3 Dev Adam (1973)

There is a long and noble tradition in Turkish cinema of churning out knock-offs of Hollywood favourites with little care for subtlety, logic or copyright laws. 3 Dev Adam (which translates as 3 Giant Men) continues this, taking two beloved Marvel characters and a Mexican wrestling legend and crapping on their characters reputations from a great height.

The plot is in there somewhere. It's something to do with antiques or counterfeit US dollars. Spiderman is not your friendly neighbourhood web-slinger.

Instead he is a childish but a psychotic gangster, who gleefully buries a woman up to her neck in sand and then decapitates her with a speedboat propeller. Captain America, who has no shield but does have a girlfriend has come to Turkey with legendary Mexican wrestler Santo to sort Spidey out.

Who cares about the plot though. What you get is 90 minutes of war speed delirious nonsense, with a constant energy that means the film never gets dull. At one point, Spiderman tortures an enemy with a rodent oriented headset straight out of 1984, expect that instead of rats he uses a cute guinea pig. Oh, and Santo's favourite filing system for incriminating documents is to shove them down the front of his spandex trousers. He seems to do this a lot.

Things come to a head at the end where it turns out Spiderman can clone himself, or he has a lot of lookalikes lying around. I forget which. My brain hurts. It's a film where hairy men in stag do superhero costumes beat and grope each other into submission. Sometimes you don't need to over analyse things.

Seytan (1974)

Taking pity on Turkish cinemagoers in the 1970s that wanted to see William Friedkins's The Exorcist, but were unable, due to the unavailability of any prints, some enterprising producers dashed off a largely identical work to fill the gap. Unfortunately, Seytan dilutes the elements that make the original work, while adding little new, leaving an end product that is not horrifying, thought provoking, disgusting, or even that much fun to watch certainly compared to other rip-offs from that country.

The filmmakers stick rigidly to the plot and characters of the original, giving us not just a scene-for-scene remake, but in places shot-for-shot and word-for-word (and note for note, as Tubular Bells crops up several times, albeit wonky and badly dubbed). However, as 99.8% of the Turkish population identifies as Muslim it is perhaps not surprising that the major change is that the Catholic imagery and rituals have been removed and replaced largely, although not entirely, with Islamic equivalents.

However, the one major change to one of the lead characters comes from removing not replacing the religious element. In The Exorcist, Father Damian Karrass is both a psychiatrist and a priest, losing his faith and wracked with guilt over his inability to do anything to help his mother and her deteriorating health. In Seytan, the Karrass character, Tugrul Bilge, although also guilt ridden over his senile mother (a lifetime of poorly paid academia, rather than a lucrative career in medicine, has left him unable to afford decent health care) is a completely secular person, and without the spiritual crisis, he just comes across as a bit of a loser.

The other major change is that most of the obscene and blasphemous language and imagery has also been removed or altered (the infamous scene with the crucifix is replaced with one involving some sort of Devil shaped knife). This strips out another layer of interest from the source material, where the foul-mouthed demon contrasted with the quiet dignity of the priest.

Beyond the changes, the main problem is that is simply not as well made as the original. It was churned out in a cheap and hurried fashion and it shows, with the flat cinematography lacking the atmospheric touches of The Exorcist. The acting is melodramatic, hammy, scenery chewing stuff, with some, presumably, unintended comedy, such as the scene where the Doctor is hit in the groin being reminiscent of a Benny Hill sketch.
 

The terrible special effects do not help either, although it is hard to pick a low point with so many to choose. There is the papier-mâché demon, or the bouncing bed, where it is blatantly obvious that it is a group of people underneath the bed pushing it up and down. There are the scenes where the girl is supposed to be having electro shock therapy, which consists of what appear to be mini jack hammers pounding into either side of her skull while she gurns, mugs and rolls her eyes. There is also their take on the 180-degree head spin too, but in fairness, that looked pretty silly in the original, and the one here is not much worse.

These provide some cheap laughs, and much needed sparks of energy, but are too few and far between to save Seytan from being a largely grim and dull watch.