I have just finished watching the 1982 Turkish movie The Man Who Saves The World (a.k.a Turkish Star Wars) and I am appalled. This movie is so bad that it has an international cult following. I now understand why.
An evil wizard wants to conquer the earth and two courageous Turks try to stop him. A big wooden sword and a brain in a box are key elements in the magnificent plot. The space battles are made by using footage from Star Wars, but it is stretched (anamorphic) so that the death star looks like an egg instead of a moon. Most of the action sequences are set to the music of Indiana Jones and the monsters are made of toilet paper or red plush. Also, there’s a short lecture on Islam thrown into the middle of it all!
The whole movie with English subtitles is available on Google Video. Beware, watching this movie is painful!
Personally, I think it’s quite a good film, though definitely not in the traditional sense. I found it very fun to watch -- especially with friends. It’s an absolutely wonderfull film to watch with a bunch of other people. As we watched it we frequently pointed out absurdities that someone else had missed -- for example, that the earth is alternately described as having been blasted to smithereens, protected by an energy shield of human brains or split up by a cosmic ray into several pieces (apparently our heroes are on one of these “pieces”). Did you notice how the evil leader contradicts himself by alternately saying that he wants to conquer the Earth/destroy the Earth? And who could forget that priceless ending sequence, where he’s shown being cut in half by blacking out half the screen... except that both sides of his face have noses! Or that big, blue robot that does nothing but stumble around... or those random monster faces that pop up on the screen for no reason in the beginning when they’re riding on horses. And of course, that final battle scene is epic... off-screen trampolines being used left and right, lots of heads being chopped off...
Frankly, I think that any film that is that much fun to watch cannot really be called a bad film. 🙂
Yes, it was fun to watch, but it hurt so bad! Especially the constant cutting monsters with his hands, and the two halves of the wizard at the end was just too much. It was so bad that at first I didn’t even believe it was supposed to be two halves.