The Man Who Saves the World

Dünyayi kurtaran adam (1982)

Trash Palace

Web: http://www.trashpalace.com

The Man Who Saves the World is a Turkish made film which is now celebrated in the world of cult cinema as the Turkish Star Wars. It is also considered the most infamous Turkish ripoff film ever made. It was released in 1982 and directed by Çetin İnanç. Since Turkey was in the midst of major political upheaval and budgets for films were not existent, Turkish versions of popular films were made using Turkish casts and settings with unique adaptations of the plot, not to mention borrowed content.

The Man Who Saves the World became infamous because of its notorious use of unauthorized Star Wars footage. The musical soundtrack is also entirely lifted from Western scores of the period including Raiders of the Lost Ark, Moonraker, Ben Hur, Flash Gordon, Battlestar Galactica, Planet of the Apes, Silent Running, The Black Hole and Psycho.

The story is not entirely clear, bringing together all sorts of fantasy and science fiction themes mixed with “borrowed” and stock footage, never mind low budget special effects, terrible acting and lots of biffo.

The film opens with footage combining scenes from Star Wars footage mixed with both American and Soviet space footage, this is accompanied with a long winded narration giving the background to the truly momentous experience you are about to have. We are then introduced to the Turkish Darth Vader and his robot, an upside-down garbage with a water cooler on top and a police siren to top it off.

We then experience a wild space dogfight involving Murat and Ali (the Turkish Luke Skywalker and Han Solo). They are wearing motorcycle helmets and headphones and sitting in front of TVs playing Star Wars footage. These are meant to represent spaceships but are not particularly convincing but are oh so much fun. Soon they crash land on Tatooine, a barren desert planet.

As Murat and Ali explore the planet, they begin to wonder if it is inhabited. One of them for some strange reason comes to believe it is solely populated by women and decides to whistle to attract them. Sadly, he uses the wrong tone of whistle and instead attracts evil skeletons on horseback instead, who they defeat in rough and tumble hand to hand combat. They certain can fight, they take out a dozen men on horses with flips and kicks in karate style while borrowed Indiana Jones music plays !

Of course there needs to be a supervillian and the Turkish Darth Vadar appears next, capturing Murat and Ali aiming to turn them into gladiators to fight in his arena. It seems Darth Vadar is actually a thousand year old wizard who originally hailed from earth. His goal is to bring the earth under his dominion but he is constantly defeated by an earth shield comprised of concentrated human brain molecules. He hopes to use a human brain to destroy the shield and take over the earth. Luckily for the earth, our heroes escape and join a group of refugees fleeing the evil leader.

Here the second major theme of any movie enters the plot, the love story. Murat develops a relationship with Uçar, who is tasked with looking after the children. As Murat romances Uçar we are treated to the rather familiar sounding music of Raiders of the Lost Ark. But the romance does not last for long as evil mummies and monsters attack the cave and the children end up being slaughtered. After death their bodies are transformed into mummies.

To celebrate their first fight Murat and Ali decide to do some training. This is the real deal folks no “use the force, Luke” here ! They kick the air, hit into rocks and then they start karate chopping right through boulders, one of which explodes. Soon Murat, Ali and Uçar end up in a local bar, the cantina from Star Wars with extra monsters and scenes to boot ! The story gets weirder and weirder as it progresses with cardboard swords that look like lightning bolts being used instead of lightsabres, ridiculous macho fight sequences and monsters which have to be seen to be believed.

The film climaxes with the death of Ali and Murat planning to take revenge. He melts down a specially empowering space sword (a cardboard lightning bolt no less) to create a pair of gauntlets and boots with which he will save the earth and avenge his friends death. He comes face-to-face with the Turkish Darth and karate-chops him in half! We are then treated to a moving speech extolling the human brain as the most powerful weapon throughout the stars !

This is a truly insane cult cinema. The intense editing, the no budget production values, the borrowed footage, stolen soundtrack and creative adaptation of the Star Wars story makes this an absolute winner. You will never look at science fiction the same way again.

We were lucky enough to find a excellent DVD-R edition from Trash Palace, they have a superb range of rare, weird and unusual titles. Drop by and you will be astounded by what you find.

Trash Palace: http://www.trashpalace.com

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This review will appear in Volume 2 No.5 (2009) of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.

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