In my senior year of high school in an International Relations class, I was preparing to give a presentation on the nation of Turkey. A week before the project was due, I had been complaining to my boyfriend about the amount of research I would have to do about Turkish culture. He offered to help and, smirking, sent me this link: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7634280864799169516#
So I watched it. I watched all 88 minutes of this life-changing film. And I could not believe it.
Üç dev adam is one of the most widely known Turkish movies internationally. It translates loosely to Three Strong Men, but is also known as Turkish Spiderman vs Turkish Captain America, a rivalry that Hollywood would never have the guts to incur. In this portrayal of the well-known American superheroes, the Spider-Man character is in fact a murderous villain, leading a violent gang of evil-doers around the Turkish metropolitan of Istanbul; he also has the power to regenerate, something that I don't believe is Marvel Comics canon. Captain America's main operative throughout the movie is to rid the city of the Spiderman character, as he is extremely dangerous and murders at random. Captain America is aided by a Mexican luchador wrestler named Santo, who is, from what I have researched, a very well-known figure in Turkey, at least during the 70s when this movie was written.
The movie itself is trash, an hour and fifteen minutes of gore, sex and poor craftsmanship, and it is not supposed to be faint: the beginning of the movie features a women being murdered by the Spider-Man's gang with a boat (I will not go into the gruesome details, and if I haven't made it clear, you should not visit the link above if gore and sexual content affect you). With the rise of digitalization, the movie, which otherwise made very little profit, has been uploaded to several video-sharing sites, which has increased its popularity significantly. Unfortunately, this movie is all of what much of the world's Internet users know about Turkish cinema, which has a rich and significant history. However, this film actually has historical purpose within the study of film in Turkey.
Other bloggers have discussed on the Ning the field of Turkish cinema, so I will not lay out all of the details, but is relevant to discuss the concept of the Yeşilcam era. Yeşilcam is akin to Hollywood or Bollywood in terms of cinema, and this cinematic period between the 1950s and 70s is considered to be one of the great booms of the film industry in the geographic region. Making movies was considered very professional and artistic, and movie-going was a popular pastime. During the Yeşilcam era, around 300 films were being produced every year. However, this all declined once the household television set became more mainstream and affordable. Once every Turk could afford the entertainment of television in their own home, what was the point of going out to the movies? The revenue that one could intake from directing or producing a movie declined significantly, and so the era died out. However, movies obviously did not become extinct. Now the most effective movie would be one that was cheap to produce and would garner enough public interest that people would watch it rather than simply stay in front of their televisions, rather than an artistic, well crafted film. It is during this time that Üç Dev Adam was released: its characters were famous world-wide, its violence would be sure to captivate, and its storyline was tried and true - violent stories like The Godfather had just been released in America only a year or two prior to the release of Üç Dev Adam and they were very successful.
And historically, Üç Dev Adam was not the only "Turkish rip-off movie", as they are affectionately known throughout the states, to be coined in that era. Ayşecik ve Sihirli Cüceler Rüyalar Ülkesinde is known in English as The Turkish Wizard of Oz for its many similarities to L. Frank Baum's piece, and was released in 1971. Şeytan, a movie with a very similar plot to that of The Exorcist, was aired in 1974, and Yarasa Adam, or Turkish Batman, was aired in 1973. Nor was Turkey the only nation to have film producers who violated copyright laws. India, a nation well-known for the quality of its films, faced a similar trend around the same time period, and an infamous movie called Dariya Dil, or Indian Superman, was produced in 1988. These movies were less expensive than buying the distribution rights to the original movies, and made a large profit due to the similarities in plot that they shared with the originals.
Today, these movies are still distributed, though not as often, as more copyright laws have been imposed all over the world. Turkish cinema has been revived through artistic movements. However, the indelible Üç Dev Adam will remain a part of the legacy of the post-Yeşilcam years as long as the Internet continues to perpetuate the popularity of such cinema. Nevertheless, this movie will remain at the very least entertaining, and that was what it was intended to do after all.
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