Turkish cinema has proven time and time again that whatever we can do, they can do much, much worse. The Turkish Wizard of Oz, or Aysecik ve Sihirli Cuceler Ruyalar Ulkesinde, is the latest in their series of no-budget remakes of American film classics.

The movie starts with scenes of Dorothy and her family working on their farm in Turkish Kansas (a rocky, mountainous wasteland). Several minutes into the montage of Dorothy's skipping and her father raking dirt and rocks, the film editor forgets about Dorothy and switches entirely to long, lingering shots of her father naked from the waist up. Good news if you wanted a full three minutes to take in his sweaty, aged form. Mmmm.

When the twister arrives, the movie switches to a cartoon, because it's easier to scribble a picture of a twister than to create one through special effects. The movie remains a cartoon as Dorothy and her mother scramble to get Dorothy into the attic. Their panic is brilliantly depicted by someone slooowwwly pulling animated drawings of the two women across the screen.

Dorothy wakes up and dances with midgets dressed as nutcrackers. And the strange thing is, I did not skip anything. The scene cuts directly from her opening her eyes to her in the center of a dwarf hoedown. After a short fit of clapping and stomping, the midgets magically blink out of existence and Dorothy steals the sneakers off an unexplained corpse she finds under her house. You have to hand it to Dorothy, she's hard to rattle.

The introduction of the Scarecrow marks the point where the movie goes from queer to FABULOUS! Why the Turks chose to make Scarecrow gay will forever remain another Turkish film enigma. But they don't stop at just making him gay, the scarecrow is so stereotypically homosexual that Dorothy's eyes almost burst into flames. Every line this lunatic straw construct coos through his lipstick is accentuated with a limp wrist and a hip thrust. What I'm trying to say is that if there was a world championships of acting gay, no one else would even bother to show up, and after the awards ceremony, the Scarecrow would be elected President Gay.

The two make fast friends and skip off together. Once they get to a clearing, they start dancing. And oh God, this does not stop. In normal musicals, the songs, although lame, explain areas of the plot. Not in The Turkish Wizard of Oz. Here, the story just stops for 20 minutes so we can watch Dorothy and the Scarecrow jig to instrumental music. The only pause from this is an awkward point in between line dances and curtseys where Dorothy slightly lifts her dress and, if I'm not mistaken, tries to seduce the Scarecrow. He prances a step forward and points toward her crotch, saying what I'm positive is Turkish for, "I'm not getting anywhere near that horrible thing." Before long, they hear the muffled voice of the Tin Man, who is rusted in place. The rest of the sequence is similar to the American version, except that while Dorothy is oiling the Tin Man's joints, the Scarecrow, and I'm deadly serious here, humps him. He just interrupts their rescue attempt to ram his crotch into the Tin Man. They soon skip off to dance.

Ten minutes into the trio's prancing marathon, the Scarecrow backs into a campfire and lights his ass on fire. In a brilliant move by the special effects wizards, they let the audience witness this with their own imaginations by having no actual fire on the Scarecrow as he runs around trying to put himself out.

Once Dorothy repairs the Scarecrow's damaged ass, they skip on through the sunshine. In the next set of woods they come across the Cowardly Lion. He starts a fight with the group, which Dorothy quickly finishes by slapping him across the face. This not only makes him cry, it hits him so hard that it's suddenly nighttime. A camera cut later, it's daytime again and the nutcracker midgets magically appear behind the group to make a strange foreign gesture and vanish. If you can't translate that into something you can understand, I'll do it for you: Turkish cinema is awesome.

The group fights their way through a spooky forest filled with people shaking tree branches at them from off camera, and eventually get to a town populated by children mannequins and tiny cardboard houses. Given their production values and lack of budget, it's hard to tell if the set designers meant for this to be layer after layer of creepy horror, but no one in Dorothy's group seems to care. They lay down and go to sleep in the tiny streets. That's when two of the girl dolls spring to life and wake Dorothy up with a synchronized blood-curdling scream. This, of course, doesn't bother Dorothy.

As the four heroes continue, the magic dwarves appear a few more times. Once to help them get across a river, once to cackle at them for absolutely no discernable reason, and once to create a picnic where they kill another twenty minutes of film with a group dance. Soon they reach the Emerald City, home of the Wizard of Oz. This is such a crappy model that it would have cost MORE to make it out of macaroni. The wizard, who is a skull placed on a bedsheet near a campfire, gives the group a menacing speech leading to them skipping out of the cave and soon line dancing. They run into the wicked witch, who comes out of her cave to howl. This next part is a little strange, even for Turkey: The Scarecrow tears himself apart and, while the witch stands and watches him, creates a haystack for Dorothy and the Lion to hide under. The Tin Man then wanders around for a minute or two until deciding to tear them out from their hiding spot. Trust me, if I knew why, I wouldn't be sitting here watching a group of bad actors pound the Turkish Tin Man with giant cardboard rocks; I'd be running our civilization with the power of my mind.

Dorothy is thrown into a prison cell from which she quickly escapes, although exactly how this happens is never shown. She wanders through the hallways of the wicked witch's cave until she steps into the witch's brilliant death trap -- a thick rope tied across the hallway that makes its victim gently lay herself down. Angered by this sinister treachery, Dorothy melts the witch with a bucket of water and makes friends with her soldiers. The group celebrates with a dance. This is one of the shortest dance sequences of the film, probably because they all want to go somewhere not filled with the smell of seared witch meat.

They travel back to the Wizard's macaroni palace where he's revealed by Toto to not be a skull, but an actual pointy-hatted wizard. There's a celebratory parade that ends in a culmination of all Turkish effects technology. The Wizard flies away in a hot air balloon, and by using a simple blindfold you can hardly tell it's just a toy wizard tied to a helium balloon. Six or seven dances later, the movie ends with Dorothy returning to the rocky mountains of Kansas. But right before that is the plot twist. In a normal movie, this is where the villain turns out to still be alive or you find out it was all a dream. In Turkey, a plot twist is an army of charging cavemen getting exploded by a magic cannon conjured up by midgets. Maybe no one else in their film industry knows what they're doing, but the Turkish screenwriters are amazing.