 Video Review: Turkish Star Trek Once again, Turkish cinema takes an American classic, turns it on its head and kicks the living crap out of it. Seanbaby By now, you've hopefully heard of Turkey's proud history of stealing American films and remaking them with no money and their own unique set of production values. When they remade Superman, Superman became a homemade doll dangling on string in front of a black and white TV, and when they remade Star Wars, Luke Skywalker fought an army of Cookie Monsters on a field of trampolines. And even if you do speak Turkish, their remakes of films are confusing madness, but invariably end up being twice as entertaining as the original. Turkish Star Trek continues this cinematic tradition. In Turkey it's called Turist Omer Uzay Yolunda, which probably translates literally to "Tragic Mistake."
The movie abruptly cuts to a wacky shotgun wedding scene where a chubby man who looks like a cab driver (Omer) and an old woman in a wedding gown are surrounded by armed men in face-crawling moustaches. There are a lot of rubbery twanging sounds and Omer keeps making faces, suggesting that this is meant to be funny. Just as the ceremony gets underway, the unwilling groom disappears and shows up outside Profosor Krater's cave where the speedoed robot chases him down in a comical mix of Mr. Bean, Tarzan and erotic massage oil. What happens next (weird turn #2) is difficult to explain, but here goes: Funny sound effects start while Nancy licks Omer's hand. He seems to be asking her what she's doing, but loses interest and decides to poke his other, not-being-licked hand into the pinecone on Tarzan's back. Each time he does this, the robot does a pelvic thrust that delights Omer more and more with each poke. I'm not sure if the silly sound effects were still going because at this point any boings or zwoops would have been drowned out by the sounds of my screams. Most of the rest of the movie is made up of Omer's zany antics. At one point, he is taken prisoner by the crew of the Enterprise and led to the bridge by three miniskirted women holding laser guns. He sits in the pilot seat and starts fiddling with the ship's controls. Without speaking, the ladies sternly strike poses that are more and more sexy in an effort to make him stop. Kirk bursts through the sliding door with the magnificent flair of a flag-twirling figure skater and seems to tell the women that it's not very responsible behavior to seductively dance around a prisoner while you let him fly your spaceship. They slink off, giving everyone behind them a generous look at their space underwear. The movie goes back down to the surface of the planet where Nancy is licking the dead body of the green-shirted crew member. It's nice to know that the future's idea of ceremonial burial is to leave your teammate's corpse with a woman who licks everything, an eccentric mad scientist, and a pervert robot wearing tiny briefs and a pinecone. For the first hour, all the opening doors on the Enterprise are accompanied by a nice door-opening sound effect stolen from Star Trek. But by this point in the movie, the Turkish audio engineers have lost interest. Now whenever someone walks into a room, somebody off camera makes the sound "swwwsh!" with their mouth two to three seconds after the door opens. For some reason this seemed more riveting to me than Nancy running around the ship licking people's faces and disguising herself as different crew members. After many more scenes of Nancy changing shape and slurping
people, Spak and Kirk transport themselves to the planet and, through a
series of continuity mistakes by the filmmakers, find themselves split
up. Outside, Kirk is attacked by a monster with a foam hippo head and
wiggling jazz hands. It dances for a minute or two and then starts
shooting fire out of its face. And remember, this is Turkey. There's no
such thing as pansy digital effects. To get this scene, some brave
bastard on the film crew had to get close enough to this deadly dancing
hippo to light its head on fire.
To give you an idea of the sense of action and drama in this scene, the flames reach nearly three feet from the monster's head and Kirk is hiding behind a rock 40 feet away. Spak finally ends this clash of the titans by coming out of a cave and zapping him with a slow and curvy laser rubbed onto the film by a pencil eraser.
Omer runs over to a jukebox someone thoughtfully set up in the middle of the wasteland and fiddles with some levers until the Tarzan bots are karateing themselves.
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In the original Star Trek,
Captain Kirk was all that is man. He'd tear his shirt off and fight a lizard monster from a space couch covered in green alien sluts. In
Turkish Star Trek, reverse all of that. The movie starts with Kaptan Kirk practically prancing over to his chair to sit down
cross-legged and daintily lisp out orders. He and the Turkish Uhura discuss something, which reminds me that I should let you know that the
movie hasn't been subtitled and I've never even heard of anyone who's ever heard of anyone who speaks Turkish. However, judging by the way
Kaptan Kirk is sitting, he and Uhura are discussing the useful applications of not having a penis.
The
Turkish Enterprise's dress code has got to cause problems. The female
personnel are forced to wear miniskirts that end four inches above the
bottom of their asses, and when they turn around to work on the
spray-painted cardboard computers, they have no secrets. I'm sure this
leads to situations where the navigator loses his concentration and
says, "Miss Uhura, we are crotching a course for the panties sector,
coordinates your whole ass hanging out. Repeat: panties, panties,
panties."
Kirk
decides to go down to a nearby planet and assembles an away team of Scotty, Mr. Spak, Dr. Makkoy and an unnamed guy in a green shirt who
they hope will act as a human speed bump if any creatures on the planet rush them. The teleportation effects are, like all Turkish special
effects, a strange combination of retarded and rad. The four men stand
as still as possible while the camera goes out of focus. Ten seconds
later, the film gets scratched in their general area and they run out
of frame while the guy holding the camera hits pause and unpause. This
gives more of the impression that something's wrong with your VCR than
of people being transported through space. Miniskirt technology is a
much higher priority among their people than visual effects.
Down
on the planet, the team finds the eccentric Profosor Krater and his
assistant Nancy. Nancy is a homely blonde in a miniskirt who at one
point during the conversation turns into a different (but still not
that attractive) woman. Please trust me that at this point in my
film-reviewing career I've developed some of the world's most advanced
confusing-Turkish-effects deciphering skills, and I decided that this
was supposed to represent how each person looking at Nancy sees their
ideal woman. This is where the movie takes its first weird turn.
Suddenly Profosor Krater leaves and comes back with a Tarzan robot in a
loincloth.
The team member in green is as dead as we knew he would
end up and
Nancy is standing over his body, now covered in giant space acne. Spak
carefully stands very close to what's probably a contagious
spore-launching corpse and calls Kirk to tell him about it. Nancy goes
back to the Profosor's cave to tape a pinecone to the naked Tarzan
robot. I'd like to think that if I spoke Turkish I would know why, but
I'm just being ridiculous.
Omer
shows up somehow and gets licked by Nancy disguised as a hot girl in a
bikini. Being a generous lover, he reciprocates the licking even though
his wacky faces seem to indicate that she doesn't taste very good. She
eventually stops this insanity and turns into a Vulcan woman to seduce
Spak into attacking Kirk with a series of mean faces. Kirk responds by
circling around him making equally mean faces. A few slaps are thrown,
but the sound effects are mistimed by so much that it's tough to tell
who's winning. And unfortunately, they both went to the same stage
combat class where dodging a slap and being hit across the face cause
the same reaction.
Spak
finally comes to his senses after the evil licking shapechanger leaves,
and Kirk is strangely uninterested in why he just tried to kill him.
They avoid discussing it as they walk to the next wasteland where they
get attacked by 20 Tarzan karate bots. That's what I said. This sets
off a chain reaction of stupidity with naked robots kicking and
punching in random directions and Omer almost pulling a face muscle
with his mugging. Professor Krater built these robots for love, not
karate, so the fight mostly consists of them rushing Kirk and Spak then
stopping just short of them to scream "YAAAHHH!" and dance.
Minutes later, Spak and Kirk find themselves beaten and
licked by Nancy, who has revealed her true form to be Bigfoot. Dr. Makkoy comes
in and wrestles with the idea of lasering her as she wipes chunks of
Kaptan Kirk's screaming face off. He evidently had strong enough
feelings for Nancy in her homely cave assistant form to have second
thoughts about killing this horrible face-eating monster. In what feels
like ten minutes later, he zaps it.
Omer rushes in with the joyful enthusiasm of someone who's just
stopped an underwear karate riot with a jukebox, and barely notices
Bigfoot's corpse. What happens next will forever redefine the limits of
comedy. He does a triple take at the body, looks at the camera, does a
QUADRUPLE take, looks at the camera, then does five more takes to
finish the routine with a previously unimagined and amazing comedic
achievement of a THIRTEENTH TAKE. This proves that Turkish cinema is to
comedy what Turkish cinema is to everything else it tries.