The Worst Movie Ever: a Turkish Star Wars Clone

There are many bad sci-fi movies, and for many years movie addicts even considered Ed Wood's "Plan 9 From Outer Space" to be the worst movie of all times. But "Plan 9" is still a pretty good movie when compared to "Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam", a film commonly known as "Turkish Star Wars".

The official film poster already indicates how awful this movie must be (it's probably also one of the worst movie posters ever created), and when I first saw it I though it should be a hoax or something alike, as such a silly poster wouldn't likely exist. But this thing is real, and it's so bad that it got what it deserves: cult status!

So here are the facts:

Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam ("The Man Who Saves the World") was released in 1982, while Turkey was in the midst of massive political upheaval. US movies were hard to acquire, and so the stories of popular US movies were more or less copied and remade with turkish actors. As there was no money for expensive settings or special effects they simply bootlegged (copied) original scenes from popular US movies (notably many scenes from the original Star Wars movie) and mixed them with their own material (quite randomly).

The soundtrack is entirely copied from US movies, primarily Raiders of the Lost Ark (Indiana Jones), Moonraker, Ben Hur, Flash Gordon, Battlestar Galactica, Planet of the Apes, Silent Running and The Black Hole. The story doesn't make much sense, the monsters look absolutely silly, the acting is horrible. Apparently they also wanted it to be a martial arts movie, but the fighting scenes are hilarious.

The story was written by Cüneyt Arkin, a well-known Turkish actor who also played to main character in the movie. It's about the adventures of two comrades, Murat and Ali, whose ships crash on a desert planet. They then have to fight tons of ridiculous monsters and zombies, as well as an evil wizard who wants to defeat the Earth. Ali gets killed, and Murat finds a magic sword he'll need to fight the villains. At a certain point Ali then gets "super-jumping boots" and he starts jumpin'around all the time, which becomes quite annoying after a few minutes... At the end of the movie Ali kills the evil wizard.

The Turkish Star Wars movie has a strong fan base - on 15 December 2006 a sequel was released, but most fans were disappointed as it was more a comedy movie than a sci-fi film (although you may consider the original movie to be an unintentional comedy too...) The available YouTube video shows about 9 minutes of the movie's ending, and I'm sure you haven't seen anything like this before!