DIGG THIS ARTICLE. 1972, Turkey. Starring Yildirim Gencer, Kadir Inanir, Meral Zeren, Eva Bender. Directed by Mehmet Aslan. Buy it from Xploited Cinema.

(...how can you not love a film with that title?)

I haven't really seen many of his films, but Mehmet Aslan seems like my kind of director. I've seen a couple of his Tarkan movies, and Karaoglan Geliyor, and they're collectively packed with fight choreography, crazy stunts, cheap (if very mild) gore, and fun costumes and obviously wooden swords. Following what I've seen on posters for his other movies, and the description Onar films presents in the biographical extras, most of Aslan's films feature a healthy dose of manic violence, crazy stunts, and a generally progressive attitude toward the optionality of clothing. It's for movies like these that I own a DVD player.

As for Aslan's 1970 film Aska Susayanlar..., I should state up front that I'm not really a giallo connoisseur. Or, really, an avid watcher of non-supernatural murderer films in general. As such, I've never seen Sergio Martino's The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh--and I gather that Aslan's 1972 film pretty much adopted that film's plot, right down to finding leading characters who looked similar to the stars in the Martino film.

I've stopped thinking about these things as necessarily "ripoffs" because, particularly in the Turkish case, they were made for the domestic market, not infrequently using Turkish stars. The Turkish movie industry appears to have been a business just like any other such industry, sure, but it seems to me that there's more at stake in these films. Higher-budget productions from the U.S., Italy, etc., were flooding into smaller countries such as Turkey in the later 20th century, and I can only assume that the differences between international and domestic production values were obvious to Turkish cinemagoers. Turks seem to have cherished their stars, but certainly they also enjoyed a good foreign flick; sooner or later, someone would have to try remaking these foreign films with local stars, and in appropriate cases even translate Christianity into Islam or otherwise make the film more culturally applicable to its new context. "Ripoff" suggests a lack of creativity; these Turkish films seem to be more like adaptations.

As a side note, I've been openly critical before of the "let's remake Japanese films for American audiences" boom that occurred after the Ringu craze. I'm not recanting that. Hollywood was just cashing in on the popularity of foreign creativity in remaking Dark Water, and Ju-on, and whatever else they went and butchered. America has flooded its own cultural space with so many representations of its own conventions and obsessions and traditions on film that it's almost impossible these days to write a film that's not reflexive. The primary source of production was the primary source of consumption. By contrast, cinematic representations of Turkey have not historically traveled too far from ethnic Turks themselves, at home or abroad. Remaking a foreign giallo in 1970s Turkey seems like a way of assimilating some of that flood of foreign media (and its attendant foreign ideals). I don't want to succumb to an East/West or secular/Muslim dichotomy, but... I dunno, it seems like there's been a long history of tension in Turkey regarding what's viewed as Western-derived "secularism and the more gruesome or lascivious forms of free expression, versus Islam, which is seen as more traditional. Films like this are, I think, at least partly an attempt to make some of this foreign glamour more reachable.

Or it seems that way to me, anyway. But back to the actual movie... The basic plot here is that a rich and recently-married woman knows someone who's a serial murderer, but she doesn't know who it is. She is being tormented by a man who once assaulted her, but the murderer might also be her husband, or her best friend's lover who seems to have a thing for her.

Plot summary would be a waste here, but I can say that there are some effective scenes in the film (my favorite might be the parking lot chase), and the cinematography is at times much more refined than in some other Turkish outings of the same period. That said, at other times this film lacks some of the restraint and refinement of the better giallo outings from Italy (or at least those that I've seen), and adds in a very manic Turkish element instead.

Or to put it another way, sometimes the gloved killer is artfully hidden and sinister, and at other times he just leaps in from offscreen to startle his next victim (in one case, in the middle of a very open field). The gore is restrained from an Italian perspective, but still nicely cheap and copious from my perspective, and the film ends with an old-fashioned round of fisticuffs, because I think Mehmet Aslan probably didn't know how to make a movie without a good, Turkish fight scene, complete with dubious flailing kicks and karate chops that send the villains flying. Our leading man here is no Cuneyt Arkin, but he does a worthy job nonetheless.

Onar films released this film as a double feature with The Dead Don't Talk; I think I personally preferred the latter film, but other reviewers seem to have preferred Thirsty for Love, Sex, and Murder. So be it. These two films were saved from the brink of oblivion by the valiant efforts of Onar Films, and regardless of which you like better, they're both well worth watching.

Labels: Country: Turkey, Horror: Giallo, Turkish Horror Double Bill, Year: 1972