at his mind reading powers, and still insists on telling him the secret of his birth to which Tayfun glares surprised that he’s a super powered alien but not too shocked that he can read minds.
The rest of the film is basically a variation of Richard Donner’s Superman film with gaping plot holes and horrible acting, not to mention there are some rather surreal sequences that seem to be included just for the hell of it. In one instance Tayfun uses X-Ray vision on a woman dressed with a string bikini under her clothes and manages to faint out of excitement. The remainder of the story involves the “krypton stone” that can turn metals in to gold and the villains wanting to use it to their advantage unaware of Supermen’s interference and vulnerability to the cube-like stone, and there’s also Tayfun saving Alev (his Lois Lane) who gets in to trouble and never even wants to try to fight back when ensnared in a criminal plot.
The whole primary goal of the villains makes absolutely no sense but the movie is just so baffling you just have to sit and glare at its inanity. Thankfully Kunt spares us by trying to create his own Lex Luthor and just invents run of the mill thugs who are supposed to stop Tayfun and his super powers so they can turn toilet paper in to gold. You can’t not like a movie that has Supermen flying over the city using an obvious doll as a stunt double. On some morbid plane, this movie is a cult masterpiece. There’s a near impossibility that people will hate this. Is it bad? Most definitely. Is it a clear example of plagiarism? No doubt. Is it painful to sit through? Yes and no. On many levels it’s an entertaining little take on Superman with horrific production qualities that make it all the more watchable in the end. The folks in Turkey know how to churn out a damn good rip off, that’s for sure.