3 Dev Adam

One of the most auspicious movie starts in history, yet a walk in the park for movies coming out of Turkey. I thought I had seen everything Turkey had to offer. From Turkish Star Trek and Star Wars to Turkish Superman to Turkish Young Frankenstein. I was not prepared for a mostly green Spiderman, with a red hood and giant, untrimmed eyebrows.

This isn't your Marvel Spiderman though. Turkish Spiderman is leader of a gang. His whole racket involves smuggling artifacts from Turkey to the US, selling them cheaply to dealers and then buying them back with fake money. The opening scene is of Spidey and his gang building a hole in the sand, dropping some woman in a night gown into it and then pushing a boat (the motor is on, propeller spinning) into her face. The Spider (as he is called in Turkey) has no powers whatsoever. He knows movie martial arts, is quite the escape artist and tends to sneak up on people. His primary weapons include a 2-inch knife, a shower head, shish-kabobing people and a complicated torture device involving hamsters. Welcome to Turkey !!

Aytekin Akkaya is Turkish Steve Rogers, a.k.a. Captain America (minus a shield which would have cost extra). You may remember him from Turkish Star Wars. Sadly I cannot forget seeing his shirtless performance as he bounced around on the screen. His partners include a luchidore who stores everything in the crotch of his tights and a female secretarial assistant (who does most of the undercover work). Their mission is to stop the Green menace (thank you Jonas).

This is truly an exercise in Turkish 70's film making. Turkish movies often remind me of the old movie serials (Flash Gordon, Batman and Robin,etc). They seem to be made on the cheap, poorly edited, poorly acted and done very quickly, often with little regard for intellectual property (the music seems to be from a James Bond movie). It is as if this is Turkey's attempt at mimicking the exploitation movies coming out of the US and/or the martial arts movies coming out of Asia. Exploitation is definitely what this movie is going for. It has all the elements for grind-house: a striptease (with pasties), graphic violence, shower scenes in underwear, crappy disco music, sex and alcohol. Well what did you expect, Turkey is a much different place? What was tame for us was probably raunchy for them. Context people, context.

As with all the 70's Turkish movies I have seen, I cannot take them seriously. I find them quite amusing along with the lingering misogynistic undertones (seems like more women died in this movie than men). There also seems to be a lot of time spent in showing running, driving and chasing. If you have never seen a Turkish movie, try to get one with the appropriate subtitles. Understanding the dialog will only help you slightly, as the plots and edits are "complicated" (not to mention the cultural differences). I have seen Turkish movies without the subtitles and I can tell you it gets pretty confusing (Turkish Star Wars, I'm looking at you).

These movies would have been prime candidates for MST3k. If only that were still possible. Maybe in an alternate universe. Until then, make mine a double whiskey. It's for the pain.

Turkish cinema, gotta love it. Where else in the world can you get copyright infringement films that make you smile from ear to ear? In this film Marvel Comics hero Spiderman becomes a bad guy trying to take over the world. He is battled by Captain America (in possibly the best suit every put on screen) and Santo, the Mexican wrestler and movie star. The action is great as is some of nastiness that Spidey inflicts on his victims (The opening boat propeller to the face is a nice touch). As Turkish superhero movies go its pretty good, though the print I saw was sans any English so it was hard to know what was going on and it made the dialog scenes drag.

Not the best of the Turkish cinema I've run across, and certainly not the worst. If you run across it and are curious about the madness that Turkish film makers have unleashed on their audiences give it a try. Also give it a try if you're a comic book fan who worries what Hollywood will do to your favorite creation. One Look at this film and you'll never complain they got something wrong again.

In the world of Turkish cinema, Spider-Man leads a gang of counterfeiter who use murders people with outboar dmotors, axes and man-eating guinea pigs. Santo is a secret agent who rarely wears his mask and puts things directly into his pants, pockets by damned. And Captain America doesn't have a shield, smokes and brings his girlfriend, Julia, along.

Just strap yourself in — 3 Giant Men is a ride into insanity, the kind of world that Sergeant Joe Friday worried about when kids in the 60's started doing LSD and jumping out of windows.

Istanbul! The Spider's Gang — led by Spider-Man — are taking over. They cut the head off of a woman with a boat propeller to start the movie off right.

The film then kicks into the craziest title sequence ever — they basically filmed a board of photographs, pulling out on image after image, with the type for each credit simply vinyl type on a board.

Julia, Captain America's girlfriend, is captured but is able to send a distress call to Cap, who rescues her but can't catch Spider-Man after a battle through a graveyard. Captain America is played by Aytekin Akkaya, who was Ali in Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (better known as Turkish Star Wars) and Ukan in Yor, the Hunter from the Future.

I'd like to inform all of you right now that Spider-Man has the biggestt eyebrows you've ever seen. He can also die and come back to life with no lasting damage, for some reason. He also gets his men to drop off what I can only refer to as mini-tents near mafia bases, emerging from them to kill other gangs.

Meanwhile, Santo infiltrates a dojo known for counterfeiting. Santo's fight style is to basically no sellkicks to the face and do rolls and judo. So, you know, nothing at all like he real Santo. He also likes to look right at the camera whenever he is film. I could watch Santo fight karate men for hours and hours of my life. Santo gets captured, but escapes with the evidence. He and Cap raid a hideout while Spider-Man kills a woman in the shower.

Spidey calls out the dude who let Santo escape, punishing him by putting a tube over his head and letting two guinea pigs EAT HIS FACE. Sorry to scream, this movie this movie is just one shock after the other. Spidey tops it off by watching couple shower (!), killing them by stabbing them together ala Jason Vorhees to Jeff and Sandra in Friday the 13th Part 2 (!!) and then stealing a statue that has no importance toward the rest of the movie (!!!).

Yes. If you are keeping score, Spider-Man has two different shower based kill scenes in this movie. If you like your Peter Parker murderous, then this flick is for you. But wait what would make this movie better? If you answered watching Spider-Man have sex while surrounded by frightening puppets, then you are on the same wavelength as the insane people who made this movie. You should really speak to someone or be on one of this lists where you have to announce yourself to all of your neighbors when you move.

Santo and Captain America then battle Spider-Man again, where we find out that there are four Spideys, several of which die horribly. After some undercover work at a club — the same club we keep seeing with a girl in shadow spinning boob tassles — Spider-Man's goons kidnap our heroes. They fight one another, but it's all a clever ruse, as they kill almost all of the gang members, including Spider-Man's girlfriend (who is not Mary Jane Watson, Gwen Stacy, Felicia Hardy, Betty Brant, Carlie Cooper or Liz Allen).

There's a battle that doesn't stop until every Spider-Man is dead. Spideys get knocked off ladders, their necks broken and crushed by presses. It's an orgy of Spider destruction, highlighted by Captain America's trademark offense: one footed dropkicks , face slaps and punches to the belly.

But just as Cap is about to leave town, he sees one more Spidey. However, it's just a kid in a mask.

I don't know if it's possible to love a movie as much as I love 3 Giant Men. Today's superhero movies fail to capture the majesty of this film. It answers the big questions, the ones no one had the guts to ask or care about. Cap punching Spider in the breadbasket? It's in there. Santo powerbombing goons and then putting them into submission holds in a nightclub? Yes. Wacky asides with comical music? Yes. A Cap that smokes and wears a leisure suit? Evet.

3 Giant Men comes in at 78 minutes of what I can only imagine being in a coma and pumped full of iowaska would feel like. Everyone knows all about Japanese Spider-Man Takuya Yamashiro (they do, right?), but laughing, killing, giant eyebrow having Turkish Spider-Man? He is the greatest villain ever in the best superhero movie ever made.

This funky Turkish interpretation of graphic novel lore has Spider-Man as an ultra mean bad guy running a gang of thugs in Istanbul on the wrong side of town. He has none of his Spider powers, which I guess is why he is so angry, but makes up for some of it via his ruthlessness and a peculiar ability to come from the dead - multiple times.

In fact Spider-Man while noticeably less agile looks as though he has let himself go a bit and is a tad flabby (What we in Canada refer to as "Molson Muscle"). His costume has some noticeable signs of wear and tear as well and his bushy eyebrows peak out of eye slits in his mask.

Could it be that the makers of this film got their accounts of Spider-Man's exploits only from the slanderous accounts provided by that yellow journalism scandal-sheet the Daily Bugle? If they read the comics they would know that Spider-Man/Peter Parker would never use his powers for evil. What would his Aunt May think of him? Worse what would the spirit of his Uncle Ben think? Clearly this baddie is just some dude who ordered an ill-fitting, cheap imitation Spider-Man costume and couldn't get his money back.

A rather improbable team up of Captain America (Akkaya) and Santo (Selekman) the wrestler/superhero track the Spider Gang to Turkey after Spider-Man's counterfeiting scheme in Mexico leaves a trail of angry people on both sides of the law. Cap's famous shield evidently didn't clear Turkish customs as we don't see it. But his girlfriend Julia came with him to help.

This film is so spectacularly wrong on so many levels as to show the value of copyright protection as preservation of artistic integrity more than proper assignment of royalties. Turkey, then under the control of a military junta in a chaotic struggle with terrorist groups and engaged in a brutal suppression of leftist elements offered no such copyright protection to products of comic book heroism or Western entertainment.

Like the Turkish version of Star Wars and Star Trek the staging of a rip-off like this utterly defies logic. Why not just dub or subtitle the Spider-Man cartoon and Santo movies into Turkish? Or better yet why just make a completely original set of characters with Turkish identities?

There is low-grade production value and then there is no-grade production value. What is shown here is beyond what Hollywood producers would deem incredibly cheap though the cast soldiers on even with the various continuity errors and other goofs.

It doesn't look like they were given a safe working environment to shoot under but really what does that even mean when the Turkish government was rounding up people - very much including artists and locking them up for even being suspected of having leftist sympathies?

In one scene where Captain America rescues Julia from the baddies at the Spider gang's safe-house we see a pretty silly action sequence. Hanging from conveniently placed acrobat rings, Cap attempts to heel-kick one of the baddies behind him but the stunt guys must have messed up the timing because he misses. The thug falls anyway and from the angle of the shot it looks as though the villainous henchman has been knocked unconscious by a devastating, explosive fart to the face from the hero.

Captain America's subsequent fight with Spider-Man betrays the fact that Cap is, for whatever reason, a lot more acrobatic than Spidey. El Santo is, by contrast to Spider-Man in considerably better shape than we have seen him and unlike the real Santo, generally goes unmasked. Santo in the Mexican movies he was hero of was never seen in public without his mask.

The comedic possibilities offered in Santo's time on screen are rife as he infiltrates a dogo serving as a front for the Spider Gang, discovers incriminating papers in a back office and stuffs them in his tights in a manner which looks as though he has done it to make his crotch bulge look bigger.

Unintentional humor throughout offers countless openings for snide one-liners and sarcasm. But no one needs to say anything as this Turkish rip-off lampoons itself so perfectly.

It's got Spider-Man as a crime lord choking women in bathtubs, Captain America karate kicking guys to kingdom come, not to mention the James Bond theme, what more could you ask for?