Turkish Delight?

Sweet Jesus!  I really do need to sop watching all these low rent movies.  It's becoming an addiction, I fear.  I mean, this last weekend not only did I find myself watching a direct to video action film starring Scott Adkins, but also a Turkish superhero film.  Now, to be fair, Scott Adkins is actually one of the better British ex-pat martial arts movie stars, (he's a decent actor who is safe to give relatively complex dialogue to), and his (mainly) direct to video starring vehicles are among the better of their kind, but I can't help but feel I'm on a slippery slope here.  (Actually, the film in question - Eliminators (2016) - was very slickly made and even mustered James Cosmo as chief villain and ex-wrestler Wade Barrett as chief henchman.  It was also novel in that Adkins, who usually plays Brits in US set films, played an American in London.  Although one has to question why an ex-federal agent in witness protection would be re-located in the UK where their accent would stick out like a sore thumb).  But Turkish superhero and fantasy movies are something else altogether - incredibly poor production values and performances, fuzzily shot on cheap grainy stock with terrible sound quality.  If the camera manages to stay pointed in roughly the direction of the action, then that's considered good direction.  The most notable thing about these movies, though, is that the laxity of Turkey's copyright laws means that they frequently feature the unlicensed use of copyrighted characters and music.

The 1973 film I watched is often referred to by 'fans' as Turkish Spiderman, as it features a character who dresses in a Spiderman-type costume (albeit with green instead of blue on the body) sporting a Spiderman symbol.  This character, however, is actually the villain, not the hero and is nowhere in the sub-titled version I saw referred to as 'Spiderman', but rather simply 'The Spider'.  That said, Captain America does feature as one of the heroes, in full costume, (minus the wings on his cowl and his shield, much in the manner the character was depicted in Republic's 1944 Captain America serial), along with famed masked Mexican wrestler and star of numerous movies, Santo.  (Not the real Santo obviously, but an unlicensed impersonator).  They rock up in Turkey to help the authorities smash a dangerous gang of international art thieves and counterfeiters led by 'The Spider'.  Much mayhem ensues.  Interestingly, 'The Spider' has none of his Marvel comics look-a-like's powers - he's just incredibly homicidal (he knifes people, strangles women in the bath and presides over the execution of a woman buried up to  her neck in sand using the spinning propeller of an outboard motor, for instance).  Oh, and he has an unexplained ability to create a duplicate of himself (in full costume) every time he is killed.  (There appears to be a limit to the number of times he can do this, as the climax sees Captain America keep killing them until no more appear).  Most of the soundtrack is pirated from John Barry's score for the then recently released Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever (1971), with a quick burst of part of William Walton's mainly unused score for The Battle of Britain (1969) over a fight sequence.  (For the record, the film is actually titled 3 Dev Adam (1973), which translates as 'Three Mighty Men)'.  

There are dozens of these Turkish knock offs out there, ripping off everything from Superman to Star Wars, taking in Rambo, Star Trek and many more along the way.  Just like the Italian exploitation film industry, Turkish film-makers in the seventies and eighties would seek to cash in on whatever the current Hollywood success was with locally made imitations, except with much lower budgets, none of the visual panache or imagination of the Italian films and no regard for copyright.  The end results are crude beyond belief, although intermittently entertaining, (mainly for their breath-taking disregard for copyright).  They are, pretty much, scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to schlock.  Which is why I find it worrying that I ended up watching one - has my need for low budget, low rent movie entertainment reached such addictive levels that normal schlock will no longer satisfy me?  Am I, like a drug addict, doomed to keep going for harder and harder stuff in a desperate search for a kick?  Where will it end? Watching marathons of Andy Milligan or Ted V Mikels films?  I mean, Jesus Franco is pretty mild compared to them, (he usually had a budget, no matter how microscopic, not to mention actual actors).  I know that, so far, it's only one Turkish superhero knock off, but I fear that it could be the beginning of a slippery slope.