Original title: Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam
For a long time, Çetin İnanç’s fantasy epic The Man Who Saved the World has been better known in English speaking parts of the world under the faux title Turkish Star Wars, a fan derived appellation that stuck. It earned it because of the infamous scenes that bookend the film with footage haphazardly (and entirely illegally) assembled from George Lucas’ 1977 film, though the bulk of İnanç’s bewildering mix of crazy ideas has more in common with the Hong Kong fantasy martial arts films of the 1970s and 80s than an intergalactic blockbuster.
A fairly lengthy narration sets up the flimsy back story, as roughly edited action footage from Star Wars plays on what seems like an endless loop. This same footage blends into the main film leading to the hilarious sight of our heroes, Murat (Cüneyt Arkın) and Ali (Aytekin Akkaya) sitting in what we presume is the cockpit of a space fighter while back projected footage cycles through the same sequence of lifted footage that we saw earlier. One moment they’re being pursued by TIE fighters, then they’re hovering over the Death Star (in the same shot with no edits) and appear to be flying in several different directions at once.
Murat and Ali crash land on a desert planet and speculate on very little evidence that it’s inhabited entirely by women. Ali uses his supposedly “irresistible” wolf-whistle to attract them only for them to be attacked by a group of what appear to skeletons (men, some of them very well fed, wearing bones on black costumes) who capture them. They’re taken to the Wizard (Hikmet Taşdemir) who claims to be a thousand years old and from Earth, having fled when he tried to defeat Earth’s forces who deployed footage of the Death Star against him to create a “shield of concentrated human brain molecules.” After escaping, Murat and Ali seek shelter with a group living in a cave, refugees on the run from the Wizard’s tyrannical rule, Murat falls in love with the daughter (Füsun Uçar) of the tribe’s wise man, zombies turn up attack the group, taking blood from the children to rejuvenate the Wizard, our boys find their way to the Mos Eisley cantina for a bar fight and then get captured again.
And this is barely scratching the surface of this madness. We’ve still got torture, a “golden brain“ that contains the sum total of all human knowledge, news of the “the thirteenth clan” (shades of Battlestar Galactica (1978)), a magic sword, a scene discussing Islam and the Quaran, nunchaku-twirling ninjas and so much more to come. While the mid-section tends to spin its wheels rather, there are few moments here that are genuinely dull – incomprehensible, yes, and often quite infuriating, but it’s rarely boring.

The reason for that Star Wars footage has been put down to a storm that wiped out the sets that İnanç had had built on the beach where a lot of the action was shot. One can’t imagine that these sets were any good – Turkish cinema rarely put much money into these kind of films – but the penny-pinching producers refused to have them rebuilt. Facing the prospect of making a crowd-pleasing fantasy film with no sets or special effects, İnanç was forced to devious methods and the story goes that he, or someone associated with the production, paid off a nightwatchman at a film distributors, copied a print of Star Wars they had lying around and hit the editing suite. Unfortunately for them, Star Wars was shot in widescreen, while The Man Who Saved the World was being made in Academy ratio so everything from Lucas’ film is squashed, leading the Imperial superweapon to resemble a Death Egg rather than a Death Star.
And the pilfering didn’t stop with the effects. The soundtrack is a riotous compilation of cues from Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Moonraker (1979), Ben-Hur (1959), Flash Gordon (1980) (with the “Flash! A-ah!” bits clumsily edited out), Planet of the Apes (1968), Silent Running (1972), Moses the Lawgiver (1975) and The Black Hole (1979). That old standby, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor also gets an outing. In an aural barrage almost as ridiculous and brazen as the visual steals and one can only marvel at how they got away with it – copyright wasn’t an issue in Turkey at the time and presumably the country lay beyond the reach of Hollywood lawyers.

Some prints of the film carry very dubious subtitles that were created by fans, and which were probably played deliberately for laughs, though the film really didn’t need to be made any funnier or weirder – it was doing a fins job on that score all by itself. The action scenes are lengthy but listless, often involving the use of just-out-of-shot trampolines and they rub shoulders with awful monster make-ups, eccentric editing, clunky robots and lousy photography to become almost a textbook example of how you shouldn’t do this sort of thing.
And yet, it’s hugely entertaining. Probably not in the way that İnanç imagined, but one gets ones laughs were one can find them. Some of its is very amusing – Murat’s kung fu is so powerful he can chop the arms off monsters and cleave a man in two with his bear hands – and while it’s inarguably one of the worst films ever committed to celluloid, if we can find some crumbs of pleasure in it, then it’s worked. Sort of… One wonders what Turkish audiences of 1982 made of it. They were starved of international cinema and many who went to see it may not have seen Star Wars, but surely, even allowing for different cultural contexts, they must have been able to see how awful it was. Perhaps they did. Perhaps they didn’t care…

The unofficial title has given The Man Who Saves the World more cache than it really deserves. It is amusing but for many it’ll be very much a one-time only affair (and not even that even more) and you’ll spend much of that first and only viewing wandering what the hell is going on. You’ll be none the wiser by the time Nurat flies off aboard a squished, stock footage Millennium Falcon at the climax, but the film’s revival in recent years has found a fanbase. Not a big one, but one enough to warrant a belated sequel. Kartal Tibet’s Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam’in Oglu/Son of The Man Who Saved the World/Turks in Space (2006), though it tried to be a “proper” film, with custom made effects, thus robbing it of some of the wayward charm of the original and it wasn’t a great success. İnanç himself has suggested his own sequel, allegedly about “zombie ninja space warriors” which “pits God against the Devil in an epic war for Earth.” Now that sounds more like it…