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Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam

Do you want to hurt yourself? Do you want to test your endurance? Have you had a shitty day and you want to end it in a deserving way? If you fall into any of these three categories, this movie is for you; otherwise, it’s still for you. Because what we have here is a true gem, a totem of pure trash, a B-movie so poor, raw, rough, and poorly made that compared to it, «Plan 9 From Outer Space» seems like an A-series production. «Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam» (Turkey 1982), or «The Man Who Saves the World», is an epic bucket of crap, the negation of the very concept of a film, a movie that condenses the worst one can conceive in a work of fantasy dementia. Cuneyt Arkin, an actor who looks like a talking vegetable and an icon of C-series Anatolian films (those who know, know), stars in this insipid mess, written by him as well, alongside Aytekin Akkaya, the Turkish Toto Cutugno.

Plot: space, year Zillion. A bad guy dressed in cardboard (no kidding, his mask is TRULY made of cardboard) wants to destroy Earth for some reason; he is opposed by two Turkish pilots with chamber pots on their heads, aided by the wise old man (who of course dies...), the useless blonde of the moment (who falls for the talking vegetable: no surprise there..) and surrounded by an irritating tribe of dorks constantly oppressed and tortured by the galactic tyrant. A very predictable plot whose sole purpose is to tie together the most ridiculous fight scenes I’ve ever seen: jumps, kung fu moves, facial expressions of idiots, giant puppets and stuffed animals torn apart with bare hands (don’t be fooled, gore level equals zero), mummies wrapped in toilet paper massacred with kicks. Epic and memorable moments abound: right from the start, you’ll be at least puzzled since this film heavily relies on indecently stolen sequences from Star Wars and Star Trek, randomly spliced and used to replicate space battles that we actually won’t see; the two heroes sit on nonexistent spaceships, leaning ridiculously to mimic the flight of the fighters while images of Star Wars run behind them... It’s all incomprehensible, but in the end, the two idiots get shot down; from there on, absurd beatings rain on the pathetic army of the villain, which also includes skeletal knights with unspeakable costumes and lousy giant robots in ski suits.

It is immediately noticeable that the film practically lacks sets: the exteriors were all shot in Cappadocia (which can fit as an alien landscape, too bad about the indecent photography..) and the interiors in some old mosque or thereabouts; didn’t even bother with a painted backdrop. All of this reaches heights of delirious squalor considering that the number of props can be counted on fingers and includes: five or six fake rocks that explode (!), a pathetic plasterboard power sword (ri-di-cu-lous), the hilarious supercomputer of the villain and a magic brain sprayed with golden glitter. Stop. The rest is done by the actors with their indecent costumes, their moves verging on epileptic seizures, close-ups that shock. And the somersaults, because the two heroes jump like crazy, for no reason at all and without the use of stunt doubles: it has to be said that good Arkin has quite the skill of a showman. Let’s add to the disaster a montage done by tearing the film with teeth and sticking it back with spit, a shameful level of acting, nonexistent special effects (at best a smoke bomb, crappy laser beams made with markers, a few fake lights, and red filters randomly thrown in), delirious dialogues with ass-kissing to the Quran and Islam, and there’s this indescribable atrocity packaged.

Memorable scenes? Well, almost all of them, but there are two sequences that will make you laugh harder than the others: the training of the two heroes (I won't say more, I declare myself utterly unable to describe them) but especially the unpresentable final showdown and the villain's death (who by the way without the mask looks just like the pathetic Leonidas from 300); this scene is surely one of the worst ever made, it will cause you serious physical pain and make you want to track down the director to set him on fire. In less than two minutes you can grasp the essence of a bad movie, consigning «Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam» to history.

In conclusion: the film is known as a remake of Star Wars, and you can indeed find it online, subtitled in English, as «Turkish Star Wars»; however, I believe this definition is too tight for such a masterpiece of filth as this. The one thing you MUST do as a resolution for the upcoming year is to arm yourself with patience, sit in front of your PC (better on an empty stomach), and stomach this 90-minute crap soup. I assure you it’s worth it.

If you don’t, may Cuneyt Arkin crush your scrotum with his damn golden gloves of power.