Sunday Stupid: Hone your body, the Turkish Star Wars way!

In the annals of blatant foreign rip-offs of hallowed exemplars of American cinema, there’s one that stands above all others: Turkish Star Wars. It’s the dreadful standard by which all dreck is judged. How bad is it? It makes Indian Superman look like Casablanca. That’s terrible, people. Really, really terrible.

A 91 minute feature, Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (The Man Who Saved the World) is a pastiche of stolen effects, a nonsensical plot, utterly unbelievable characters and musical scores stolen willy-nilly from box office hits of the day. Turkey has always had a thriving rip-off industry, and this effort has by far gained the most infamy. But despite its dubiously august pedigree, I defy anyone to sit through its entire runtime at one go, as that hour and a half unspools at a glacial pace, opens holes in the space-time continuum, bends Einsteinian physics and makes the clock hands stand still.

If there’s a highlight of the thing it’s the training sequence seen above. In it two heroes chop rocks with their bare hands most goofily, improvise weights with said rocks, hop around, and generally just make complete asses of themselves and their scrawny arms. (My favorite routine is when one guy simply slaps his hands on the ground. I don’t know whether Jack LaLanne ever had that in his regimen. Doubtful.) Oh, and the “Raiders March” makes an appearance. The best moment by far comes right at the very end of the clip, when a rock is kicked into a larger rock and explodes. For some reason.

Glorious, in its way.