Todd from Die Danger Die Die Kill is responsible for many of the best reviews on Teleport City, including reviews of two East German science fiction films produced by DEFA. I got a chance to return the favor (a little) by writing about a DEFA science fiction film, Eolomea, for his site.

You know what I like about the world? I like… no, I love… that there are at least two films that vie for the title of “the Turkish Rambo.” One of them, Vahsi Kan, stars familiar face Cuneyt Arkin and has a cameo by, of all things, a gang of zombies. The second, Korkusuz, stars a perpetually confused bodybuilder named Serdar as Serdar. Both of them come from the same fertile mind: Turkish director-producer-one man exploitation machine Cetin Inanc. If there are additional claimants to the throne of “Turkish Rambo,” I hope they soon make themselves known, because as far as I’m concerned, a proliferation of Turkish Rambo‘s cannot possibly be anything other than good. Of course, it would be better if we lived in a world where both Korkusuz and Vahsi Kan were readily available on DVD, but then, it’d also be better if we lived in a world where Filiz Tacbas, Olga Kurylenko, and Monica Bellucci all dropped by my apartment one day to tell me they could no longer keep their lust for me under control… oh, and also they didn’t mind each other’s company. Barring that happening, we at least have Korkusuz on DVD. And Vahsi Kan? Well, you can watch it on YouTube.

But before we dive headlong into the world of Korkusuz, and before we wander any deeper into my grand fantasies regarding assorted actresses (after all, I don’t want excessive talk on the matter make those who aren’t mentioned feel jealous), let’s take a moment to examine the life and times of Cetin Inanc. Put succinctly, Cetin Inanc is a mustache-sporting force of nature. Born in 1941, young Inanc seemed headed for a career in law until, one day, he decided to go into filmmaking instead. Among his first jobs was working with famed director Atif Yilmaz. Following in the footsteps of his mentor, Inanc directed a number of adventure films. But then he switched gears and became one of the leading creators of Turkish erotic films. When increased censorship made this career less than viable, he hopped genres once again, landing with both feet in the burgeoning world of action cinema, where he has existed comfortable for years.

Cetin (coincidentally, I think his first name is pronounced something close to “Cheatin’) Inanc finds his peers as a filmmaker in journeyman Italian exploitation director Antonio Margheriti and Filipino cult movie impresario Cirio Santiago. All three men (and their respective industries as a whole) showed a remarkable aptitude for picking up on a trend and throttling it mercilessly, making as many movies as possible until the high concept was withered and dry, at which time they would move on to the next trend. As such, all three men dabbled in multiple genres, but they seemed most at home within the confines of the action film. Margheriti and Santiago both seemed partial to war movies cut from the Rambo: First Blood Part II cloth. Inanc also showed a predilection toward such action, though he was equally partial to even more violent copies of violent 70s fare.

Outside of the small cadre of Turkish action cinema fans that has taken root in the United States, most people who would have ever seen anything for which Inanc was responsible would have seen Dunyayi kurtaran adam, known to many as The Man Who Saved the World, and known to many more still simply as “Turkish Star Wars.” Inanc had a long and fruitful collaboration with Turkish movie superstar Cuneyt Arkin, and The Man Who Saved the World caught the eye of people outside of Turkish film fandom for one obvious reason. Turkey has often found itself just remote enough to flagrantly violate international agreements regarding copyright and intellectual property with relatively little risk of the rights holders taking any sort of legal action. Similar to Hong Kong and Indian cinema, Turkish films would most commonly pilfer the scores to famous American films. And similar to Indian films in particular, they would also pilfer the plots, operating under the assumption that the average rural Turk would never get a chance to see, say, Star Wars, but he would get a chance to see a locally made knock-off. So these Turkish pop films became a thematic representation of more famous films, with the storytellers own ideas and opinions of what would play in rural Turkey being thrown into the mix.

With The Man Who Saved the World, Inanc took it a step further. Knowing that the risk of serious repercussions was remote, the crafty filmmaker didn’t stop with just stealing the score from Star Wars (as well as other musical cues, such as Raiders of the Lost Ark and the original Battlestar Galactica television series); he stole actual footage from the movie. Most notably, the climactic attack on the Death Star finds itself used in the opening scenes of The Man Who Saved the World, often with Cuneyt sitting in a fake cockpit while the footage is projected behind him as if he’s in the thick of the battle — never mind the fact that the battle raging behind him has been expertly edited to include cuts. It’s this sequence in particular that got the movie saddled with the “Turkish Star Wars” moniker, even though the remainder of the film bears little resemblance to the plot of Star Wars and is, instead, mostly a movie about Cuneyt tying boulders to his ankles and punching paper mache monsters in the face.

Although by far the best known of Inanc’s films here in the United States, The Man Who Saved the World represents a drop in the bucket of the man’s career as an exploitation giant. Most of his movies were action films, and no matter how violent the original may have been, Cetin Inanc never met a film that couldn’t be improved by adding more violence, sped-up kungfu fights, and explosions. Korkusuz is the first of his films I’ve seen that didn’t star Cuneyt Arkin, and it probably didn’t star him because Cuneyt had already appeared in Inanc’s other Rambo rip-off, Vahsi Kan. This time around, we have a guy named Serdar. Serdar was apparently a former competitive bodybuilder turned gym owner when he caught Inanc’s eye and agreed to sign on to do several pictures. This is the only Serdar film I’ve seen so far, but I would imagine that seeing one of his performances qualifies you well enough to judge the others. To summarize: when Serdar removes his shirt (or, more likely, has it violently ripped from his body), you understand why he was cast in a film. When he acts, you understand why his shirt gets ripped off so frequently.

In Korkusuz, he plays Serdar, a member of an elite military agency. I think it was supposed to be a surprise that Serdar was a government agent, but I can’t imagine too many people being surprised. It seems that a particularly scenic stretch of scrubby central Asian brushland is being ravaged by brigands. Their ability to pop up, stage a guerrilla attack, then melt back into the surrounding countryside frustrates government soldiers, so a plan is devised in which Serdar will be planted among bona fide members of the organization who have been captured, and lead them in an escape attempt while they are being transported by, for some reason I assume is mostly budgetary (the Turkish military being somewhat fairly advances and much feared — ask my Grandpa Harley about Turkish soldiers who made necklaces out of ears they cut off of captured German soldiers), a Winnebago camper. Having gained their trust by successfully leading the escape, Serdar is lead by his newfound compatriots to the secret mountain base of the brigand leader, played by Huseyin Peyda.

To draw parallels, seeing Huseyin Peyda as the villain in a Turkish action film is about as common as seeing Vic Diaz as a villain in a Filipino film, or Amrish Puri as a Bollywood villain. In fact, I like to think that whenever these guys appear in their respective movies as members of a vast and shadowy conspiracy, the other guys in their own movies are actually part of the same continuity. Thus, Amrish Puri’s Mogambo was probably on the phone at some point with Huseyin Peyda’s evil brigand Ziya, who had to reluctantly put Mogambo on hold when sadistic prison warden Vic Diaz called him to see what should be done with the scantily-clad female undercover agent he’d just thrown into prison. Of course, this veritable Legion of Doom (represented in the United States by Richard Lynch) can only be opposed by an equally impressive loose confederation of heroic commandos that would include Mithun Chakraborty, Cuneyt Arkin, Sho Kosugi, and Cynthia Rothrock.

En route to the brigand base, Serdar and his traveling companions pick up an unnamed but acceptably hot female traveling companion, because someone needs to end up in a rainstorm while wearing a thin, clingy dress, and no one wants to see hairy ol’ Osman Betin do such a thing. Thoughtfully, Cetin Inanc leaves clingy dress duties to former nude model Filiz Tacbas (actually, at the time, she was probably a current nude model). Her function in the movie, aside from being hot, is to… well, I guess it’s just to be hot. It’s not like Serdar needs her to inspire him to take down Ziya; he was going to do that anyway. And it’s not like he needs to have his soul saved or his faith restored. Although Serdar’s character, Serdar, is obviously modeled heavily on Rambo, he totally lacks the complexity of that character (yes, I said that). There is no crisis of conscience. Serdar didn’t come home from a war to find himself hated by an anti-war population. He wasn’t brutally hounded by Brian Dennehy until he finally had to jump off a cliff and break his fall by hitting the branches of a tree (something my elementary school friend Larry Becker once demonstrated for us when he was the only one who had seen First Blood… with predictably ambulance-summoning results). Serdar has never been betrayed. He loves Turkey, and he’s damn well going to complete his mission. Having the girl there to give weird speeches really serves little purpose other than to train the camera on a pretty girl. But I’m hardly going to complain to Cetin Inanc about that.

When they finally reach Ziya’s compound, the brigand chief is decidedly less enthusiastic about the arrival in their midst of this beefy outsider with no past. When one of the criminal’s who brought Serdar along — Ziya’s own brother, no less — vouches for the big guy, Ziya displays the limit of his trust in his brother by lashing him to a cross. The girl he throws to the mercies of a captive businessman (who is, quite obviously, another do-gooder undercover agent). And Serdar? Ziya buries him up to the neck in the mud. And here’s my favorite example of Serdar’s bizarre skill as an actor.

The best way I can think to describe the job Serdar the actor does is to liken him to an alien shape shifter who is struggling both to control his new human face and also comprehend how to express human emotion. While buried, Serdar is supposed to be expressing, I assume, the idea that “it is hot,” and later, “it is rainy.” But the thing he does with his face is just… I have no idea. It looks like he’s in the middle of suffering a stroke, and while his face is contorted by the experience, he’s also bored by it. All the while, Ziya keeps coming out to scream at poor Serdar, convinced by standard issue criminal paranoia that Serdar is an enemy. Finally, in order to prove allegiance, Serdar is ordered to deliver yet another rival criminal to Ziya’s compound. Ziya, of course, plans to kill Serdar once the mission is under way, which seems like a complicated way to go about killing a huge dude with a demonstrable skill for survival and handling a giant knife, especially when you previously had him buried to his neck in the mud. In a more complex film, one could attribute this to Ziya’s mounting psychosis, the feeling that everyone is out to get him somehow clouding his sound judgment. But I think, mostly, Inanc just needed a way to get Serdar out of the mud so we could move things on toward the finale, in which Serdar will tear around in a jeep for a while until it’s time to decimate Ziya’s forces by employing a knife, a Turkish commando force, and an RPG that goes “thoop” when fired.

The “thoop” is, admittedly, the product of the dubbing, but we can forgive them for it since I doubt I could have resisted doing the same, seeing as Serdar’s RPG launches without any smoke or fire and, instead, each rocket just sort of pops off as if weakly launched out of some child’s compressed-air pop gun. Looping in a big whooshing rocket launch sound would have been just as out of place. While learning that RPGs launch their ammo without emitting any smoke or flame, I also learned that the camps of Turkish terrorists are positively littered with RPGs lying about in random spots. Inside walls, behind barrels of gasoline, just out in the middle of the street — it’s like playing Contra (that’s Turkish Contra, sir). You never know where you will find a convenient rocket to shoot at stuntmen who will sometimes come running toward an explosion after it has already happened just so they can get in on the fun of hurling themselves over a fence or something.

For me, and for many readers of this site, describing something as “Turkish Rambo” rightfully sets up certain expectations that need to be met. Happily, Korkusuz delivers. The thing you have to remember about Turkish rip-offs is that they use the original as a jumping off point, and often quickly delve into their own mad plotting. For instance, Serdar is obviously modeled after Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo character, right down to the comically phallic big knife. But the movie itself in which Serdar moves in a dream-like daze is less a copy of any existing Rambo movie and more like, say, a fan fiction continuation. The unofficial further adventures of (hey, Rambo was in Afghanistan for a while, so I don’t see why he couldn’t have wandered over into Turkey for a bit on his way to Thailand), if you will. Vahsi Kan was the same way. Cuneyt Arkin has a Rambo bow and arrow, and a Rambo headband, but the movie itself is its own beast entirely. Thus, while pegging these films as “the Turkish whatever” may be useful as a cultural short-hand, but it rarely takes into account the full degree of weirdness these films possess. Calling The Man Who Saved the World the “Turkish Star Wars” hardly prepares you for the delirium that awaits (perhaps that’s for the best). Similarly, Korkusuz uses Rambo as inspiration but hardly feel compelled to ape its source material’s every step.

Judging the acting is somewhat moot. There is, unfortunately, no original language track, though in this case, it’s not a function of careless disregard on behalf of the company distributing Korkusuz in the United States. As we mentioned before, Turkish films quite enjoy stealing music from American movies. While this is usually of no consequence in Turkey itself, it makes releasing the films in the United States problematic for the would-be distributor who doesn’t want his ass sued off by the proper rights owners. So releasing such a movie requires that pretty much all the musical cues be replaced by something less… copyrighted. Under good circumstances, this isn’t terribly difficult, at least it’s no more difficult than composing a new score and replacing the old one (which, actually, is pretty complicated, but it’s at least something that can be done).

Unfortunately, Turkish films rarely come to us in “best of” circumstances. As Greek DVD label Onar learned, and now as US label Dark Maze knows as well, the “master” print for these films is usually just a VHS copy. Turkey has not shown great interest in preserving it’s cinematic culture, which means the chances of finding a good 35mm source for any of these films are almost zero. This also means that you are stuck not just with a copy of the movie that is often of questionable quality; it also means you are left with a flat audio track — one in which the dialogue, sound effects, and music are all combined into just the one recording, making separating them impossible. Thus, if you have to throw one part out (the music, in this case), the whole thing has to go with it. This means that there was no legal way for Dark Maze to include the original Turkish audio without risking the wrath of the gleefully litigious MPAA or RIAA, whoever more sue-y this week.

So they had to dubt he entire thing. Still, we can make some guesses as tot he quality of acting based on the evidence on screen and elsewhere. For instance, you don’t need to hear Serdar speak his own lines to guess what they would sound like. Anyone who ever made fun of Sylvester Stallone for being a terrible actor (You know what? He isn’t; he’s a limited actor, but within those limitations, is often pretty good) needs to rethink their standards after seeing Serdar. That said, there’s something charismatic in Serdar’s almost total lack of screen charisma. Maybe it’s because he seems like an idiot savant. You can’t help but root for him. By contrast, Huseyin Peyda I’ve seen many times before, and he always gives the exact same performance — which is exactly what he needs to do. Ziya, like pretty much all of Peyda’s villains, is a tornado of eye-bulging, cheek-puffing, scenery-chewing bravado. Earlier, I invoked the name of Amrish Puri, and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he and Huseyin Peyda both studied the art of cartoon villainy at the same academy (which is located in a strangely temperate valley between two unimaginably high Himalayan mountains; Vincent Price is the headmaster). That Huseyin Peyda knows to also augment his look with one of those pointy Van Dyke beards like Satan (or Vincent Price!) shows he is totally committed to being the best hammy villain Turkey for which Turkey could ever hope.

The rest of the cast is disposable. Filiz Tacbas is hot. She was the it girl for a while in Turkish exploitation and appeared alongside Serdar multiple times. She’s still active as an actress, appearing in occasional movies and more occasionally on Turkish television. She’s actually gotten remarkably hotter as she has aged. Osman Betin pops up as a heavy in some other Cetin Inanc films. He was a stuntman by trade, I think, and a former athlete, so when it comes time for a fight scene, it’s him and Serdar. They deliver the goods, too, in a fight that, like many Turkish action scenes, is crude and unpolished, bt never the less energetic and entertaining. The other henchmen are either workmanlike or have nothing to do but jump into the air when an explosion goes off. The rest of the army guys mostly sit behind or stand in front of desks and take phone calls. So I don’t think we lose too terribly much from the inability to hear the original Turkish audio track. Plus, with that track, you don’t get the “thoop.”

Serdar came and went in Turkish action cinema much like Sho Kosugi did in the United States (but without insisting that Kane and Shane Kosugi show up in every movie). After his contract with Cetin Inanc was up (which included a Turkish Rocky called Kara Simsek and a Turkish Road Warrior called Intikamci, which looks just awesome), Serdar went back to his gym. It seems that during his time in films, he remained pretty well grounded (he’s been married to the same woman, a Korean immigrant, since he was making movies), so the transition back into “civilian” life wasn’t overly jarring. These days, he still runs the gym and seems a genuinely amiable and easy-to-like guy. That’s probably why, despite the fact that his acting job in Korkusuz leaves something to be desired, his character is one you can get behind. That said, I assume that somewhere in his backyard garden, Serdar has a hidden radio. One day, while he’s out sunning himself or working out his lats, that radio will beep, and Serdar will jog over, pick up a pair of headphones, and hear Sho Kosugi on the other side. “Serdar, it’s Sho. We’re needed. Pick up Mithun on your way over.”

Serdar’s buff real-life son can then team up with Kane Kosugi to form sort of a junior league team.

Korkusuz isn’t the most insane example of Turkish filmmaking. At the time it came out, Turkish movie making was on the downswing. But it’s still a lot of fun and showcases the “anything goes” energy of Turkish action cinema that so endears them to jaded old coots like myself. Cetin Inanc made classic exploitation films for the classic exploitation reason: turning a profit. But what a film like Korkusuz shows is that the desire to turn a quick profit doesn’t necessarily mean that the movie doesn’t come at you with energy and fun. Surrounded as we are in 2009 by big budget movies that seem so cynical and treat their audience with an air of contempt, a movie like Korkusuz — while we can poke good-natured fun at its deficiencies — also comes as a welcome reminder of a time when a movie just wanted to show you a good time. If the people making it were cynical, if they thought we the consumer were rubes or marks, it doesn’t really come through in the final product. It just wants to entertain us, with a big muscular guy and a pop gun rocket launcher.

Release Year: 1986 | Country: Turkey | Starring: Serdar Kebabcilar, Osman Betin, Yilmaz Kurt, Togrul Meteer, Huseyin Peyda, Filiz Tacbas, Sumer Tilmac, Mehmet Ugur | Writer: Cetin Inanc | Director: Cetin Inanc | Cinematographer: Dincer Onal | Music: Jake Kaufman (US version) | Producer: Mehmet Karahafiz, Ed Glaser | Alternate Titles: Rampage, Fearless

Compared to the appellations given to the protagonists of other 1980s action films — the Exterminator, the Punisher, the Executioner — the Stabilizer sounds pretty benign. You’d almost think that he was given that name only because all of those others had already been taken. But then you learn that what the Stabilizer is in charge of stabilizing is the very balance between good and evil itself. And that, it turns out, is a job that involves an awful lot of exterminating, punishing, and executing.

But if that name was the result of The Stabilizer being late to the game, that might be explained by the fact that The Stabilizer is an Indonesian film, and that Indonesian exploitation filmmakers of its day were generally loathe to jump on any bandwagon until its moneymaking potential had been well proven. There is no word for “art” in Indonesia, after all (I totally just made that up), and if there was one thing that those filmmakers were interested in above all it was a return on investment, especially on the international market. This last caveat explains another trend in Indonesian genre films of the day; the practice of using Caucasian lead actors, which tended to make it easier to sell the movies to distributors outside of Asia.

Of course, I’m using the term “actors” very loosely in this context, because sheer Caucasian-ness, combined with a more or less pleasing appearance, tended to trump any other requirements where these filmmakers were concerned. This explains why, in H. Tjut Djalil’s Mystics in Bali, we were treated to the dead-eyed approximations of star Ilona Agathe Bastian, a convenient German tourist who was happy to extend her vacation on the producer’s dime — or Lady Terminator‘s Barbara Anne Constable, an Australian who at least looked good in leather and doubled her value by acting as the film’s makeup artist.

In keeping with this practice, The Stabilizer‘s star, Peter O’Brian, an English teacher from New Zealand, was literally plucked off the streets of Jakarta by talent scouts for Raam, Dhamoo, and Gobind Pujabi, the brothers behind the production company Parkit Films. As he tells it, after a demonstration of his fighting skills, O’Brian immediately found himself under contract to the brothers and beginning work on his starring debut, The Intruder. That film’s alternate title, Rambu, not only makes it the film equivalent of one of those Prado bags you can buy on Canal Street, but also makes very clear the type of stardom the Punjabis had in mind for O’Brian, acting ability or no.

And make no mistake about it; it’s impossible not to make fun of Peter O’Brian’s acting ability. His expressions range from stone-faced to just plain stoned, and when required to display an emotion of any greater intensity, it erupts inorganically like a Rage Face projected onto an Easter Island statue. At the same time, the fact that O’Brian had no pretensions about that ability — and, in fact, no ambitions to be an actor in the first place — leeches that mockery of schadenfreude. One also has to consider the impossible odds the man was up against, having been given dialog that even the most seasoned thespian couldn’t elevate above the risible, and then having his voice hastily dubbed over in a cartoonish American accent.

That said, it couldn’t be argued that O’Brian didn’t look the part, having all the bearing and stature of a well muscled, off-brand Stallone. Though if there’s one controversy that rages around him, it’s the question of which big-haired classic rock star he most resembles a bulked-up version of. I say Brian May, but others say the singer from REO Speedwagon, and they are also right. I think it is perhaps this combination of 80s iconography that he embodies that today makes O’Brian so ripe for cult appreciation, as if he were a living monument to all the most in-your-face signifiers of the MTV decade; a hair metal Rambo with an awesome super-mullet.

But more important than looks, O’Brian delivered in full upon the kinetic requirements at the heart of his movies, throwing himself into the many fights with palpable gusto and performing dangerous stunts that range here from driving a motorcycle through a wall to dropping a not inconsiderable distance from an airborne helicopter into the ocean below. The Punjabi brothers’ movies, after all, were not character driven affairs. And it is a marked departure from his debut that, in The Stabilizer, O’Brian’s character is at least given some kind of back story — whereas, in The Intruder, he was just a random guy who really hated crime who had a corresponding knack for coming upon it while aimlessly walking down the street.

In The Stabilizer, O’Brian is Peter Goldson, a globetrotting FBI agent who arrives in Indonesia with his sexy lady partner Sylvia Nash (Gillie Beanz) on a very special assignment, an assignment that will involve no end of motorcycle stunts and vaguely defined martial artistry. Of course, it’s never enough in these movies to see our hero leap a hog off a balcony into a guy’s face or hurl himself from a helicopter; we also have to hear testimonials from the other characters about what a badass he is — and when that hero is portrayed by an actor as characterologically inert as Peter O’Brian, that may be doubly necessary. And so we have Goldson’s friend and Indonesian counterpart “Captain Johnny” (Harry Capri) on hand to provide what would otherwise be the work of an unseen, stentorian narrator. What we are dealing with here, he says, are “the world’s best criminals, who are COMPLETELY capable of upsetting the balance between good and evil in the world.” When the no doubt closely watched instruments that measure such a delicate equilibrium tip into the red, what is needed is ” a man with the guts and ability to restore that balance”. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Peter Goldson.

The threat that Goldson is in country to stabilize in this case is the one posed by drug kingpin and all around shitty guy Greg Rainmaker, who has kidnapped a prominent scientist in the hope of gaining the secret of the high-tech Narcotics Detector he has invented. Every great villain has to have a great gimmick, and Rainmaker’s is the spikes on the bottoms of his shoes, which he uses to stomp foe and disappointing minion alike into a bloody pulp. Clearly, with Rainmaker, the makers of The Stabilizer, in their underachieving way, were going for a classic 007-style villain, which makes me wonder why they didn’t instead name him Goldencleat, or The Cleat Master, or something else more appropriately Bondian. Thundercleat, maybe?

Rainmaker is played by Craig Gavin –- real name Craig Smith — a friend and traveling companion of O’Brian’s whom O’Brian convinced the producers to hire as a condition of his participation. Though Gavin left the acting game after appearing with O’Brian in both The Intruder and The Stabilizer, it must be said that, while he’s no great actor, he certainly took to his bad guys roles in those films with obvious relish, projecting a sleazy menace that easily met the bar set by many more experienced B movie heavies. Suffice it to say that, of all the members of The Stabilizer‘s cast, he’d be far from the first I’d single out as a non-professional. Which leads me to wonder if he was just a sleazy, menacing guy in real life.

Anyway, it turns out that Goldson and Rainmaker have a history, a history that involves — as a flashback reveals — Goldson’s young fiancé falling down on the wrong side of Rainmaker’s cleats. As such, Goldson makes no secret of his personal investment in the assignment: “He’s the man I hate the most”, says O’Brian’s stilted, obviously overdubbed voice at one point. “I DESPISE scum like Rainmaker!” These strong feelings might explain why Goldson exhibits a certain recklessness in his approach to the investigation. During a show-stopping raid on one of Rainmaker’s drug warehouses, an operation that one might think would require that some care be taken in order to preserve important evidence, Goldson instead roars around the interior of the building on his motorcycle, randomly smashing everything in his path as cumulus clouds of loose cocaine billow up around him.

Not surprisingly, Greg Rainmaker has no surplus of love for Goldson, either. You see, it was a bullet from our hero’s gun that gave him the gimp leg he now overcompensates for with those nasty cleats of his. Thus Rainmaker, upon learning of Goldson’s arrival in town, is quick to dispatch his various colorful henchpersons — an Asian Mr. T lookalike among them — to begin the series of assassination attempts that will comprise the meaty core of The Stabilizer‘s second act. This insures that The Stabilizer will be another one of those cop movies in which the heroes never have to do any actual investigating. Instead they are here free to amble through a series of “Mysterious Asia” type travelogue sequences, secure in the knowledge that the bad guys will eventually make themselves known by trying to kill them. Both parties will then chase each other across ever decreasing distances until they converge upon a single point, which will inevitably be an underground hideout with an itchy self destruct button.

Along the way to this preordained conclusion, Goldson finds an ally in Tina (Dana Christina), the vengeful daughter of the kidnapped scientist. This allows for dual romantic pairings between Goldson and Tina on the one hand and Captain Johnny and Goldson’s partner Sylvia on the other, a circumstance that leaves the two male buddies so disbelieving of their own horndogging luck that they can’t help constantly elbowing and high fiving each other while giggling like high school boys. Tina is also desired by one of Goldson’s minions, Victor (Mark Sungkar), who, upon capturing her, is inspired to utter what is probably my favorite line in a film that has already shown itself to have a generous gift for idiosyncratically delivered verbal obscenity: “Your father will cry in hell when he sees me FUCKING you in front of everyone!” (I’m also a big fan of Goldson’s earnest and impassioned reading of the line, “You pig fucker!”)

As you have probably already gathered, The Stabilizer is a very silly film, perhaps even silly enough to stand out within the already very silly realm of 80s action movies as a whole. In addition to what I’ve already catalogued, there’s a scene in which a chaste romantic interlude is inexplicably followed by what appears to be a close up on a woman’s ass crack, only to have a pullback reveal that it is in fact the crook of a man’s arm. (I guess these are the lengths you have to go to suggest onscreen nudity in a predominately Muslim country.) There is also the appearance in more than one location of a framed portrait of Goldson that is obviously modeled upon — if not actually a doctored version of — the image of Sylvester Stallone from the poster for Cobra.

But it must be said that where The Stabilizer most definitely stands out among 80s action movies is… well, in its action. This is a film in which few second pass without something very loudly and frenetically happening, be it a fist fight, car crash, demolition by motorcycle, or just something blowing up for no discernible reason. And while all of this is accomplished with limited means and definitely comes across on the cheesy side, it couldn’t really be called phony. For all its rough edges, this is a spectacle of real metal crashing upon real metal, real fists (and sometimes cleats) pummeling real flesh, and real bodies falling through real space, often while shooting at things with a machinegun and yelling.

Indonesia’s commercial film industry of the 1980s was an inarguably mercenary one. Yet there is still something at once moving and heartbreakingly old fashioned about the obvious fact, evidenced in The Stabilizer, that its base equation was one that saw profit as the reward for a sincere and tireless effort to entertain. As covenants between purveyors of pop culture and audiences go, that’s a downright wholesome one, both transparent and rooted in a relatable work ethic.

Contemporary Hollywood, by contrast, has left sincere and tireless efforts to entertain long behind. Instead, its rush to exclusively cater to the perceived desires of teenage boys has resulted in a monster of its own creation, one distinguished by both an overwhelming sense of entitlement and an easy tendency toward boredom. This monster — I’ll call him “King Boy” — slumps irritably on its throne, casting a jaded gaze upon every new cinematic bauble presented to it, turning a regally unforgiving eye upon any instance of unsatisfactory CG or narrative departure from canon. Perhaps as a defense against this, Hollywood has taken to imbuing its products with a kind of reflexive, built-in self loathing, be it in the form of self-referential snark, or a cagey is-it-a-parody-or-isn’t-it flabbiness of tone. Whatever the case, the end result is that, for the most part, America’s popular cinema is today only capable of entertaining from between quotation marks.

The Stabilizer, bless its heart – and despite its mother lode of unintentional hilarity – has never heard of quotation marks. The only punctuation it needs are exclamation points, like those that cap off every one of Peter Goldson’s ridiculously earnest expressions of rage or purpose. Now, I’m not going to call the movie some kind of underappreciated classic; It’s way too objectively terrible for that. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t scratch a certain itch.

Release Year: 1986 | Country: Indonesia | Starring: Peter O’Brian, Craig Gavin, Gillie Beanz, Dana Christina, Harry Capri, Mark Sungkar, Jenny Farida, Kaharudin Syah, Linda Hussein, Belkies, Herman Pero | Screenplay: Deddy Armand, John Rust
Director: Arizal | Producers: Dhamoo Punjabi, Gobind Punjabi, Raam Punjabi

Oh yeah, I forgot that I never finished reviewing all the Bond books by Ian Fleming. In a way, that in itself is a fitting review of the final of Fleming’s influential adventures starring international pop culture icon James Bond. There is nothing about The Man with the Golden Gun that I would call bad. But there sure is a lot of it — as in all of it — that I would call unmemorable. Fleming was dying (some people say he even died before he finished, and what remained was polished off by his long-time friend Kingsley Amis). He was sick of Bond. But he’d had the bad fortune of ending the previous, and one of the best, Bond books on a cliffhanger, as he had taken to doing with most of the stories once he realized this was going to be his career. Well, this, and spokesman for cigarette holders.

You Only Live Twice ends with Bond, suffering from amnesia, somehow convincing himself that because he is haunted by a fleeting memory of something important about a place called Russia, that he needs to go to Russia. Thus delivering himself, Russia’s most wanted, directly into their hands, with all his defenses down and no knowledge of who he is or what they might do with or to him.

The Man with the Golden Gun picks up the action some time later. England has hesitantly accepted that Bond must have been killed in the climactic battle against Blofeld in Japan. At least, that’s what they think until the day Bond comes strolling into the office, wondering what the hell is going on. In short order, he finds himself in M’s office, where he promptly attempts to kill his old boss. M escapes, but the Brits soon learn that Bond has been brainwashed into thinking he is a Russian double agent. This part of the book is pretty good, but as with the last book’s “Bond is emotionally shattered by his wife’s murder” angle, Fleming doesn’t really follow through on the potential of the opener.

MI6 does a quick cost benefit analysis of trying to rehab Bond versus just killing him and decide that rehabilitation might work. It does, of course, but the Bond who emerges from the process is not the man he was before. Actually, Bond hasn’t been the man he was since the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Then, it was because he was shattered (at least for a couple of chapters) by his wife’s murder. This time, it’s because he has no confidence that he isn’t still acting under some secret Russian control, that there might not be some hidden impulse that can be triggered, resulting in Bond performing some manner of nefarious deed.As he did last time around, M thinks sending Bond on a mission will be the best way to force the man to rely on himself again. And lucky for Bond, the mission is in one of his favorite locations: Jamaica.

Bond’s target is a hotshot assassin who goes by the name Pistols Scaramanga. After tangling for so many books with villains the caliber of Largo and Blofeld, Scaramanga is a huge step down no matter how many times we’re told how dangerous he is. Fleming isn’t writing a character as cartoonish as the mobsters in Diamonds are Forever, but he’s certainly skating near that edge. Perhaps he would have benefited from being more cartoonish. Scaramanga seems like a real small-time operator, despite what the plot tries to convince us of. This is one of the rare instances where the villain in the Roger Moore movie version (which, as you might guess, bears very little resemblance to the plot of the book) is a considerable improvement over the literary counterpart. Christopher Lee’s Scaramanga was wonderful (even if the film wasn’t) — a confident, slightly cocky artist assassin with great enthusiasm for meeting Bond (whom he considers his equal and his twin in many ways) and, eventually, the same enthusiasm for pitting himself against 007. The book’s Scaramanga never achieves any of that sense of power and prestige. Instead, he seems like a low rent punk.

Pistols may be good at shooting people, but everything about this mission is way to easy to make a book out of it, which means once Fleming has gotten tired of writing about Bond having a beer, we get lots of scenes where Bond has an obvious opportunity to fulfill his assignment and kill Scaramanga, but doesn’t. Had Fleming been on his game instead of his death-bed, he could have worked this into a story about Bond’s shaken confidence in his own abilities. Instead, it’s worked in simply because Fleming had accidentally come up with a really easy assignment for Bond and had to pad the book to make it long enough to get published as anything other than what it should have been: a short story.

Needing to stretch things out, Bond ingratiates himself to the cocky young killer and gets himself hired to be part of an outfit putting together what looks to be… ho-hum. A shady hotel deal. Eventually there will be more to it than that, but for much of the book, it’s like Bond is pitting himself against pushy timeshare salesmen. Things eventually get more complicated, which means Bond gets to meet up with old pal, former CIA agent turned private security man Felix “Why didn’t I think of that, James!” Leiter, as well a romance a fairly uninteresting woman named Mary Goodnight. As far as Bond girls go, she’s pretty bland. I can’t even remember what she contributed to the story, and there’s definitely nothing she does that would make Bond fall for her, though he does because, once again, that’s what the story demanded without ever actually justifying. Certainly she’s no Tracey, no Gala, no Tiffany Case. And I guess Bond has conveniently forgotten that he has a bad-ass ninja-killing Japanese wife after his last adventure. Like the book itself, there’s nothing especially egregious about Mary. There’s nothing especially anything about her. And that goes for the book as a whole.

Had this been a book that fell somewhere in the middle of the series, I don’t think anyone would mind it. It would have been one of those “breather” books that would sometimes pop in between really good books. But as the last book, even if it wasn’t intentionally so, it’s a big fizzle. Reading this, I had an eerie sense of deja vu. It felt a lot like reading Playback, the last of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe books and the one he obviously dashed off in an hour on his way to do something else he actually gave a shit about. That was a bum way to end the series, and The Man with the Golden Gun is a bum way to end Ian Fleming’s run of James Bond books — though I will say that The Man with the Golden Gun is still a damn sight better than Playback, at least.

I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the titular gentlemen of The Gentlemen’s Guide to Midnite Cinema. Without them, it’s entirely likely that I would have lived my life without any knowledge of Peter O’Brian. And while that life would have been passable, filled at is with adventure and willing mod girls in mini-dresses and films in which Bruce Lee look-alikes fight Popeye in Hell, it would not have been complete. Lying on my deathbed, the final breath escaping from my gnarled maw, I would suddenly become aware of an emptiness in my soul — an emptiness shaped like a muscular guy with a huge permed mullet. Luckily, that hole has been filled, and I can shuffle off this mortal coil more occupied with my previous deathbed plan — making sure my final words are “avenge me!”

Peter O’Brian is a New Zealand born actor who made a name for himself working in Indonesia. As the story goes, he’d been in Jakarta, working as an English teacher, and was boarding a plane one day when a couple of producers approached him in line with an offer to do some movies. “I think they thought I might be Sylvester Stallone,” he said in a later interview. In the same interview he says he thought the “producers” might be local con men just looking for a mark to take out to some remote warehouse and rob. Those men, however, ended up being the mighty Punjabi brothers, a team of sibling producers who, while not exactly single-handedly responsible for the birth of the Indonesian action film, certainly played important roles in fostering it. Think of them as Dino De Laurentiis, Golan and Globus, and Roger Corman all rolled up into one family. Dhamoo and Raam Punjabi both began their producing careers with a mind-blowing milestone in the world of Indonesian cult cinema, 1979′s Special Silencers. It was basically a crucible for everything that was to come, serving as the debut film for Indonesia’s biggest cult star, Barry Prima, as well as being directed by the enigmatic Arizal, who would later direct Peter O’Brian in another eye-poppingly awesome and incompetent action film: The Stablilzer.

After proving he could handle the fights, O’Brian was making action films. There seems to be some confusion over whether Rambu: The Intruder came first or The Stabilizer. Since they all come from the same universe of unbridled insanity, I consider the debate to be more or less pointless. Rambu has the feel of being a debut film, but that means little in an industry where films made in the 1990s look like they were made in the early 1970s. Both films are linked in that they are both tremendous examples of when boundless enthusiasm meets profound incompetence and results in absolute bliss. Given the way the industry works, it’s possible that both moves were made concurrently.

One thing Rambu — and just about all Indonesian action cinema — does is let you know immediately what kind of movie you are in for. If you don’t hoot with happiness over the first five minutes of the film, you’re probably not going to be down with the rest of it. Here, we open on a careening muscle car tearing ass down a country road. It runs into an old woman crossing the street, and even though they must have hit her at like fifty miles per hour, all it does is knock the old woman over and spill her groceries. The driver and his gang of goons leap out of the car and immediately start berating the old woman, insisting that there’s no way they’re going to pay for the groceries she dropped when she was hit. Their vicious taunting is interrupted when Rambu (Peter O’Brian) appears basically out of thin air (it’s what he does) and starts smashing their car up with a lead pipe, insisting that they make good on replacing those radishes or whatever it was she was carrying around. The crooks eventually relent and hand over a wad of cash to the old woman, but not ones to let bygones be bygones, they then descend upon Rambu, who graciously throws them his pipe and opts instead to kick their asses with kungfu and…well…it’s like a boomerang billiard ball or something.

The might of his deadly sphere sends the thugs scurrying off into the brush, vowing that Rambu hasn’t seen the last of them. Rambu reacts to their threats by heading home to get an oily rubdown from his woman (Yenny Farida, Daredevil Commandos, The Stabilizer, Virgins from Hell) while complaining about how all he does in life is get erotic massages from a pretty woman while not having to maintain any sort of employment. Bored by this aimless, sexy existence, Rambu can’t prevent himself from showing up in random locations where gangsters are pushing people around. This includes showing up at a strip club to foil a kidnapping attempt orchestrated by one gangster against another gangster.

His kungfu-powered do-gooder ways finally get him noticed by the exotically named crime kingpin John Smith, who is also sometimes called Mr. White (Craig Gavin, also in The Stabilizer). For some reason, Smith keeps referring to Rambu as “the intruder.” O’Brian’s characters are generally saddled with less than impressive nicknames like that. Rambu also gets noticed by mysterious businessman Steven (Harry Capri, Daredevil Commandos and, yes,The Stabilizer) who wants to hire Rambu — whose actual name is apparently Alex, though no one really likes to refer to him as anything but Rambu — to be part of his secret army of vigilantes who will do the things the police are unable — or unwilling — to do. Rambu, proving he’s perhaps not the sharpest knife in the drawer, throws himself into this new role with gusto and a complete lack of background check on his well-connected new benefactor. Before too long, he’s landed himself square in the middle of a gang war, and obviously, the blood will flow.

Rambu is a gold mine of low-budget action entertainment, and what it lacks in polish it certainly makes up for with enthusiasm. Indonesian trash cinema seems occupied first and foremost with giving audiences their money’s worth, and Rambu never once lets you down. From the opening showdown to the frequent fights, then on to the scene where Rambu faces down a gang of thugs by whistling to summon an army of tuk-tuk driving bad-asses who we had no idea existed at his disposal until that very minute (and who never appear again), Rambu‘s only concern is making sure there’s something entertaining on-screen. The action is awkward and poorly choreographed, but no one ever goes about it with anything but the utmost conviction. O’Brian himself did pretty much all his own stunts and fights despite not having any experience beforehand, and I think he performs pretty well. Sure, it’s not up to the standards of what was happening in Hong Kong at the time, but nothing in the world was up to that standard.

The acting keeps pace with the action in that it’s not very good though everyone is giving it their all. O’Brian manages to walk that razor’s edge where glassy-eyed confusion meets inexplicable likability. Even though he’s wooden and looks dazed through most of the movie (except in those moments when he summons a truly mighty rage face), there’s something…I don’t know. “Charismatic” isn’t the right word, but it’s in that neighborhood. He’s bad, but you don’t mid that he’s bad, and eventually you don’t even notice it. Anyway, his colorful array of shirts and amazing hair make up for any short-comings in the acting department. He looks like a someone dipped Lou Reed in a vat of Sylvester Stallone, then decided to puff perm things up a bit.

And that’s not even dealing with the scene where he reconciles himself with the death of his woman by stripping down to his micro-Speedos and going for a swim — and I call it a swim to be generous. It’s more like a frolic.

O’Brian’s stone-faced stoicism is matched on the opposite end by exotic villain John Smith. Actor Craig Gavin throws himself into the role with relish, a grand performance that could have ranked among the great scenery chewing villains if not for the somewhat lackadaisical dubbing that renders everyone substantially more listless than they appear to be (with the exception of Peter O’Brian). At times, though, the dubbing works to the film’s advantage, lending an utterly bizarre quality to the proceedings. In particular, I’m thinking of a scene where John Smith attempts to rape one of the many women swimming in Rambu’s wake. Although the woman reacts with appropriate disgust and opposition to Smith’s attack, Smith’s own dialogue seems to be taken from the “bored phone sex worker” manual, with lots of matter-of-fact “oh baby, you get me so hot” muttering instead of the usual, more abusive language one expects from such a scene. It somehow manages to make the scene even more uncomfortable and awkward than if they just went with the typical exploitation film slapping and yelling.

Pretty much everyone in this cast forms a sort of Indo-exploitation cabal, popping up again and again in one configuration or another, in many of the country’s best — or at least most entertaining (and isn’t that what’s important) — trashy action films. O’Brian of course appeared in several more films of a similar quality to Rambu, including facing off against Cynthia Rothrock in Angel of Fury (aka Triple Cross, and not to be confused with Angel of Fire aka Lady Dragon 2, which is the one where Cindy is menaced by Billy Drago and drops a shipping crate or something on Flash Gordon — which is not to be confused with Angel ON Fire, which starred Cynthia Khan, who was sold to the world as part Michelle Yeoh (who was Michelle Khan at the time) and part Cynthia Rothrock. Got everything?). Kaharudin Syah, Harry Capri, and Yenny Farida all appear in Daredevil Commandos alongside Barry Prima. Most everyone here shows up again in The Stabilizer, and Dana Christina and Harry Capri also show up in Prima’s Revenge of the Ninja — not to be confused with Sho Kosugi’s Revenge of the Ninja. Anyway, the end result is that they form a nexus of familiar faces that let you pretend all these insane action movies are taking place in the same Indonesia, at the same time.

Plotwise, you’d assume from the title and Peter O’Brian’s tenuous similarity to Stallone (in sort of the same way that Bruce Le looks like Bruce Lee) that this is some sort of Rambo rip-off. And it’s true, at the end, Rambu goes shirtless in black pants and red bandanna while screaming a lot and waving around a big-ass machine gun, but this paean to Rambo seems thrown in almost as an afterthought, like they just remembered on the last day of shooting that they called the main guy Rambu and so better throw in some scenes that hearkened back to Rambo. For most of the film, though, it plays out a lot more like an Indonesian version of the Italian poliziotteschi Violent Rome starring Maurizio Merli as a cop who leaves the force to join up with a shadowy band of vigilantes. I can’t testify as to the popularity of Italian cop films in Indonesia, but as those films themselves were inspired by the likes of Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson, it’s fair to say either way that Rambu owes as much to movies like Dirty Harry and Death Wish as it does to Rambo — maybe even more so.

Of course, once we get to the finale, Rambu is in all-out Rambo mode, ripping through endless thugs en route to bloody revenge. It’s exactly the finale you’d want from a film that has been, for its entire run time, giving in every way imaginable. Rambu: The Intruder is exactly the kind of movie it needs to be: energetic, sloppy, and packed with stunts and action. Like most Indonesian action films of the era, it comes across as the plucky little brother forever doing everything it can to impress its older sibling. It’s that rambunctious little dog that hops around that bigger, slower dog in the old Loony Toons cartoons, brimming with unbridled glee and hyperactivity. Peter O’Brian may not yet have the cult film cache of Barry Prima, whose exploits are more celebrated in the United States by the people who tend to celebrate such things — but I think O’Brian’s day is here, and once you get a taste of films like Rambu: The Intruder and The Stabilizer, there’s no turning back.

Release Year: 1986 | Country: Indonesia | Starring: Peter O’Brian, Craig Gavin, Lia Warokka, Dana Christina, Kaharuddin Syah, Harry Capri, Jenny Farida, Adrian Nugraha, Adang Mansyur, Kandar Sinyo, Waylan Gerung, Avent Cristy | Screenplay: Deddy Armand | Director: Jopi Burnama | Cinematography: Sodikin | Producer: Dhamoo Punjabi, Gobind Punjabi, Raam Punjabi | Original Title: Pembalasan rambu

Funny thing about the James Bond movies is that, while they are models of conspicuous consumption, their basic tropes are so much just that –- basic –- that one could recreate them in a backyard home movie and still have them be easily identifiable. Make your bald headed uncle wear his shirt backwards and put him in a high-backed chair with a cat in his lap and you have your villain. Get the babysitter to dance around in a swimsuit to a Ventures record and you have your credit sequence. Make sure that your hero’s suit has at least been recently pressed, and that he can hold a cocktail glass in a somewhat rakish manner, and you’re good to go. Then you can have your mom… Well, that got weird awful fast, didn’t it? Anyway, you see my point.

You’d think that it would be this aspect of the Bond films that made them ideal fodder for the make do, cash poor cinema of 1960s Turkey. But the fact is that’s not the reason that Altin Cocuk, Turkey’s answer to James Bond –- aka Golden Boy –- was made at all. Altin Cocuk was made because it was 1966 and, in 1966, every country on Earth with a functioning movie industry was constructing their answer to James Bond. Thus we ended up with, at last tally, Jefri Zain, Singapore’s answer to James Bond, Tony Falcon, the Philippines’ answer to James Bond, James Bond 777, the South Indian answer to James Bond, Cantonese star Connie Chan’s Lady Bond, and on and on. The only reason, I suspect, that I am unable to add a Mauritian or Micronesian James Bond to that list is that I simply haven’t stumbled across their films yet. But rest assured that time and dedication are on my side in that matter.

Funny thing about Altin Cocuk is that – while, to someone unfamiliar with the Turkish cinema of its era, it might look downright dire in terms of its production values — it actually shows signs of being a bit of a prestige production, especially when compared to pulpier efforts like the Kilink films. Lead actor and producer Goksel Arsoy was already an established movie star at the time, having broken through with his role in the 1959 film The Milky Way, and had essayed a considerable number of lead romantic roles before signing on. Such was his stature that the film drew upon his popular nickname, Golden Boy, for both its title and the name of his character in it –- thus encouraging on the part of the Turkish public an identification between star and role similar to that touted by the makers of the Bond films (“Sean Connery is James Bond”).

Director Memduh Un was also an established figure within the Turkish film industry, having directed his first film in 1955, and he had even made inroads into the international market with his film Kirik Canaklar, which was nominated for a Golden Bear at the 1961 Berlin International Film Festival. Because of this, Altin Cocuk has less of the scrappy, learning-as-we-go-along look of some of its contemporaries in Turkish action cinema, exhibiting a surer directorial hand in terms of both staging and composition. Again, though, I am speaking in wholly relative terms, and anyone who has yet to be exposed to, say, Iron Claw The Pirate or Three Dev Adam will no doubt find the film to be pretty rough-edged and cheap looking.

Altin Cocuk’s opening credits play over a scene of a fetching young Turkish lass doing a very slooow striptease in front of a mirror, accompanied all the while by the film’s catchy theme song (“Golden Booooy, Altin Cocuk!…”), whose backing sounds like it’s being played by a strip club jazz ensemble. Finally, for her big finish, the girl holds hers enormous garter belt up in front of her face like a veil, and a new camera angle reveals, watching appreciatively from the bed, our hero, Golden Boy. Or is it? Cue the entrance of a frogman who summarily executes this man, subsequently removing his mask to reveal that it is he who is the real Golden Boy. This fresh corpse, Golden Boy explains, was merely an enemy agent who sought to masquerade as him after undergoing months of painful plastic surgeries. Soon thereafter, our man in Istanbul is on the phone with his superior, who authorizes him to take a well deserved vacation in England.

What follows is several scenes of Goksel Arsoy driving a sports car very cautiously through London traffic (Don’t scratch the car! It’s a rental!), followed by a series of scenes of him wooing a variety of English roses in various settings. This section of Altin Cocuk goes on for quite some time, and has the odd effect of making Altin Cocuk the first Turkish movie I’ve seen that feels in any way padded. My experience of Turkish action films is that they usually try to compensate for their shortcomings with sheer velocity, throwing so much at you in such quick succession that you’ll hopefully not notice just how cheap they are. By contrast, with these UK shot location scenes, Altin Cocuk’s makers seem to be making the most of some conspicuous production value, wanting to make sure that you know that they did indeed fly their star and crew to England and rent him a fancy car. Thus we get quite a lot of the unimaginatively shot travelogue footage typical of European spy films of the day, placing our star in a number of postcard perfect locations, including an English pub where he indulges in some deeply weird post-dubbed English speaking (and distances himself from the Bond associations a bit by ordering “A beer. A BIG one!”) This series of scenes also bears the burden of establishing our hero’s status as an irresistible sexual dynamo, which is actually a bit more of a hard sell than you might think.

While I enjoyed Altin Cocuk, I have to say that star Goksel Arsoy presented a bit of a stumbling block to my doing so. As has been noted elsewhere, he’s slight of build, but, more importantly, his attempts at what I think is meant to be a cocky smirk look more like an affronted sneer, with the result that he walks through the entire film looking like he’s just smelled something unpleasant, as if his upper lip had perhaps been coated with over-ripe cheese. This may be the result of Arsoy trying too hard to place distance between himself and his previous romantic roles, but, whatever the case, it’s not a good look for a suave secret agent. In fact, it actually makes Golden Boy come across as a bit of a punk, and not the good kind. (Though he does, now that I think about it, bear some resemblance to Mark E. Smith, the singer from The Fall.) On the plus side, though, Arsoy acquits himself well in the film’s many action scenes, so when he’s not trying to exude sexy secret agent cool, he presents no further obstacles to our enjoying the ride.

Anyway, somewhere during Golden Boy’s British idyll, a narrator interrupts to tell us — somewhat reprovingly, I think –- that, while Golden Boy is dicking around all over London (I’m paraphrasing), events of real import are taking place back in Turkey. And so we cut to a very noir-ish, artfully shot scene in which Golden Boy’s colleague, Agent S-99, is stalked and shot down by a pair of relentless assassins. This event, of course, necessitates Golden Boy’s immediate return to Turkey. It must be determined what exactly S-99 knew that required that he be silenced in such a manner, and so Golden Boy requests to be booked into the suite directly above the last hotel room S-99 stayed in. Personally, I think that it would be easier, if at all possible, to be booked into the room itself, rather than the one above it, but I’m no secret agent. Also, if such were the procedure, Golden Boy wouldn’t have the opportunity to flaunt the contents of his super secret spy case, which is really just a normal brief case containing a couple of guns and a rope ladder which he uses to climb down into the lower room. There’s not even a secret compartment or anything in it; everything’s just kind of right there when he opens it up, and its all pretty utilitarian (which brings us back to that whole backyard aesthetic).

Once in S-99’s hotel room, Golden Boy quickly finds a notebook stashed away underneath a drawer, but unfortunately also finds the same two assassins who killed S-99, who take custody of the notebook after a desperate struggle. Golden Boy makes his escape by leaping off the balcony, and is lucky to land in the passenger seat of a car driven by an unnamed woman in a very Audrey Hepburn-ish black cocktail dress and pearls ensemble. She apparently just happened to be passing by at that moment. A very slow car chase follows –- so slow that it was obviously felt necessary to have Golden Boy comment on just how slow the unnamed woman is driving.

Now, even though the unnamed woman, like most of the female characters in Altin Cocuk, is not graced with a name, that’s no reason to assume that her part in the action is a minor one. In fact, the unnamed woman is a major player in Altin Cocuk. She’s played by Turkish actress Sevda Nur, who not only starred in Kilink Strip and Kill, but can also lay claim to having participated in Turkish cinema’s first lesbian screen kiss – with Kilink’s Suzan Avci, no less!

I want to go on record as saying that I am a fan of Altin Cocuk’s unnamed woman. I love how, despite the fact that we never learn anything about her, and have no reason to assume that she herself is any kind of spy or law enforcement official, she ends up advising Golden Boy on what his next move should be, and as a result is invited along to participate in all of the dangerous adventures that follow, including the climactic scuba assault on the villain’s headquarters – and that, in the process, she is not only completely unfazed, but also proves herself adept at both firing a machine gun and underwater combat. I admire her not only for her adaptability, but also for her spontaneity: whatever engagement she was heading off to when Golden Boy landed in her car, it obviously wasn’t very pressing.

Finally, at about half an hour into Altin Cocuk’s running time, we meet our villain, the very Blofeld-esque Mr. Demetrius. (Bald pate, cat, and Nehru collar are all present and accounted for.) Demetrius is played by Altan Gunbay, a soloist with the Ankara State Opera who was recruited by director Un with the stipulation that he would have to shave his head for the role – a stipulation to which, the evidence of the eye informs us, he agreed. The success of Altin Cocuk would lead to Gunbay being offered numerous subsequent roles, all of which, much to his dismay, also required that he shave his head. As a result, Gunbay made a long career out of playing chrome-domed bad guys in Turkish films, and did such a good job of it that he was literally attacked in the streets by angry citizens who made no distinction between the man and the parts he played.

Altin Cocuk by necessity strips the spy movie down to its very basics. If a Bond movie could be said to have a skeleton, watching Altin Cocuk is like seeing that skeleton stripped clean and exposed to the light. In keeping with this, Mr. Demetrius’s super-villain scheme is also dirt basic, involving some nuclear weapons — obtained we know not how or where — that are to be used to blow up Turkey, for reasons unexplained and interests unidentified. In furthering this scheme, Demetrius also has the prerequisite sexy female minion, agent Z-19, who economically goes through the paces of trying to kill our hero, then subsequently being seduced by him, and then paying with her life for her betrayal. (What are these women called in the Bond Films? The not-quite-Bond-girls? The femme fatalities?) Even Demetrius’s underwater lair is barely more than conceptual in nature; we never see an exterior view of it (not even a crappy Lightning Bolt or Operation White Shark caliber miniature), and, at the end, its destruction is signified by some light fireworks that amount to little more than an anticlimactic splash on the surface of the Bosporus.

In sum, Altin Cocuk derives its fascination less from what it accomplishes with so little than from the very idea that filmmakers with so little would try to accomplish it at all. As with much Turkish pulp cinema, you are seeing the bare nuts and bolts of genre, the raw sinews — and with all of the pulsing vitality and forward-pressing mechanistic drive that that implies. And what’s amazing is that, even operating on such a stripped-down level, all of the proper buttons still get pushed. While the impressions on our pleasure centers might not be as intense as they might be were we watching an enveloping, multi-million dollar spectacle, if we are agreeable enough — and who wouldn’t want to agree to an attempt at entertainment as pure and honest as this one? — we’ll find that the stimulus is still there.

This is different, I want to note, than saying that Altin Cocuk is generic. Director Un, as indicated above, brings a lot of style to the endeavor. And while the film’s more deliberate pacing might come as a bit of a jolt to those accustomed to the more wildly kinetic efforts of Turkish directors like Yilmaz Atadeniz or Cetin Inanc, it is partly that pacing that allows Un to indulge in those interesting camera angles and lighting effects, those niceties of mood and tone, that elevate the film above the utilitarian point-and-shoot style of the aforementioned filmmakers.

So, yes, if you’ve seen a James Bond movie, you know exactly what tropes Altin Cocuk holds in store. But the film nonetheless offers distinct pleasures in the course of watching them unfold. When sour-faced Goksel Arsoy and the unnamed woman don their scuba gear and prepare to make their descent down to the evil genius’s lair, the thrill we feel is like a muscle memory, coming almost in spite of the fact that we know full well that we’re not going to see events play out on the scale we imagine. The fact is that, by this point, Altin Cocuk has demonstrated enough of a good faith effort that we’re willing to sign on, buy in, and perhaps fill in the gaps ourselves when necessary.

For anyone who ever watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and was disappointed that, for all its over-the-top absurdities, it didn’t feature a scene where Harrison Ford punches a midget and makes him fly across a field, then Naksha is the movie for you. Only it’s not Harrison Ford doing the punching; it’s action cinema mainstay Sunny Deol. But hell, if anyone in the world is going to punch a guy of any size and make him fly across a field, then it’s going to be Sunny. Jackie Chan may have tried it at some point, but he’s past the days of being able to do that anymore — although he is an appropriate actor to bring up in our discussion of this movie. Naksha gets compared to Raiders of the Lost Ark (because all adventure films get compared to Raiders), the films it more accurately resembles would be the modern-setting adventure films of the late, great Cannon Studios, like Treasure of the Four Crowns or that thing where Chuck Norris and Lou Gossett, Jr. bicker and hunt for gold or whatever

Or, perhaps even more closely, Naksha resembles the globe-trotting adventure antics of Hong Kong adventure films like Jackie Chan’s two superb Armor of God films and Michelle Yeoh’s entertaining but fabulously awful The Touch. In fact, if you took the armor from Armor of God (although, technically, we never even see the armor, do we?) and plopped it into the finale of The Touch, with a heavy dollop of Dwayne Johnson’s The Rundown thrown in for good measure, you’d basically have Naksha, the tale of two brothers and a tag-along woman who doesn’t do much (shocking) who traverse a mountainous jungle wilderness in search of a secret temple and a sacred relic that could turn villain Jackie Shroff into an invincible superman, instead of turning him into the twin of French actor Jean Reno, which seems to be nature’s own plan for Shroff.

Pretty boy Viveik Oberoi stars as Vicky, a fun-loving goofball who likes to spend his night at sexy dance clubs where the singers implore you to “shake what your momma gave you,” even though poorly proofread subtitles insist that they are saying “shake what your momma told you” (and this after they tell is the lyrics to “Sway” are “when the rubber rhythm starts to play”). I generally don’t pick on subtitles, especially on DVDs that are marketed to a population that speaks something other than English. The inclusion of English subs is a nice consideration for the rest of us, and so I don’t really complain when things stray from precise grammar. But still, man — you should at least be able to properly subtitle in English the lines that are actually delivered in English. I only say this because I was all into shaking what my momma gave me, but then if I am only able to shake what my momma told me, I’m not gong to be allowed to shake anything other than Shake and Bake — and going to a sexy dance club to shake a bag of raw chicken and crumblings is not what I’d consider getting my money’s worth.

While hosting a bachelor party for his pal, Vicky meets dancer Riya (Sameera Reddy), who chastises him for being a low–down dirty dog, and that’s pretty much that. But when Vicky learns that his father, a famed archaeologist who died mysteriously some years before, may have been murdered while trying to protect a map to a sacred relic, he suddenly kicks himself into intrepid adventurer mode and sets out to find the lost relic — which happens to be the armor and earrings worn by Karna during his legendary battle with Arjun, as described in the Hindu book The Mahabharata (which is a religious book in much the same way The Old Testament or The Iliad are: presumably historical events are mixed with or attributed to the intervention of gods and the supernatural). Whoever dons the armor and earrings will be rendered invincible.

Also searching for the armor is the dastardly Bali Bhaiyya, played by Bollywood veteran Jackie Shroff. Bhaiyya has no real back story other than the fact that he’s the one who is responsible for the death of Vicky’s dad. Exactly who Bhaiyya is, we never really find out, but adventure movies always have a villainous guy looking for the same treasure. In Raiders it was Belloq, in The Touch it was Count Dracula himself, Richard Roxburgh. And here it’s Jackie Shroff. They’re all pretty much the same: possessed of seemingly unlimited wealth (while the hero always seems to be rougher around the edges) and an unlimited number of incompetent but well-armed henchmen in black t-shirts or trenchcoats. Said henchmen quickly pick up Vicky’s trail, and although he proves himself an able enough fighter (though the fights themselves can’t stand up to similar fights in either The Touch or, most certainly, the mind-blowing fights — few and far between though they may be — in Armor of God), he is soon overpowered and finds himself strung up in a vacant building, about to be eviscerated by Bhaiyya’s goons.

Until, that is, Sunny Deol crashes through the ceiling in slow motion and starts blowing cats away and punching them across the room.

Up until this point, the film has been pretty so-so, with a typical adventure film “discovering the plot” build-up and a lead who was neither good nor bad, but simply a null value that wasn’t going to engage me for the full film. But as soon as Sunny comes smashing through the building like The Incredible Hulk, wearing his old school Banana Republic safari man hat (some of you may remember when Banana Republic was entirely safari and adventure themed — they had pretty awesome catalogs back then, digest-size and printed on thick brown paper and full of stories about rum and clippers and such in between pictures of bush hats and waterproof duster jackets), well that’s when the movie actually begins. From there on out, there’s a few minutes sprinkled here and there dedicated to our main cast bickering with each other, but for the most part it’s all Sunny beating the crap out of people and walking in slow motion as shit blows up around him.

Sunny plays Veer, Vicky’s long-lost brother. It turns out that when Vicky called his mom to tell her where he was, she in turn called Veer and asked him to bring Vicky home. So Veer then used his incredible powers of teleportation to get to the remote little village where Vicky was being held captive, then used his incredible powers of ESP (or possible Google Maps) to locate the exact building in which Vicky was being held. Forget Karna’s magic armor. Veer already seems possessed of near godlike omnipotence — plus he can smash through buildings and punch guys so hard they fly across the room.

Vicky properly saved, Veer goes about the task of trying to bring the rascally younger brother home — which proves difficult, as Vicky is nothing if not sneaky. Things get further complicated when, in the middle of the goddamned jungle far from home, the two brothers run into Riya, trapped in an out-of-control raft in a raging river. Apparently, she went on holiday and booked a white water adventure with an outfitter who takes women in their regular street clothes and plops them into a novelty-grade raft and sets them out into class IV rapids without partners or guides.

The movie spends a little too much time with the trio monkeying about in the jungle (though sadly, and surprisingly, there are no hijinks or comedy bits involving actual monkeys), but that’s forgivable as soon as Bhaiyya and his goons catch up and we get a parade of exploding trucks, kungfu fights, shotguns that seem to fire atomic bombs, and a scene in which the heroes run afoul of a tribe of pygmies that whip out some serious kungfu skills on Sunny (in a scene lifted wholesale from The Rundown — even going so far as to hire an Ernie Reyes Jr. look-alike for the fight) before everyone makes up and gets drunk and dances through the village. And on the village. I don’t know how happy the midget tribe was to have a big lug like Sunny Deol dancing on their roofs. I mean, if he can smash through the roof of full-size building, who knows what kind of damage he could do to the mud and grass hut of a guy named Liliput.

Eventually, everyone gets back to the business of trying to recover Karna’s artifacts, leading to a big showdown in the hidden mountain temple, which is of course stuffed to the gills with booby traps (most of which are stolen from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) and candles that light themselves.

Naksha is a pretty dumb movie, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t like it. I liked it a lot. But then, keep in mind that I like pretty much all adventure movies, even those Tomb Raider movies no one else liked (in fact, I loved those), and even Treasure of the Four Crowns. Naksha is better than Treasure of the Four Crowns, and better than The Touch, but it’s still no Raiders of the Lost Ark. Granted, nothing is (not even the other Indiana Jones films), so it’s not really all that fair or useful to say a movie isn’t as good as Raiders, which just might be the greatest adventure movie ever made. Still, measured against the rest of the world’s adventure films (including those Antonio Margheriti adventure films starring David Warbeck), Naksha measures up pretty well despite the fact that the plot depends on a couple tremendously gigantic coincidences. At this point in the history of adventure films, however, I’m used to just looking the other way when a female from earlier in the movie shows up at random in a raft on a river in the middle of a remote jungle. Or when Sunny Deol travels at the speed of light to the location where his little brother is being tortured. Or the fact that everyone solves all the treasure map’s clues by sort of staring off into the distance until “revelation music with chanting in it” plays and gives them the answer to the puzzle.

But there’s a word for watching a guy sit for ten years trying to decipher clues on an esoteric map, and that word is “archeology.” And since real archaeologists rarely get in kungfu fights with midgets or get involved in magical battles in secret temples, let’s leave their work as the purview of The Museum of Natural History, and let’s let adventure films be populated by guys like Sunny Deol blowing up trucks and swinging around sawed-off shotguns.

You may notice that, while Viveik Oberoi is ostensibly the hero of this movie, I’ve barely mentioned him. That’s because he’s not even there. Not really. There’s a reason Ajay Devgan is the guy everyone remembers from Company, even though Viveik was the main character, and there’s a reason we’re talking about Sunny a lot more in Naksha. Oberoi doesn’t really strike me as a bad actor; it’s just that he spends pretty much the entire movie mugging for the camera and going over-the-top in a way that makes him less like the hero and more like the hero’s odious comic relief sidekick (or Jackie Chan). This leaves the actual hero work squarely on the beefy shoulders of workhorse Sunny Deol, where it belongs.

Sunny is getting on in years but I still have absolutely no problem buying him as an action hero. I also have no problem at all buying Sunny as a legitimate tough guy. The trend these days is to feature uber-scultped male model types as action heroes. Sure the bodies look good in a gym, but do any of these lads strike you as someone you’d want to depend on in a fight? Who has your back: John Abraham or Sunny Deol? I’d be much happier knowing that a guy like Sunny Deol, with his tree trunk arms and a little bit of fat, has my back. When I reviewed Kamal Hassan’s Abhay a while back, I compared Hassan’s build to Joe Don Baker, or to many of the beefy redneck guys with whom I grew up. Ask ‘em to show you their six-pack, and they’ll take you to the fridge. But you damn sure know that when push comes to shove, for all their beer gut and excess body fat, these guys are more than capable of hammering pretty much anyone into the ground. Sunny definitely falls in that category. When Viveik Oberoi punches someone, you sort of shrug and go, “Eh, it’s a movie.” But when Sunny punches someone, you believe that someone would fly across the room and through a wall.

The other person to pay attention to in this film is Jackie Shroff. Again, we see that while Viveik may have been seen as the handsome, young lead, this movie really belongs to the veterans. Where as Oberoi’s over-the-top mugging comes off as lame, Shroff gets to go just as over-the-top as the villain of the piece, but he executes his scenery-chewing turn with ace perfection. As I mentioned earlier, he is almost totally devoid of character. He is evil because the movie says he is evil, and because he is willing to gun down a village full of kungfu midgets. But beyond that, the movie pretty much relies on you recognizing a well established adventure film archetype. And honestly — is his sinister plan really worth all this effort to prevent? The armor may make you invincible, but I still bet it would be pretty hard for one guy wearing heavy armor to conquer the entire world. I guess these villains never really expect to succeed in their mad schemes, so they don’t think through the actual logistics of their proposed global conquest. But whatever the short-comings of his plan may be, Jackie still gives his all despite being in such a goofy movie. You could jettison Oberoi and Sameera Reddy from this film entirely and just leave the whole thing up to Deol and Shroff, and you’d probably be better off for it.

Speaking of which — I almost forgot Sameera Reddy was in this movie. She has absolutely no purpose other than to be the pretty girl and get captured every now and again by Shroff’s goons. Her turn isn’t really bad — we’re not talking Kate Capshaw here — but there’s certainly no point to it, either. So at least she’s no Kate Capshaw, but she’s also no Karen Allen. She looks good in the musical numbers though (of which there are only a couple), and I guess that’s about all she’s supposed to do.

Plotwise, you can pretty much guess that this movie isn’t exactly coherent. Coincidences abound, things happen for no reason, and people just seem to appear in places with very little effort or explanation, sort of like how Tony Jaa was always able to teleport to wherever he thought someone would be who might know where his elephants were in Tom Yung Goong. Within the realm of adventure films, the plot is actually better — or at least more sensical — than many, but that’s really not saying a lot. The plot isn’t really the point here, though. The armor is just a MacGuffin that allows the movie to indulge in a parade of exploding trucks, shotgun battles, and kungfu fights. And in this capacity, Naksha delivers the goods in excess. Really in excess. No truck explodes when five trucks could explode instead. And nothing just explodes when it could explode and shoot end over end, fifty feet up into the air. And no one gets punched and falls down when they could get punched and fly like a hundred feet back and through a wall or a tree or a windshield. The action is way over-the-top, well into the realm of the cartoonish, but it’s still great good fun. It does make for a weird transition when the wacky action has serious consequences, but awkward shifts in tone are hardly the sole property of Naksha.

I’ve brought up both Armor of God and The Touch fairly often in this review, which probably doesn’t mean a whole lot to people haven’t seen either of those films. First of all, if you haven’t seen Armor of God yet, you should. The bad slapstick comedy is more than made up for when Jackie starts kicking people so hard it makes them flip over backwards, hit their shins on the edge of a wooden table, then flip over backwards again before hitting the ground (you really just need to see it). It’s the second most painful looking abuse Jackie has visited upon a stuntman (the first being in Police Story, when he kicks that dude on the escalator and makes him flip backward and land chest first on the edge of the metal stairs and then he bounces — again, you have to see it to understand just how painful it looks).

As for The Touch — not so much. It’s really pretty bad, even though I still watch it from time to time just because I like adventure movies, and the cinematography is nice to look at, and Michelle Yeoh is a peach. Naksha resembles The Touch in that it takes the traditional adventure film and attempts to graft some sort of cultural-religious context onto the action. In the case of The Touch, it was Buddhism, and obviously here it’s Hinduism. However, I’d say the lessons in Hinduism (taught to us in cartoon format!) to be taught by Naksha are about as trustworthy as the American history taught to us by National Treasure, so I wouldn’t use this movie in place of reading the actual historical texts. Actually, I would. But you shouldn’t.

It’s this, and the supernatural ending, that makes Naksha feel like The Touch, though I would qualify that statement by saying that Naksha is a much more enjoyable movie. Director Sachin Bajaj finds himself in that position for the first time, and even though it looks like he got the job through the ancient tradition of nepotism (his father is a film distributor in India and is listed as the producer of Naksha), Bajaj handles the job well. Not perfectly, but well. The pacing is OK, there’s a little too much reliance on slow-motion during action scenes (though this is a global trend and not anything unique to Bajaj), and the cinematography (by Vijay Arora, who does have a lot of experience in the field) nicely captures the landscapes and contributes the exotic feel that is so important to a successful adventure film. Incidentally, The Touch was directed by a cinematographer-turned-director too, and while that film is frequently gorgeous, it’s rarely good. If Bajaj was still a novice director, he at least had the good sense to surround him with a capable crew.

There’s also a fair number of special effects which, for the most part, are realized pretty well. I don’t know the exact budget of Naksha, but it sure wasn’t small, and it showcases India’s continually improving skill with CG effects. Not everything is pulled off perfectly, but if I were to assume the budget to be roughly the same or slightly lower than The Touch, the effects in Naksha pretty much blow that film out of the water. That said, the CG in The Touch was pretty awful, and Naksha doesn’t even deserve to be dragged down to that level by an act of comparison. There are also a fair number of practical effects, as well as the kungfu fights. India, like pretty much the rest of the world, has never quite gotten the knack of filming a superb kungfu fight the way they can (or could) in Hong Kong. So there’s no kungfu showdown of the quality we get at the end of Jackie Chan’s Armor of God when Jackie takes on an entire monastery full of evil monks and a gang of leather-clad, high-heel wearing kungfu amazons (Jackie was just making some weird nonsense up with that one, wasn’t he?). But then, even Hong Kong and even Jackie can’t deliver fight scenes like that anymore, so that style of hyper-kinetic, bone-jarring acrobatic kungfu seems to be the exclusive domain of Tony Jaa.

That said, I wouldn’t really expect to see someone with Sunny Deol’s build going all 1980s Jackie Chan in a movie. Deol is a classic tough guy, and his job is to move slower but with thunderous power. The fight choreography in Naksha is OK, maybe slightly above average if you average out the quality of fight scenes all over the world. It does rely a lot on the gravity defying wirework that is so en vogue and has been so since the 90s in Hong Kong (though it was only discovered recently by the rest of the world). But since the fight scenes are, for the most part, possessed of a cartoonish over-the-top quality anyway, the wirework doesn’t detract. And Sunny still looks solid just punching or kicking guys square in the jaw. I guess Viveik Oberoi gets in some action, too, but honestly — is he still even in this movie?

However well Deol might acquit himself in the action scenes, and however charismatic and likable a performer may be, one thing that does astound me about the man is that, after some twenty-odd years or so as a leading man, the guy still hasn’t learned to dance. Naksha has only a few musical numbers, and Deol is involved in only two of them. And one of those isn’t even in the movie. It’s just a music video tacked on to the credits. And it’s here that Deol’s proficiency for the dancin’ rears its ugly head. The other musical number in which he’s involved is the drunken revelry with the tribe of kungfu midgets, and his job there is mostly to drink, smash some clay pots, and stomp around like a joyous madman. That he can do.

But the non-sequiter final musical number pasted into the closing credits calls for actual dancing, and while Viveik and Sammera wriggle and writhe about with skill, Deol dances with all the grace, rhythm, and timing of Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster. I don’t know how you stick around in Bollywood as long as Sunny has without learning how to dance, but somehow he manages. Still, when you think about it, if you have an action-packed kungfu adventure movie full of lost treasure, secret maps, and exploding trucks, do you want your hero to look good in the post-adventure dance number, or do you want him to look good kicking ass in the rest of the movie? Let Viveik and Sameera have their paltry moment to shine in the “freaky freaky Friday night” closing credit song, because Deol owns the rest of the film. The director must have also realized that dropping Deol into the middle of a bunch of dancers for a music video was a bad idea, because eventually, he stops making Sunny try to dance and just lets him lounge about surrounded by hot, squirming women — which is the way things ought to be for Sunny.

I should probably mention that the songs in this movie are awful. The score is pretty much the de rigueur “faux tribal” orchestration so common to modern adventure films, with lots of enthusiastic “Ho! Whoa ho!” chanting and percussion punctuated by flutes and that “haunting moaning” for moments of introspection and revelation. If you’ve seen an adventure film in the last fifteen years, you pretty much know the score. But the songs for the musical numbers — my God! The song where they party with the pygmies is OK as it’s just an extension of the score, and sounds like one of those “tribal music written by white guy” songs you hear on Globe Trekker. Then there’s the “Shake what your momma gave you song” and the “freaky freaky Friday night” song — there’s a reason neither of these set the pop charts ablaze (as far as I can tell). The other song is performed when Jackie Shroff’s standard issue “sexy, evil mercenary woman in booty shorts” performs a little number for the goons, but honestly, I can’t even remember how that sounds now, because all I can think about is that horrible “freaky freaky Friday night” song.

Both Oberoi and Deol were in a bit of a slump when they starred in this film, and Naksha didn’t do a whole lot to revive them. It also seems that Naksha had a pretty big budget, and adventure/treasure hunt films of this nature are pretty scarce in the overall cinematic landscape of Indian cinema. I guess Bajaj was hoping the stars and the relative uniqueness of the genre would translate into box office success. No dice, though it was a fun effort despite the box office failure and mixed reviews in India, ranging from “dumb fun” to “mindless idiocy and harbinger of the end of Indian cinema.” Some felt that it wasn’t “Indian” enough (for that, perhaps they should watch the Sunny Deol film Indian — I mean, how much more Indian can you get than to call your film Indian), or more accurately, that it was too Hollywood. This is a criticism that has been leveled at a lot of cinema these days — from Hong Kong to Korea to France (could Sachin Bajaj become the Luc Besson of India??? — I mean, I already cracked that Jackie Shroff looks like Jean Reno, so this is the next logical step), and personally, it doesn’t fly with me.

We are no longer in an era of localized, regional cinema. That era died the day DVD stores and movie review websites went online. The cinema of one country has always influenced the cinema of another. Even if the audience wasn’t aware, the filmmakers certainly were. Italian spectacle films of the silent era influenced American filmmakers, who set out to incorporate the larger-than-life opulence into their own films. And then the Technicolor spectacles of Hollywood during the 50s in turn revived spectacle filmmaking in Italy during the 1960s. Westerns became spaghetti westerns which in turn were heavily influenced by Japanese samurai films. And now, Hong Kong action films of the previous two decades heavily influence American films, which in turn influence Hong Kong films. Thanks to the interconnectivity of the Web, fans and even casual filmgoers are more aware of this global exchange than ever before. I mean, twenty-five years ago, when I first started watching Hong Kong action films, I never would have dreamed I’d hear my parents speak with familiarity about Chow Yun-fat or Michelle Yeoh. So yes — Naksha has some very Hollywood elements. It also has some very Indian elements, as well as elements of Hong Kong cinema and Luc Besson’s crop of French action films that have destroyed French film the same way Naksha and Dhoom have destroyed Indian cinema.

I’ve never been a big fan of nation-state borders serving as barriers to artistic expression, and if the Internet has done anything positive besides deliver cheap, plentiful porn to the world, it’s that it has facilitated the breakdown of walls between artists and fans across the world the way no fanzine or convention could ever dream of. So in this climate, what does it mean for a film or a genre to be “too Hollywood” or “not Indian enough?” Doesn’t this confine film — and all other forms of artistic expression — to regionalized prisons? If you film is an Indian film, it must fulfill these requirements, and it must not do these things. How is this mode of thinking in any way beneficial to filmmaking, or to art? How does this in any way encourage experimentation or evolution? At the same time, how does aping another country’s cinema help cultivate the pieces of filmmaking that make your cinema unique on the global scene? Are we talking about genre topics, or technical aspects and camera tricks involved with filmmaking — or does “too Hollywood” have less to do with the film and more to do with the moral values presented (for what it’s worth, the moral values presented in Naksha include, “Indian mythology is awesome,” “Don’t conquer the world,” and “stick by family”)?

Of course, there’s also the debate over what “destroyed such and such cinema” even means. Does applying techniques and values from Hollywood films somehow happen at the expense of obliterating that which makes another country’s film unique? Isn’t it possible to use the one without losing the other? I mean, Hollywood voraciously devours influence from all over the world, but no one is really saying that Hong Kong cinema destroyed Hollywood. In the end, “too Hollywood” is generally a criticism leveled at films by the same people who would still hate “Hollywood” even if they were American — and here, Hollywood ceases to mean “Hollywood,” or even “American” cinema, and instead is used as a synonym for “big, dumb popcorn movies,” which are perceived by some as being automatically possessed of far less artistic merit or social value than smaller, quieter films. But then, this is again hardly an argument that restricts itself to India, or to any one country, and it has been raging pointlessly (though often times entertainingly so) since the birth of feature films.

In the case of Naksha, the film did well in large cities but tanked everywhere else — and since most of India is everywhere else, you can’t really get by without everywhere else. Does a film like this represent a rift between urban areas, where perhaps people are more open to change, and rural areas, where something not identified as traditional is met with suspicion and hostility? If so, once again this is hardly a situation unique to India, but it does spotlight one of the great problems we face as our world becomes more connected and the varied cultures of the world continue to collide and meld into something new. It seems the more some people want to move ahead into this new arena, the more other people want to pull away from it. And both sides of this tug-of-war have plenty that justifies their position.

I was originally — before I derailed myself into this random thought exercise — going to review this movie with nary a mention of “Bollywood” other than as a passing reference, because I think the role of a movie on the global scene is more important than its role in a restricted subsection, even one as large as Bollywood. Other people, with a greater sense of national pride, or a greater concern over maintaining the purity of their culture against outside influences rather than embracing global accessibility and co-mingling, obviously don’t feel the same way. I’m not going to make proclamations on who is wrong or right, even though it’s obvious where I stand. From day one of Teleport City, we have roamed the globe in search of cool and outlandish movies — that’s why a review of an Indian film that is too Hollywood contains so many references to Hong Kong films, Tony Jaa, Luc Besson, and David Warbeck. As far as I’m concerned, our regional cinema is planet Earth — and I only use that limit because the shipping on movies from Io is so expensive and takes twenty-two years. Plus, man, who wants to watch a movie full of pretentious Ionians chain-smoking and mumbling about how the view of Jupiter looming in the sky so perfectly embodies their personal existential crisis — and from what I’ve seen of Ionian cinema, that’s pretty much all there is, as the Ionian Luc Besson has not yet come around to destroy Ionian cinema.

A review of a goofy, fun-loving flick like Naksha is hardly the best place for contemplation on the globalization and cross-pollination of culture, art, and entertainment, and this is certainly not meant as a defense of Naksha’s sundry faults. It’s hard to argue against anyone who claims this movie is stupid, because Naksha is pretty stupid. And that alone is enough to legitimately dismiss it as bad for many people. I happen to have a different standard though, and the movie was OK in my book. But what we’re talking about here is not whether the film is good or bad, but whether it is too foreign or not, and whether such arguments have much meaning anymore.

I think it’s valuable to look at a film in terms of its native cultural and industry context. It’s important to understand the prevailing trends and cultural mores from which a film emerges. And in many ways, although people who frown upon pop culture are loath to admit it, you can learn a lot about people by learning about what people like in the pop culture and entertainment. There’s no way to fully understand Indian films without making some effort to at least get the basics of Indian film and cultural history under your belt. At the same time, I also think it’s important to remove films from that context and look at them as members of a more globalized cinema scene. In that sense, whether or not Naksha is “Bollywood enough,” whatever that may mean, is hardly an important question for me. I don’t care, to be honest. Others may care a lot, and that’s just a matter of your point of view on things. I, personally, am not a “fan of Bollywood;” I’m a fan of film, wherever it may come from. But this debate probably deserves a more respectable forum than Naksha as reviewed by Teleport City, so I’ll lay it to rest here unresolved. What matters most to me right now is, how does Naksha measure up against its contemporaries in adventure cinema from the rest of the world?

And honestly, despite the obvious script gaffs and Oberoi’s mugging, Naksha holds up pretty well against the rest of the pack — but depending on how dumb you think the rest of the pack is, you may enjoy this film a lot less than I did. It’s got a playful sense of adventure, decent pacing, some fun fights, nice locations, solid veterans in Shroff and Deol, an appropriately supernatural blow-out for the finale, and lots of people tearing about in Land Rovers. Theater audiences may have met the film with a resounding, “meh,” if they even took the time to do that, but I have to say, I really had fun. Plus you know: kungfu fight between Sunny Deol and a guy who was like four feet tall.

Crap. I think I like the “freaky freaky Friday night” song…

Release Year: 2006 | Country: India | Starring: Sunny Deol, Vivek Oberoi, Sameera Reddy, Jackie Shroff, Suhasini Mulay, Navni Parihar, Liliput, Mridula Chandrashekar | Screenplay: Milap Zaveri, Tushar Hiranandani | Director: Sachin Bajaj | Cinematography: Vijay Arora | Music: Pritam Chakraborty, Salim Merchant | Producer: Akshay Bajaj

In June of 1995, legendary (some would counter with “infamous”) b-movie kingpin Al Adamson was murdered by a handyman he’d contracted to complete some work on his ranch. The body was discovered entombed beneath a newly poured concrete slab that occupied the space where Adamson’s hot tub once stood. The producer-director’s disappearance piqued the curiosity of friends, and one in particular became suspicious of the concrete slab, noting that Al loved his hot tub perhaps more than anything else he owned and never would have had it removed. And indeed that’s where they found his body. The handyman, Fred Fulford, was arrested and, in a trial that dragged on until March, 2000, finally convicted and sentenced to 25-to-life. Cult film fans and publications predictably noted how much like one of his movies Al’s death ended up being, and I can’t really claim not to be among them.

It was the final scene in a life and career that spanned decades and produced some of the crappiest, most boring, and most ubiquitous exploitation films of the 60s and 70s. Few are the cult films fans who haven’t seen at least one Al Adamson movie, be it Satan’s Sadists, The Female Bunch, Psycho A Go-Go, or any of the other numerous titles that Adamson produced and directed. Like the other great cinematic hucksters of his era (guys like Harry Novak and David Friedman), Adamson was a master of churning out movies that were low on budget, lower in quality, but never the less still managed to end up getting distributed across the drive-in circuits and turning a profit.

He pulled this off using a number of methods. Horror of the Blood Monsters, for example, was just a chintzy black and white Filipino film that Adamson bought for a song, tinted different colors, and sold as an entirely new movie — several times. By the time Adamson was done with the film, it had been released and released under at least six different titles, including Blood Creatures from the Prehistoric Planet, Creatures of the Prehistoric Planet, Creatures of the Red Planet, Space Mission to the Lost Planet, and Vampire Men of the Lost Planet. Imagine the consternation of theater patrons who paid multiple times for the movie, only to discover too late that this was the same movie they saw some time earlier, but with a new title. Luckily, most people went to see Al Adamson movies so they could fool around in the back seat at the drive-in, not because they wanted to pay attention to the movie.

I think it was under the title Vampire Men of the Lost Planet that I saw it, making it my first Al Adamson movie, at an age when I was too young to know who Al Adamson was but old enough to recognize an hilariously shoddy film when I saw one. It certainly wasn’t the last time I’d see an Al Adamson film. He had a knack for dreaming up titles that appealed directly to losers like me. Even after I’d learned my lesson and knew that “Directed By Al Adamson” was the opening credit’s polite way of saying, “Prepare to be Disappointed,” I still couldn’t help myself. Like a dog too stupid to learn not to stick its nose into the fire, I keep coming back. How can I not? Angel’s Wild Women. Blood of Ghastly Horror. Brain of Blood. Brain of Blood!!! I don’t even know what that means, but it’s awesome. Whether it was a Filipino movie he had bought, retitled, and filled with disconnected scenes of an aged John Carradine, or whether it was something Adamson had written, produced, and shot himself out in the desert, I ended up seeing almost all of them. Multiple times. Under their many multiple titles. It’s possible that Adamson paid for his beloved hot tub entirely with money he snookered out of me.

Around the same time I was acquainting myself with Al Adamson, but before I’d had a chance to see the movie we’re here to discuss, I started reading the Black Samurai novels written by Marc Olden. At the time, and before flea markets had been entirely decimated by eBay (modern flea markets are shadows of their former selves, stocked less with insane old junk from people’s basements and instead, stocked mostly with bought-in-bulk crap of the kind you find in Dollar General Stores or for sale on Canal Street), I was buying huge stacks of espionage novels from the 60s and 70s. Stuff like the Nick Carter books, Edward S. Aaron’s Sam Durrell adventures, and the Black Samurai.

Black Samurai was the first book in what would become a pulp series that ran throughout the mid-1970s, telling the story of Robert Sand, an American G.I. on leave in Japan during the Vietnam War. While trying to help an elderly Japanese man who is being harassed by a couple of racist American soldiers, Sand is shot in the belly and left for dead, maintaining consciousness only long enough to see the frail, ancient man burst suddenly into a blur of action and decimate the attackers. After Sand recovers, he becomes a disciple of the old man, who is soon revealed to be one of the greatest martial arts and samurai trainers left in the world. Sand endures the grueling training to become a samurai, and soon wins the respect and admiration of his Japanese peers, even becoming the best of all the students.

Sand’s life is shattered one night when a gang of mercenaries invades the samurai training compound, slaughtering Sand’s samurai brothers and murdering his master — but not, of course, before the samurai do a healthy dose of damage to the invading forces. Sand manages to escape and soon learns the identity of the mercenaries. They are a cutthroat band of terrorists and war criminals led by a bloodthirsty ex-general named Tolstoy, the man responsible for, among other war atrocities, the Mei Lei massacre. Tolstoy wants revenge against the men who punished him for his proactive, initiative-taking go-getting, and he has assembled a force of like-minded individuals who all have a grudge against America. They attacked the samurai compound because the old master’s granddaughter happens to be married to the prince of Vietnam. Sand is contacted by a former US president named Clarke, who hires Sand to stop Tolstoy and protect the Presidential daughter. Sand accepts, not so much so he can help Clarke, but more so he can take revenge for the murder of his brothers and rescue his master’s granddaughter, with whom, in yet another plot complication, Sand is hopelessly in love. Damn, can Sand possibly have any more shit to deal with? How about the fact that Tolstoy’s entire plan is to recreate his biggest hit, the Mei Lei massacre, only by slaughtering an entire town’s population in America? And Sand has only a week to stop him.

So began Olden’s series of incredibly violent and increasingly bizarre stories about the efforts of Sand and Clarke to, in their own words, stick it to people who live with their foot on the throats of others. The first two books in the eight book series are fairly straight-forward action/espionage stories, with little about them that was overly sensational beyond the fabulous amounts of violence. Fascination with the martial arts in American had been around since World War II, coming to a head with the release of the James Bond film, You Only Live Twice and boiling over a couple of years later with the release of Enter the Dragon. These films were particularly popular among black audiences, coming as they did at a time when minorities — through martial arts films and blaxploitation — were finally seeing action heroes their own color. Marc Olden had a winner on his hands when he combined martial arts and blaxploitation with the pulp-style espionage novels that had surged in popularity during the 50s and 60s.

By the third book in the Black Samurai series, things started getting just a little bit more comic bookish. Sand has to fight, for example, a massive American Indian warrior who, true to goofy pulp sensibilities, still strides around in his rawhide vest and uses a tomahawk. But it was with book four, The Deadly Pearl, that the Black Samurai really started to go off the deep end of sensationalism. That one features Sand battling a New York super-pimp with a penchant for pearls, cane-swords, and selling little girls into sex slavery. Things got progressively weirder from there, peaking perhaps with the sixth book in the series, The Warlock.

The highly enjoyable ridiculousness of Olden’s sixth book in the series can’t be over-emphasized. On page one — hell, in paragraph one — Robert Sand is already locked in combat with a deformed, cackling dwarf in a bright red leather suit, armed with a whip and an army of dudes dressed up in leopard skin loin cloths and metal claws. Forget “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” or “Call me Ishmael.” This has got to be the single greatest opening to a book ever written. Things only get freakier from there, as Sand is pitted against the twisted, murderous leader of blood and sex cult whose specialty is cannibalistic orgies, rape, human sacrifice, heart eating, and using hypnotism and drugs to get powerful men into such situations so they can be filmed and blackmailed. In his employ, the Warlock has a gay albino gunman, a hulking man-wolf, leopard men, and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of grinning, straight-razor wielding transvestite dwarfs. How he managed to even find, let alone recruit, such a huge number of willing and murderous cross-dressing little people with high-pitched helium voices is just a testament to his unspeakable occult powers.

Olden was obviously following the trend of the day, which found the United States in a fit of Satanic cult panic (it would flare up again in the 1980s, and we’re probably due for it to return to the public consciousness sometime in the next year or two). Stories of ritualistic sex orgies, kidnapping, murder, and other reportedly ghoulish undertakings dominated headlines when headline writers didn’t have time to write another headline about Vietnam, nuclear war, economic collapse, crime, or terrorism. In times of extreme real-world crisis, we humans often seek the comfort of more outlandish and often wholly manufactured dangers. So the great Satanic scare began, and the creators of popular entertainment jumped on it voraciously. Olden, like pretty much all of them, just lumped every piece of fantastic shit he could into his cult, mixing devil worship, witchcraft, murder, cannibalism, voodoo, S&M, and whatever else made for something over-the-top and outrageous, then set it against a determined black guy with a katana.

The Warlock was published in 1975. The popularity of the series coupled with the pop culture popularity of martial arts and black action films seemed to guarantee that a movie would be made. And pretty much everyone agrees that Jim Kelly circa 1975 was born to play the Black Samurai. He had the look. He had the attitude. He had the skills. And he had a major supporting role in Enter the Dragon, not to mention pretty much all of that film’s most quotable lines. When I read the first Black Samurai book, I assumed independently of this film that Robert Sand looked like Jim Kelly. Other people must have felt the same way, because in 1977, Kelly stepped into the role.

Kelly’s acting career began almost by accident. After winning a major karate tournament, Kelly was hired to train actor Calvin Lockhart for the movie Melinda. The producers were so impressed by Kelly’s charisma and physical prowess that they gave him a small role in the film. About this first acting gig, Kelly himself is candid. He looked good on-screen, but there was no danger of an Academy Award in his future. Still, the man had an undeniable something, and Bruce Lee was always keen on casting people who were martial artists first, actors second, which is part of the reason Kelly found his way into a substantial role in Enter the Dragon. Kelly’s acting was still shaky, but the film was written and constructed in a way to play to his primary strength, which was being bad-ass. His natural charisma takes over, and in the end, he ends up being as memorable as Bruce Lee — not to mention the fact that his response to Mr. Han’s taunts about defeat are answered with the greatest comeback over: “When it comes, I won’t even notice, because I’ll be too busy lookin’ good.”

With Kelly having made such a splash in Enter the Dragon — and with Bruce Lee suddenly dead — Warner Bros. leaned on the man with the perfectly spherical afro to become a leading man. Black Belt Jones was the result, and it was a winner, even if Kelly’s ability to carry a film by himself was still suspect. Shortly thereafter, he found himself as part of an ensemble of bad-asses for his next, even better film. And then it all started to fall apart.

I’m not certain as to the exact details of the deal that brought Black Samurai to movie screens. I don’t know if Kelly was the rights owner, or if somehow the rights ended up in the hands of Al Adamson. What I do know is that by 1977, Jim Kelly’s star had faded. After Enter the Dragon, he was going to be the next big thing. Black Belt Jones and Three the Hard Way seemed to confirm his ascension. But then, all of a sudden, the gas started running out of the blaxploitation tank. If you didn’t have the instant charisma or business acumen of Fred Williamson or Pam Grier, time was running out on you to build your base before the 80s came along and ushered in the era of the great white action hero (plus Carl Weathers). Fred Williamson prevailed, mostly because he had enough cash saved up to produce his own movies. But as blaxploitation faded and white-washed Hollywood reasserted its control, Kelly found himself on the outside looking in. Any number factors may have contributed. Word got around that he had an ego, though I’d say he had the tools to back it up. And if it was the fact that he wasn’t a very good actor — well, as Kelly himself said, neither was Chuck Norris, but Hollywood seized on Chuck and forced him mercilessly down our throats until we accepted him as a mainstream superstar. Had Norris been black, Kelly claims (and rightfully so, I think), the situation for the man with the wicked spinning back kick might have been very different.

Things went downhill from Three the Hard Way (which was one of the best action films of the 70s), and before too long, Kelly was putting in token appearances in Hong Kong films or showing up in stuff like One Down, Two to Go — a half-hearted sequel to Three the Hard Way and in which Jim Kelly’s character disappears for almost the entire movie. Shortly thereafter, Kelly himself disappeared from the movie scene almost entirely, popping up from time to time in small television roles but basically staying off the radar despite the fact that so many fans were looking for him. The bell curve of 70s action stars and their relationship to fans and media can be best explained using the stars of Three the Hard Way: Fred Williamson, Jim Brown, and Jim Kelly. Williamson is always more than happy to sit down and toot his own horn, talk blaxploitation and cigarellos, and go on and on with great stories and a genial pride and talkativeness about what he did and continues to do. Jim Brown is a much more guarded individual. It’s hard to get an interview with him, and when you do, he’s apparently keen on testing the interviewer and making sure he isn’t about to waste his time with some idiot (the most famous example to me being when one of the guys from Bad-Azz Mofo scored an interview with Brown, but Brown wouldn’t answer anything until the interviewer himself answered a question to Brown’s satisfaction: what does it mean to be black). But he will talk on occasion, just as on occasion he’ll show up in a good-natured ribbing of his persona, as we got in I’m Gonna Git You Sucka.

And then there’s Jim Kelly, who vanished and didn’t speak with anyone about his movies for years. When interest in the films was revived in the 1990s, Kelly remained M.I.A. even when Jim Brown willingly dusted off the foot and put it to ass in Original Gangstas. Even after tracking him down, both Bad-Azz Mofo and Giant Robot magazines failed to get him to agree to an interview. Part of it had to do with Kelly devoting himself to martial arts and tennis, his two physical pursuits of choice. Part of it came from Kelly not wanting to have his work taken as a joke, even a well-intentioned one. And part of it was probably just not wanting to deal with annoying idiots like me asking him about John Saxon’s kicking technique. Weirdly enough, when Kelly finally did resurface, it was for a token appearance in a cheap “Rudy Ray More Hip Hop Party” music video tacked on to the end of a Something Weird Video collection of blaxploitation trailers. And in 2009, he appeared in a small role in a movie called Afro Ninja: Destiny, a movie starring and somehow inspired by a stuntman who became an internet sensation when his (supposed) audition tape of a flubbed stunt got posted to YouTube.

Not knowing beforehand what one was in for, a person can’t help but get a little excited about the prospect of Jim Kelly starring as the Black Samurai. If only someone besides Al Adamson had made this movie! But Al Adamson did make the movie, so we have to deal with what we have. And what we have is a wildly uneven, completely bizarre, generally sloppy adaptation of The Warlock, and had I not read The Warlock, I wouldn’t have known that so much of this movie’s ultra-bizarre nonsense is present in the source material. The devil worship and voodoo, the sex cult, the killer midgets — everything but the attack vulture, which was Al Adamson’s primary contribution to the proceedings, and one I assume must have made Marc Olden slap himself on the forehead for not having thought of it when he was writing the book. Al Adamson was better known for cheap, boring horror films than he was for either martial arts or black action films, but the inclusion of devil worshipers and killer midgets must have made him feel in more familiar territory. The movie plays with some chronology and motivations and changes up the finale, but for the most part, this is a pretty straight-forward, if lazily executed, recreation of the book.

Things start out with some establishing shots of Hong Kong. Of course, the lavish (well, relatively speaking) inclusion of what looks to be a mixture of stock footage and stuff Adamson actually shot for the movie doesn’t change the fact that this is just a lot of footage of Toki (Hong Kong film regular Essie Lin Chia) walking down streets, with occasional shots of some dudes with skeevy mustaches looking around corners. They wait until she’s properly attired in a bikini and lounging poolside to make their move. After gunning down a few of those white jacket-clad servants who always get gunned down in these kinds of movies (and inevitably fall into a pool), the men led by the dastardly Chavez (Roberto Contreras) kidnap Toki, causing the pretty awesome cut-rate Black Samurai version of the Foxy Brown credits to roll.

Jim Kelly, of course stars as Robert Sand, the black samurai — though when we first meet him, he’s indulging in Kelly’s other physical culture passion: tennis. The samurai is contracted to hunt down a criminal mastermind known as Janicot — The Warlock — who uses a voodoo cult as his army. Sand is uninterested in interrupting his vacation to chase after some goofy wizard, until he learns that Janicot has kidnapped Toki, the grand-daughter of Sand’s samurai master (in the book, she and Sand are in love, but she remains loyal to her husband, who is a decent man). Which means that before too long, Sand is up to his…well, basically his waist…in bullwhip-wielding midget hitmen and dudes dressed up as leopards.

In more capable hands, even with a modest budget, this could have been one of the great action films of the 1970s, even when relying on a book as batty as The Warlock instead of something more straight-forward. But Adamson botches it almost every step of the way, resulting in one of those films that sounds incredible when described but ends up being a bit of a chore to actually watch. Front and center for the reasons this is such a crummy film is Adamson’s direction. The man never met a shot he couldn’t frame poorly. Martial arts films rely heavily on a director and cinematographer who know how to shoot martial arts action. In 1977, the United States was still feeling things out, and many would say they’ve yet to get the hang of it. The best martial arts cinematography lingers far enough away from the action so that you can actually see the action. They alternate between rapidly edited close-up shots to generate an adrenaline rush, and longer shots that are less edited, allowing the combatants/stuntmen to show off complexly choreographed fight sequences uninterrupted by editing.

American (among others) martial arts fight filming instead relies much more heavily on quick edits and lots of close-ups — ostensibly to cover up the lack of choreography talent on the part of the American stars and stuntmen. This ends up meaning you have a lot of herky-jerky scenes and way too many shots of someone punching into the camera as if it was the point of view of one of the combatants. While this is sometimes used to cover the lack of talent possessed by the stars, that’s not always the case. It’s certainly not the case with a guy like Jim Kelly, whose martial arts skills are impeccable. Instead, it represents a fundamental difference in philosophy between the U.S. and Hong Kong. Although intricate and graceful, Hong Kong kungfu scenes are rarely “realistic.” American fight scenes like to think they take the more realistic approach, presenting fights more in line with how fights are in the real world. The problem, of course, is that fights in the real world are usually sloppy, clumsy, and boring. Additionally, there are insurance risks Hong Kong filmmakers can take with their stars and stuntmen that simply would not fly in the United States. All this means that for decades, fight choreography here lagged behind Hong Kong, a situation that was only rectified when everyone in Hong Kong who could actually fight in a movie got too old and was replaced by boy band idols with no skills, thus dragging Hong Kong down to our level rather than ever forcing the United States to elevate its game. And then CG came into effect.

Anyway, my point is this: imagine how bad American martial arts camera work is even in the hands of a good director. Now imagine a bad director doing a bad copy of bad direction, and you’re beginning to approach the level of plodding blandness that Al Adamson manages to conjure up. His camera never seems to be looking in the right place, never seems able to keep up with Jim Kelly — and Jim isn’t even pulling out all the stops. Most of the fight scenes fall into the category of “hero runs away for a little bit, then kicks like a dozen guys who can’t fight.” On occasion, we’re promised a longer, more involved fight between Kelly and someone else who knows martial arts, but they never make good on the promise. That’s always been another big problem with American martial arts films. One guy with kungfu beats up a hundred guys with no kungfu is a lot less fun than just watching one guy with kungfu fight another guy with kungfu. Kelly’s longest fight here goes a couple of minutes, but 99% of that is Kelly and his opponent standing opposite each other while awkwardly looped in post-production dialogue plays. It becomes positively surreal at various points, as the soundtrack goes silent and is replaced by post-production dialogue of Kelly saying stuff like, “Come on, faggot. Faggot. Show me what you got, faggot” like it’s coming from some disembodied voice of God that hates gay people as much as nutjob fundies assume God hates gay people.

In Jim’s defense, though, it was the 1970s, and the guy he was fighting was a lean black guy with a tight polyester shirt knotted up across his chest like Daisy Duke or that gay film critic character Damon Wayans used to portray on In Living Color.

The rest of the film is directed with the same level of disinterest. There’s absolutely no excuse for a film full of karate guys, killer midgets, and devil worshipers to be boring, but Adamson’s lazy direction serves only to enhance the faults of the film that could have otherwise been overlooked. There was a way to make this film look better, more polished, and more exciting, but Adamson was interested in nothing beyond cranking out a film fast enough to capitalize on the Black Samurai books and Kelly’s fading name recognition. The director’s “don’t give a damn” attitude comes through in the film, making it hard to really drum up much enthusiasm even when Jim Kelly breaks a jet pack out of the trunk of his purple sportscar.

Yeah, there’s some jet pack action — and we’re talking real jet pack action, not just Jim Kelly dangling from a crane. My assumption is that whatever budget Al Adamson drummed up for this movie was spent entirely in three places: blowing up an old car, renting out the villa they use as Janicot’s lair, and hiring the jet pack. I don’t suppose I can fault him for spending all his money on the jet pack, even if it makes no sense in the context of the movie. Roaring in on a jet pack while wearing a bright orange jumpsuit, then fluttering around the place like a moth for several minutes is, even to my untrained eye, a poor choice of ways to go about covert surveillance. Poor, but awesome, that is, and if I had a jet pack and a secret mission, I’d probably find a way to shoehorn it in as well, no matter how gratuitous its application. If having to fight a cowboy midget and a couple of guys in leopard print loin cloths is the price I have to pay, so be it.

The whole jet pack sequence reminded me of the “Little Nellie” sequence in You Only Live Twice. Apparently famed Bond art director Ken Adams heard a radio interview with the inventor of this little gyrocopter thing and thought it was so awesome that he sold producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman on jamming it into the movie (Saltzman, in particular, seems to have reacted to everything in the world like a kid in a candy store; as soon as he saw something he liked, he’d insist that it be shoved into whatever Bond film was in production). So you get several minutes of Sean Connery flying around in a gyrocopter, looking for a secret base. There’s a shoot-out with some helicopters, then Bond lands and announces that he didn’t find anything but there must be something there the helicopters didn’t want him to find. The whole sequence is pretty superfluous to the plot, and the jet pack scene in Black Samurai is pretty much the same: Robert Sand (or at least the owner of the jet pack) flies around (with occasional close-ups of Jim Kelly standing there pretending to be flying a jet pack), there’s a fight, and then Sand flies back and announces that he didn’t find anything.

Still, in a movie like Black Samurai, you take what you can get, and if nothing else, Al Adamson gave us a guy flying around with a jet pack for a few minutes.

Listless acting is turned in to match Adamson’s listless direction. As I said earlier, Jim Kelly was not a great actor. He, like many stars, relied more on-screen presence and charisma to gloss over his wooden line delivery. And presence and charisma he has in spades — but not in enough abundance this time to gloss over the rest of the movie. Still, as always, he looks in top shape and moves quick and gracefully. Even though Adamson had no idea how to effectively film the fights and stunts choreographed by Kelly and his stunt team, it’s still fun to watch the man in action. Jim was right — there are worse actors who look worse in action and became bigger stars. This man, like Marc Olden’s books, deserved more than was given to him.

Essie Lin Chai was a veteran actress with a number of quality films to her name, including work in a number of Shaw Brothers films like The Singing Thief, Return of the One-Armed Swordsman, and The Jade-Faced Assassin. One would hope that she would bring some of that Shaw Bros. skill to her role here, but one would be disappointed. Adamson really gives her nothing to do other than wear a bikini and sit in a prison cell (which she does well, although she looks pretty bored). When she finally gets a fight scene (she is, after all, supposed to be the daughter of a samurai master), against Janicot’s main moll, Synne (Marilyn Joi), it’s horribly awkward, slow, and just a tad embarrassing. Essie’s unsteady English means the few lines she does get to deliver are equally awkward, though they are at least delivered with conviction. The film’s other main female character, Marilyn Joi, had previous experience in Al Adamson movies, as well as small roles in a number of better films, like Coffy and Detroit 9000, though folks might be most likely to recognize her as the titular character from The Kentucky Fried Movie‘s “Cleopatra Schwartz” segment. She fares better than many in this film, but as with Chai, she’s given very little to do other than attempt to seduce the Black Samurai and, upon failing, hiss at him and prod him with a sword.

But the biggest disappointment is probably Janicot as played by Bill Roy, a guy whose only notable acting credits are this and another Al Adamson film, Nurse Sherri (also starring Marilyn Joi). Even in the book, the Warlock is a ludicrous, comic book bad guy — every cult leader/Bond villain character all crammed into one guy with an army of transvestite dwarfs. Such a character really, I think, calls for scenery chewing. You have to believe that this dude is crazy, and you have to believe that people would follow him. Roy plays him like an unsuccessful used car salesman. Completely bland. No fun at all. You want the Warlock? Someone should have shelled out enough money to put the character in the hands of Jack Palance. I’d even trade in gratuitous jet pack action if it meant seeing Jack Palance in the role of Janicot/Warlock. In the hands of Bill Roy, there’s never any sense of threat, never any interest in the character. I don’t think Roy is being lazy about it, and I don’t even think he turns in a necessarily bad performance: it’s just the wrong performance.

And though I don’t usually comment on the quality of a DVD release, I feel I should bring up a couple of points in regards to the commonly available Brentwood edition of this movie. It looks like it has been edited — mainly to remove nudity. I don’t know if this is actually the case, or if this is simply an example of terrible editing. Al Adamson movies were not as reliant on nudity as many other drive-in exploitation films (depending instead on capitalizing off popular trends — bikers, blaxploitation, monsters, etc). So it could be that this was simply a blunt instrument style of editing that allowed Adamson to titillate (considering you find any of this garbage titillating) without actually showing the goods. Crappy editing could give the impression that the film has been “edited for content” instead of just poorly edited. I’m not really sure, as this is the only version of the film I’ve seen. It was also common back in the day to have multiple versions of the same film, some with spicier scenes meant for more liberal markets. In the end, it hardly matters. A glimpse of bare breast or butt is hardly enough to salvage this film.

It’s not terribly surprising that when he saw the film, Marc Olden was displeased with what had been done with the character. Even a book as absurd as The Warlock had plenty of entertainment potential in cinematic form, and Adamson captured none of that. For Olden, who put a lot of his heart and soul into the character of Robert Sand, it must have been a bitter experience indeed to watch this movie unfold — especially if, like me, he believed that there was no one in the world more perfect for the role of the Black Samurai than Jim Kelly. But there just wasn’t any real effort put into most of the film, and that saps it, for the most part, of any entertainment value.

I am, as you know, a forgiving and easily entertained man, so while I have little to say that is good about Black Samurai, I also can’t say that I hate the movie. Bad-ass kungfu guy versus midgets and leopard men, with a jet pack and a purple sportscar and a cool looking track suit thrown in for good measure, is going to provide at least some modicum of entertainment, even if it ends up being cold comfort for the overall experience. In the end, though, even if you think the description makes the movie sound like loads of fun, the only truly positive thing I can find to say about Black Samurai is this: it’s better than Hot Potato and One Down, Two to Go.

Release Year: 1977 | Country: United States | Starring: Jim Kelly, Bill Roy, Roberto Contreras, Marilyn Joi, Essie Lin Chia, Biff Yeager, Charles Grant, Jace Khan, Felix Silla, Cowboy Lang, Little Tokyo, Jerry Marin, Alfonso Walters, Charles Walter Johnson, Regina Carrol, D’Urville Martin, Aldo Ray | Writer: Al Adamson | Director: Al Adamson | Cinematographer: Louis Horvath | Producer: Barbara Holden | Alternate Titles: Black Terminator, The Freeze Bomb

Tracing the lineage of Ninja Killer takes a bit of digging in the back alleys of Ankara and Kowloon, but we’re always game for a red eye flight to an exotic city (well, exotic unless you happen to live in Ankara or Kowloon) with a mysterious, raven-haired beauty at our side and nothing in our portmanteau but a stiletto, a flask of scotch, and a loaded Luger we took off a dead German officer during The War. Anyway, here’s the story as best as I know it. In 1974, a graying but still awesome Cuneyt Arkin appeared in the movie Karateciler istanbulda — “Karate Killer in Istanbul,” more or less. It’s hard to find reliable credits for the movie, as most listings conflate the credits for Karateciler istanbulda with those of Ninja Killer, aka Karate Killer — the movie that was formed by Godfrey Ho out of large chunks of Karateciler istanbulda mixed with new footage of Carter Wong making telephone calls. Karateciler istanbulda itself is a pretty awesome slice of mid 70s Turkish action cinema, with Arkin playing a cop out to bust up a Chinese smuggling ring. Credits for this original version of the film often list Carter Wong as being part of it; he’s not. Instead, you get a couple guys I don’t know and Helen Pou. Helen Pou, at least, is a familiar face, having appeared in a number of Shaw Bros. films, usually in a supporting capacity.

There are a lot of fights strung together by scenes of Cuneyt doing manly stuff like sneering at the camera, looking sternly at the camera, looking stoically at the camera, walking stoically thorugh the streets and piers of the city, and for some reason I think we can all understand, playing leap frog with a bunch of bikini chicks on a beach — although his version of leap frog seems to be having the girls squat down in the surf while he trots toward them and sort of kicks them over. It’s all pretty awesome, but nowhere in it will you find Bolo, Carter, or ninjas. That’s where Godfrey Ho and Thomas Tang come into the picture.

As many of you know, these yardbirds were responsible for a monumental pile of crappy movies. In fact, if you were to pile up all of the shitty ninja movies that came out of the Filmark production machine, you would be able to see the pile from space. They were able to make so many movies because they would only film bits and pieces of a movie, usually with anonymous white guys and gratuitous ninjas that could be used over and over. They would then splice those scenes into scenes stolen from existing Hong Kong and Taiwanese movies, often with total disregard for whether or not the films were thematically related in any way. A new script would then be written in an effort — but without much effort — to tie the sundry pieces together. They would then slap a new title on it, usually with the word “Ninja” in it, make up some new credits with Western sounding names, dub the whole thing, and dump it onto the English speaking market. At some point, Karateciler istanbulda ended up on their desks, and once they were done with it, Karateciler istanbulda has become Ninja Killer and now also featured Bolo Yeung, Lau Kar-wing, and Carter Wong — though there were still no ninjas in it anywhere other than the title.

Godfrey Ho films usually turned out almost totally nonsensical, since he would usually try to cram one relatively normal movie — a romantic comedy or underworld melodrama — with something completely bizarre — hopping vampires, undead ninjas, that sort of thing. The two movies never had anything in common, and Ho’s attempts to sew them together just made everything even more confusing. With Ninja Killer, however, Ho and conspirator Thomas Tang have created something almost… competent… in the execution. This is because they’re working with two movies that are actually more or less in the same genre, and one of them — Karateciler istanbulda — is about a guy in Turkey contending with Chinese gangsters. Godfrey Ho is able to wrap that in a story in which most the action is about a Chinese gangster on the lam in Turkey being chased by a Chinese cop and Cuneyt, and the other bit — the new footage — is about the people back in Hong Kong trying to track down that same gangster. The tone is very much the same in the two films, and while the new plot isn’t 100% comprehensible, it’s pretty solid for a Godfrey Ho script — probably because only about 10% of the movie is new footage; the rest is just the Turkish movie with dubbing.

The action begins in Hong Kong, where notorious crime lord Li Tien-ho (the tragically underrated Lau Kar-wing, brother of Lau Kar-leung) has just escaped from prison so he can take revenge against Lu Kung, a crime boss who sold Li out to the cops then took over his territory. Even though Li only had a few months left on his sentence, he broke out of jail because “I couldn’t stand it an longer!” In classic kungfu film plotting, when asked what his plan is for taking down the treacherous Lu Kung, Li exclaims, “To get rid of him!” Vengeful gangsters in these movies always have plans where the sole step is “Kill him!” or “Get him!” — which might explain why so many of them are cooling their heels in prison when we first meet them.

Li’s first move is for him and a couple buddies to put on ill-fitting balaclavas and raid the apartment of one of Lu Kung’s top lieutenants, Bolo Yeung, who’s first move in any fight is to remove his garish polyester shirt (wise, given how ugly most of his shirts are). Incidentally, the few minutes during which Li and his men sport those goofy hoods is about the closest this movie ever comes to having a ninja in it. As is usually the case, Bolo puts up a good fight for a few minutes then gets his ass handed to him. I’ve noticed this before, but it bears mentioning: Bolo has a really weird fighting style. He always stands sideways to the people he’s fighting, and always looks in the opposite direction of the one in which he’s punching. Maybe this is why he’s constantly getting beat up; it seems not all that great a style. Maybe he’s really paranoid about getting a steel finger in the eye or something. On the other hand, I love that he moves with an equally strange light-footed gracefulness, especially for such a big dude. Ultimately, though, his dedication to being the Steve Reeves of Hong Kong seems to have done nothing but make him the go-to guy whenever Chinese people want to prove that wiry little dudes are way better than sour-faced beefcake. Anyway, once Bolo realizes that it’s Li under the ridiculous hood (if they were all going to reveal their identities anyway, why wear the dopey masks in the first place?), he apologizes, claims he had no idea Lu Kung was a weasel, and swears to cut Li in on all future deals.

Meanwhile, a group of cops sitting in what looks like a Holiday Inn conference room (Hong Kong police precincts sure have lovely pattered wallpaper) meet with their captain (Carter Wong) and discuss the need to capture or kill both Li and and Lu. It turns out that Lu has gotten wind of the fact that Li is loose and on the path of vengeance, and so has skedaddled over to Turkey to hang out poolside with buxom Turkish girls until the heat dies down. Carter decides to send crack undercover agent Liu Yung, who goes by the Western first name of Neil — yes, Neil Yung — to team up with Turkish cop Charles (Cuneyt Arkin, finally) and take down Lu Kung, one way or another — though in kungfu films “one way or another” almost always means “punch him in the throat and throw him off a roof” regardless of whether you’re Turkish or Chinese.

And that’s where the new footage ends. The next hour is basically a redubbing of Karateciler istanbulda. Cuneyt and his Chinese partner cruise around Turkey, getting into fights with pretty much anyone who looks at them funny. Cuneyt picks himself up an attractive Chinese girlfriend along the way (Helen Pou), though we know she’s working for Lu Kung. Ha! As if loyalty to her criminal boss can survive the smoldering, manly attractiveness of Cuneyt Arkin! Godfrey Ho doesn’t have much chance to screw up the plot, since the plot speaks the universal language of “two dudes beat everyone up on their way to solving a crime.” It’s pretty straight-forward, and since Turkish action films of the 1970s were keen on mimicking Hong Kong martial arts movies, it all snaps together more or less logically. And not to lapse into reviewing Karateciler istanbulda intead of Ninja Killer, but it must have been somewhat cool and progressive in 1974 to show Turkey’s number one action hero actually falling in love and staying with a Chinese woman. Or maybe not. I don’t know. Turkey is a strange place and often more liberal (and conservative) than we Westerners realize.

I really wish there were more reliable credits somewhere for Karateciler istanbulda. Even Turkish sources seem to mix the two movies up. Even in the Karateciler istanbulda credits, direction is credited to “Viktor Lam.” I have no idea who he is. The Ninja Killer credits, on the other hand, list this movie not just as starring Lau Kar-wing, but as “Super Starring” him. And I think they’re listing Cuneyt Arkin as “Joey Louis.” But whoever directed the original Turkish movie — or more accurately, whoever did the action direction and choreography for it — really hit one out of the park, relatively speaking. Martial arts choreography in Turkish films has generally been admirable more for its enthusiasm than its precision. There’s a whole lot of spirited flailing about and Jimmy Wang Yu style “swingy arm” fighting, but no one would mistake it for the work of choreography masters. But the fights in Karateciler istanbulda are very nearly the equal of a Hong Kong film from the same era, and not just when it’s the Chinese guys fighting each other. Cuneyt looks pretty good in his fights as well. It’s obvious that he’s not on the same level as the guys from Hong Kong, but the nature of this co-production elevates everyone’s game, making for one of the better straight-forward Turkish action movies I’ve seen.

The film returns briefly to Hong Kong so we can check in on the progress of Carter Wong and his crew. Man, Carter does nothing in this movie but sit at a desk. You’d think he’d at least turn up for one fight scene, but not really. I guess Godfrey Ho could afford to pay Carter to appear in the movie, but not to actually do anything. Instead, the finale has Carter making a dramatic phone call, announcing that with the help of Charles and Neil Yung, they have seized all of Lu Kung’s illicit goods. Hooray! Then it’s off to the warehouse district so Bolo can put in one more appearance, taking off his shirt and getting his ass kicked once again by Lau Kar-wing. Then Carter finally gets up from his desk in order to have a really brief tussle with Lau Kar-wing that ends up being sort of crummy, which I guess makes me happy that it only lasted like half a minute. After that, we cut back to Turkey for a pretty awesome rooftop finale involving Cuneyt, Neil Yung, and the villainous Lu Kung. Again, I don’t know much about the two guys playing the Chinese characters, but they both give it their all. We’re not talking the best Hong Kong martial arts has to offer, but for a film that was made in 1974, when the kungfu film was still finding its legs, I was satisfied with the fighting.

You know what? Sometimes, you gotta give the devil his due. We’ve certainly taken shots at Godfrey Ho over the years — and he deserved every one of them — so when the man does something right, I’m more than happy to admit it. Ninja Killer was a lot fun, even if there were no ninjas, and even if my dreams of Cuneyt Arkin fighting Bolo Yeung never came to fruition. It helps that Godfrey Ho got his hands on what was basically a pretty good action film to begin with, then didn’t fuck with it too much other than to add some scenes of Carter Wong making telephone calls and Bolo taking off his shirt. The stunts and action in the original Turkish source material were good, and the new footage spliced in by Ho and Filmark had the benefit of featuring Lau Kar-wing.

Though his brothers get all of the attention, Kar-wing was a pretty good director in his own right His films were never as complex as Lau Kar-leung’s (Legendary Weapons of China, Drunken Master II), and he was never as famous an actor as adopted brother Lau Kar-fei (36th Chamber of Shaolin), but in terms of no-nonsense, old school kungfu, it’s hard to top movies like Lau Kar-wing’s He Has Nothing But Kung Fu, Fists and Guts, or Treasure Hunters — three of my favorites. I’m guessing that Lau’s involvement with the new footage is why the couple of fights they offer are substantially better than one often expects from a Godfrey Ho film.

It’s not all smooth sailing, but Ninja Killer isn’t just good for a Godfrey Ho film. It’s got the slightly ragged look of an old school kungfu film, but that’s not really a problem in my book. And I don’t know who did the music for this, but setting an otherwise serious chase scene to a synth version of “Flight of the Bumblebee” is really not much different than if they’d just slapped “Yakety Sax” onto the soundtrack. But hey — it’s not like it was much better in the original Turkish film, which couldn’t resist using that generic “oriental” music that I think was probably written by someone who wasn’t Chinese. But whatever, man. Cuneyt Arkin is totally bad-ass, and since the bulk of this movie is taken from one of his movies, he’s the star of the show. That’s a much better deal than Richard Harrison in a red and yellow ninja costume. Cuneyt may have no idea he was ever in a movie called Ninja Killer, but what can you do?

Release Year: 1974 and sometime in the 1980s | Country: Turkey, Hong Kong | Starring: Cuneyt Arkin, Helen Pou, Wang Li, Lou Wing, Carter Wong, Bolo Yeung, Lau Kar-wing, Turgut Ozatay, İbrahim Kurt, Bulent Kayabas, Birtane Gungor, Hasan Yildiz | Screenplay: William CF Lo and someone calling themselves “Zacky Chan” | Director: Laurence Chan (who I believe is actually Godfrey Ho) and Victor Lam | Music: Chan Kwok Wan | Producer: Thomas Tang

In short order, we are introduced to a gang of murderous thugs, lead by the murderous Osman (Osman Betin, who played “the murderous” someone or other in more films that a super computer could tally), who are doing what murderous thugs do best — murderin’ people. So begins a rapid succession of scenes in which they kick down a door and shoot or karate chop whoever is behind it. From time to time, their target will be accompanied by a woman in a bikini, and at no point does director Cetin Inanc fail to begin the shot with the camera leering at the woman’s crotch. Frankly, I’m surprised he didn’t shoot at least one murder with the camera spending the entire time looking out from between a woman’s spread legs. Other than that one oversight, however, Inanc and his cameraman are thorough cinematographers, being sure to shoot the woman’s mid-section from front and back, both at eye level and from the floor, being sure not to totally neglect cleavage despite the director’s interest obviously being below the navel.

Most of these killings are quick hits, until we get to a family driving down a country road and meet the eventual heroine of the film, played by Emel Tumer. Incidentally, our introduction to her is via yet another crotch shot from a camera placed on the floorboard of the car, staring up her dress — though to be fair, “staring up her dress” only takes about half an inch to accomplish, as it’s a very short dress. Emel and her family are on their way to the city to testify against big time criminal Hasmet (perennial Turkish villain Hüseyin Peyda), and it turns out that Osman and his gang are killing off all the witnesses. Because Inanc felt that his movie wasn’t violent or sleazy enough in the first few minutes, he tries to make up for it with so many panty-clad groin shots in this sequence that even the makers of Haseena Atom Bomb might tell him to tone it down a bit.

For no reason at all other than “why the fuck not,” Osman’s men make themselves up to look like zombies and all lie in the middle of the road, waiting for Emel, her father, and her little brother to drive by. When the car is forced to stop by the pile of shirtless men lying in the road, the thugs leap up and stagger around, doing their best George Romero zombie impersonations while Osman — I kid you not — beats the shit out of the little kid and breaks the lad’s neck! He kills the old man, too, but that barely even registers after we’ve watch Osman relish snapping the neck of an eight-year-old. While this is happening — holy shit, Osman even sets the dead little kid on fire, just to be a super dick! — the “zombies” are chasing Emel, whose dress is so short that it can’t even qualify as a belt. Naturally, this entire sequence is shot from a low angle in order to maximize the star power of Emel’s bright red under-lovelies.

This is the point where, quite frankly, you expect a tasteless rape scene that gives a lascivious director a chance to show some gratuitous nudity, but miraculously Inanc resists that urge — and somehow comes up with a scene that is even more tasteless as the thugs pretend to “eat” Emel. This mostly consists of them grunting like feral pigs and mashing their faces against Emel’s bare flesh, underwear, and cleavage while the camera focuses intently on her nethers. Things look pretty bad for poor Emel, who is in danger of being face-smeared to death by shirtless grown men — hey, unnamed extra, I saw you steal that cheap boob grab! — pretending to be zombies. Somehow, though, she manages to escape her tormentors and runs off into the forest, the camera being sure to follow the bouncing, bobbing trail of her red panties for as long as possible.

And then Cuneyt Arkin strides proudly into the movie.

Like I said, all that murder, gore, sleaze, karate, and partial nudity that is somehow far more pornographic than actual pornography, happens in the mere ten minute opening of this film. Cetin Inanc’s commitment not just to every lurid glory of the exploitation film, but also to wasting no time getting there, is truly a lesson in no-nonsense movie making. He knows what trash film fans want, and he sees no reason not to charge with gusto into those things from the very first second. This isn’t all that uncommon among trash film directors — after all, you want to front load your movie to get people interested. The big difference between the films of Cetin Inanc and many other directors, however, is that many other directors let their films lapse into fifty minutes of mind-numbing tedium after their glorious opening salvo. Inanc, on the other hand, tends to regard the no-holds-barred insanity of his opening scene as nothing but a warm-up for the next hour or so of the film left to burn through. Rather than leading you on with a tease that never delivers on its promise, Inanc maintains and often exceeds the breakneck pace and lunacy of his opening ten minutes. There is no sleight of hand here — if you are thrilled, entertained, or grossly offended by the first ten minutes of Vahsi Kan, you will maintain that reaction for the entirety of the film.

Cuneyt, gray in hair but still possessed of a commanding presence and steely glower that makes him totally believable as an ass-kicker supreme, plays Riza, a former commando and current matchstick chewing aficionado who was framed by the dastardly Hasmet and is apparently being walked to prison across Turkey by two guards. When they stumble upon the remnants of Osman’s handywork, the guards try to rescue the old man and the little kid from the fire, unaware that the two are already dead. In the process, they get exploded, which leaves Riza more or less a free man. But he’s also an honorable man, determined to see that the gravely wounded guards are delivered to a hospital for medical treatment. Unfortunately, the nearest town is lorded over by Hasmet, and he has instructed Osman and his goons to let no one enter or leave.

When Osman confronts Riza walking into town, the movie begins to earn its unofficial American title: “Turkish First Blood.” At first, Osman’s goons are happy to taunt Riza and simply deny him access to the town. But when Riza decies to recreate the scene in First Blood (with music from First Blood!) where Brian Dennehy’s small-town sheriff drops Rambo off at the edge of town only to see, in his rear view mirror, Rambo turn around and start walking back into town, Osman decides to be less charitable. They string up and beat the tar out of Riza for a few minutes, which Riza accepts for some reason. I assume because he wants to show how he can take a beating. Then he decides to yell and whip out the kungfu and his big-ass knife, which he had strapped under his suit jacket even though he was presumably being taken to prison when first we met him. Riza then recreates the “jumping off a cliff and breaking your fall by hitting the branches of a tree” scene from First Blood, but really, who can blame him? My elementary school friend Larry Becker did the same thing by jumping off the roof of his house and into the waiting arms of a tree in his back yard. That was not the first time, nor the last, that Larry would visit the hospital. Kid managed to get a go-cart onto the roof at some point. How the fuck does a nine-year-old get a go-cart onto the roof of a house???

While a battered Riza stalks through the woods in survival mode, looking for a spacious hideout cave, Hasmet and Osman try to convince the local cops that Riza killed the guards accompanying him, and probably everyone else, too. In a departure from the tone of First Blood, however, the cops think Hasmet is full of shit. This is Turkey in the 1980s, after all, and casting cops and soldiers as dim-witted or evil was frowned upon. With the cops not buying their shtick, and at least one of them obviously serving as Riza’s Colonel Troutman (someone has to give the “this guy’s good” speech, after all), Hasmet sends Osman into the woods to track down and kill the wily ex-commando. Oh, and it turns out that Hasmet and Riza have a past, and that Riza was somehow responsible for turning Hasmet’s murderous son into an armless, legless psychopath — because this movie wasn’t batshit enough without the addition of a cackling quadruple amputee screaming insanely about slaughtering people.

Oh, and also, Hasmet lounges around drinking Johnnie Walker Red while accompanied by a bored bikini chick (a cameo by Arzu Aytun, yet another Turkish cult film regular), because Cetin Inanc realized it had been like five minutes since he shoved his camera into a woman’s vagina.

From here, it’s pretty much First Blood, right down to the “They drew first blood” line, except with the added bonus of some more partial nudity and ass shots courtesy of Emel, who Riza stumbles across in the forest and for whom he sews a lovely red “Jane of the Jungle” loin cloth out of some brand new cloth that was buried in a pile of leaves. After getting to know each other for a minute or two, they fall in love because they are both wearing awesome headbands. Not surprisingly, there are no speeches about American disrespect for Vietnam vets and no serious anti-war message, although there is the usual “Riza only commits violence in pursuit of peace.” Emel thus outfitted in a sexy mini-toga to compliment Riza’s Rambo brand burlap sack shirt, the hero sets to stalking around the forest, stabbing the hell out of Osman and company while Emel bathes in the river and crawls up ass shot-augmenting hills. Eventually, Osman’s goons are so decimated that Hasmet himself has to take to the woods with an even larger assault force of guys with even bigger mustaches.

A movie that’s been this action-packed and over-the-top demands an even more absurdly overblown finale, preferably with shitloads of mustachiod dudes getting impaled on punji sticks. If you think Cetin Inanc is going to disappoint you in any way, you don’t know much about Cetin Inanc. Riza spin kicks, shoots, and slashes his way through a seemingly endless procession of bad guys in windbreakers. Recognizing that this is hardly enough, Cetin Inanc also give us bulldozers, dynamite, machine guns, laughing guys with bad teeth, lonesome horn music, production assistants throwing styrofoam boulders at Emel, smoldering looks of vengeance, a rip-off of the desert truck chase from Raiders of the Lost Ark (complete with Cuneyt clinging to a truck while the same music from that scene in Raiders plays), dummies thrown off cliffs, a sideways flashback featuring a fight over what looks to be a bottle of Mike’s Hard Lemonade, and really just more awesomeness than the average human brain can process. The final knife and kungfu fight between Risa and Osman is also pretty good, and Jesus — we haven’t even gotten to the part where Cuneyt blows up a quadriplegic.

Throughout the history of film, there have been certain combinations of writer and director or director and star that click. Separately, they may both make good movies, but together the game is elevated to a whole different level. Cetin Inanc and Cuneyt Arkin are definitely two creators that, when put together, produce entertainment far beyond the boundaries of awesomeness. Inanc made at least one other First Blood/Rambo cash-in, 1986′s Korkusuz, aka Rampage. That movie is pretty good. It even stars most of the same people as Vahsi Kan in basically the same roles — except for Cuneyt Arkin. The combination of Arkin and Inanc just elevates Vahsi Kan to mind-boggling levels of madness. Korkusuz is good, but it just can’t hold a candle to what happens when Inanc gets to work with Arkin. The already hyperactive pace of the standard Inanc film seems to do a bunch of speed, and the style that results is best described as “the screamin’ bug-eyed school” of film making.

As is always the case with Turkish pop cinema, there’s a lot of rough edges around Vahsi Kan, but the script is more or less sensical, at least when compared to most Turkish action films, largely because minus the loony opening sequence, they basically stick to copying the script from First Blood. There’s really no good explanation for why those two guards were marching a hand-cuffed Riza to prison on foot through the scenic countryside, but who knows? Maybe one of the benefits of doing time in a Turkish prison is you get to preface it with a leisurely stroll through an idyllic countryside. And why Osman’s gang pretends for one scene to be zombies is completely beyond me, but all in all, the logical missteps are minor in comparison, and the movie never stays standing still long enough to give you time to wonder.

By most accounts, Cuneyt Arkin was experiencing the same sort of deep blue career funk in the early 1980s as plagued Amitabh Bachchan at the same time. Both were men who ruled the 60s and 70s, with abundant charisma and a smoldering edge to them. But by the time the 1980s rolled around, things were changing faster than the aging leading men could keep pace with, even though both were still in good shape and capable of cutting an impressive presence. Both men found themselves working in increasingly cheap, shoddy action films. The notable difference is that Amitabh, with a few exceptions, appeared in movies like Toofan, from which very little joy can be mined despite the outlandish premise, while Cuneyt kept the company of Cetin Inanc, who put the aging actor in films that, if not polished, were still bursting with energy and a willingness to just go absolutely fucking nuts. The result is that Arkin, in the midlife crisis doldrums of his career, appeared in a lot more enjoyable than Amitabh when he was in the same situation. Arkin’s career in the 1980s under the guidance of Cetin Inanc was basically what would have happened if Bachchan spent the entire 1980s appearing in Mard.

For his part, even if Cuneyt was depressed and drinking a lot during this part of his career, he never let it show on screen by giving a listless or disinterested performance. No matter what crazy scenario Inanc puts his leading man in, Arkin gives it his all, throwing his best steely-eyed glares and putting everything into his screams of rage and stuntwork. In the latter half of his forties by the time Vahsi Kan was made, Arkin still throws down believably with villains half his age — and he managed to sustain that level of energy in many other Cetin Inanc films during the decade.

Matching him glower for glower is Inanc’s go-to villain, the Vincent Price-esque Huseyin Peyda. I’m going to assume this guy has played at least one role in his career other than hammy, eye-bulging, whisky-sipping villain, but I’ve never seen it. Every time I see him in a movie, he’s sitting in a living room with a half-naked chick, drinking scotch, and grimacing in disbelief that his treachery is being challenged by some uppity hero. If I ever got a chance to travel through time and recruit my own Legion of Doom, Peyda would be at the top of the list of recruits, right alongside Vic Diaz, Billy Drago, Richard Lynch, Amrish Puri, Shing Fui-on, and Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa. Insted of a floating skull in the swamp, I’d probably headquarter them in a Quality Inn, albeit a nice one, with a heated whirlpool.

Filling out the main cast is gorgeous damsel in distress Emel Tumer, who I think gets lower billing in the credits than her panties. As an actress, she’s game for whatever squirmy idea and camera angle Inanc throws at her, and her esprit de corp makes up somewhat for the fact that she’s a pretty terrible actress in this outing, looking vacant and confused most of the time. Well, in whatever scenes where we can see her facial expressions instead of just her underwear. When she dons her Cuneyt-fashioned combat bikini, I thought we were going to get some nice “foot-to-ass chick” action, but unfortunately, she spends the second half of the film doing little more than biting her knuckles and falling down. In that sense, Vahsi Kan is actually– horrifyingly — less gender progressive than Haseena Atom Bomb!

On the other hand, Vahsi Kan doesn’t share Haseena Atom Bomb‘s affection for gang rape (unless it’s being done by the camera itself), so I guess we can call it even. In the battle for female empowerment vis-a-vis Vahsi Kan and Haseena Atom Bomb, everybody loses! Inanc would make up for Emel’s uselessness in later films, where he balanced grimy crotch shots of his leading lady with scenes of her kungfu-ing the hell out of bad guys. I doubt this has much to to with any sense of feminist liberation on the part of Cetin Inanc, and has a lot more to do with him realizing one day that a chick in a bikini doing a stretched out karate high kick is really just one more way to film a gal from his favorite angle.

There’s very little point, as far as I’m concerned, in indulging in any sort of moral or political debate over a movie as patently goofy and gleeful as Vahsi Kan. But if I may digress just a bit, I’m convinced beyond any hope of convincing me otherwise that a huge amount of suffering on this planet could be eliminated if we stopped being so freaked out, hypocritical, hysterical, and contradictory regarding the simple human desire to see other human naked and doin’ it or be a human naked and doin’ it. The amount of misery we as a race cause ourselves pretending to be spooked by and indignant over sex and nudity is, to me, as offensive and that same sex and nudity seems to be to others. Come on, people! How many lives do we have to ruin over this? How many times does a crusading, puritanical political or religious blowhard have to get caught in a sex scandal before we stop taking these assholes opinions about sex and nudity seriously? Not to go all hippie free love and dancing naked in a field of flowers while listening to Honeybus’ “Under the Silent Tree,” but well, we’d all be a hell of a lot better off doing that than shaking our heads and persecuting the simple human desire to doff our duds or watch consensual others do the same.

Plus, Honeybus’ “Under the Silent Tree” is a fantastic song.

Turkish cinema in the 1970s was no less insane than it was in the 1980s. The big differentiator between the two is the fact that, in the 1970s, Turkish film makers could get away with showing full frontal female nudity (I don’t know if the same was true of male nudity, though I doubt it, as full frontal male nudity is still taboo in like almost every country because… you know… ding-a-lings). Exploitation film makers didn’t miss many opportunities to flash audiences with bared breasts and pubic hair. When the 80s rolled around though, censors decided that Turkish films had reveled in filth long enough. They started putting censorship laws in place or, at the very least, applied substantial pressure to film makers to put some clothes on the ladies. Fundamentalist religious movements were gaining momentum elsewhere in the world, and while Turkey was a monument to more relaxed and liberal interpretations of the Islamic faith and its rules, nothing makes politicians happier than pandering to moral indignation. Thank God we’ve moved beyond that.

Predictably, efforts to sanitize films by making it more difficult to get away with outright nudity resulted in film makers getting really creative with their sleaze rather than eliminating it. It was pretty much no different than what happened when nearby(ish) Pakistan tried the same thing and ended up with Haseena Atom Bomb and lots of saucy mujra videos on the internet, or when Japan tried it and ended up with Entrails of a Virgin and Urotsukidoji. People want to see the naughty bits, and come hell or high water, film makers will always find a way to violate the spirit of censorship laws while technically sticking to the letter of those same laws. Often times, as is the case with Vahsi Kan, compliance with the tsk-tsking of nudity results in scenes that are far raunchier and more sexually explicit than they would have been if the director had been allowed to show nakedness — since most of the time, the mere presence of a naked woman, even just lying around doing nothing, was more than enough to satisfy lusty viewers. Deprived of that, film makers went overboard, partially to sate their audience, but probably even more so to flip off censors, who I assume reacted to movies like Vahsi Kan with the exaggerated finger-wagging and arm-flailing outrage one sees from the censor boards in your finer 1980s heavy metal music videos.

Vahsi Kan is 80s action cinema stripped of its fat and delivering only the basest, most essential elements of action exploitation. It’s crude and violent, overblown and insane, sexist and macho and morally indefensible. The pace is frantic from the first shot, and it doesn’t take many breaks. Cetin Inanc has no time, at roughly 70 minutes of film, to focus on anything but the core of what makes people love trashy action, and with Vahsi Kan, he and Cuneyt Arkin pretty hit every note perfectly, Of course, they hit them with a sledge hammer, but it’s a well-handled sledge hammer. The only reason I can’t call Vahsi Kan the quintessential Inanc-Arkin action film is because pretty much every film they made together was the quintessential Inanc-Arkin action film.

Release Year: 1983 | Country: Turkey | Starring: Cuneyt Arkin, Emel Tumer, Huseyin Peyda, Oktar Durukan, Necip Tekçe, Arzu Aytun, Turgut Ozatay, Osman Betin, Suheyl Egriboz, Yilmaz Kurt, Cetin Basaran, Mehmet Ugur, Baki Tamer, Ali Demir | Screenplay: Cetin Inanc, Cuneyt Arkin | Director: Cetin Inanc | Cinematography: Sedat Ulker | Producer: Mehmet Karahafız | Alternate Title: Wild Blood