Seytan

Think of bad movies occupying their own solar system, getting more and more obscure as you drift away from the sun. The inner rings would be occupied by Godzilla movies, bad US monster flicks from the fifties, Italian zombie films. Then you have the Filipino action movies and Kung fu flicks, culminating in a massive gas giant constructed solely of Godfrey Ho ninja films, whereupon things get sparser as you pass the rightly neglected Jess Franco planet and the Andy Milligan asteroid belt. Eventually, just as you are about to leave the system and see what counts for a bad movie to a bunch of aliens, you'd pass the Turksploitation film.

Simply known in English as whatever film they are ripping off with the work 'Turkish' stuck in front, these films are not for the faint hearted. I've only watched a few myself, but I do remember Turkish Star Wars being so painful it took a few attempts to get by the initial scenes, which basically involved Turkish actors pretending to be piloting ships while someone actually projected footage from Star Wars onto a wall behind them. I'm not kidding.

You have Turkish Spiderman, Turkish E.T, Turkish Some Like It Hot (?), Turkish Wizard of Oz etc etc. These films occurred, from what I understand, not to rip-off successful films for cash (like the Italians did) but because it was cheaper just to remake them in Turkey, rather than pay to import the actual film. Therefore, you get cheap knock offs of Hollywood films at a fraction of the budget, usually with results that will give you a nosebleed.

Now, the problem with Seytan (Devil) is that it follows the film the Exorcist almost exactly to the letter. It has the same music, same story, everything. Only it features different people acting in the exact same roles, and doing the exact same things, so what I'm not going to describe is...The Exorcist.

Out at an archeological dig, an old man is confronted by an ancient, cheaply made, statue of a demon, and looks at it thoughtfully. Back in Istanbul, some lady is hearing noises in her attic and just about the same time her daughter starts playing with a Ouija board. At the same time again, some writer is having to deal with his mum getting dementia and becoming ill. Blah blah demon possession etc.

Nearly everything from the original is included here, from the girl pissing herself at a party, to the medical experiments, to the head spinning and the pea-soup spewing (although here it's like a budget portion of mushy peas). What's toned down is the foul language (no "Your mother sucks cocks in hell" here) and the violation with the crucifix is changed to what might be a letter opener, but it's not clear because even the person translating the dialogue into subtitles admits to being confused...within the subtitles.

What you'll also notice if you get bored enough to watch this is that for obvious reasons the Catholicism angle has been removed. You don't have Muslim clerics doing the exorcism (exorcism being common in Islam) rather than two academic types. Everything else is the same however. Only, you know, not as good. Except the bit where the guy tried to punch the demon out of the little girl and the bizarre special effects used to simulate electro-shock therapy.

This movie is an attempt to make use of a script, which was already turned into a masterpiece by William Friedkin only a year ago in 1973. To make things worse, they had only a tiny budget for this remake and well, I'm sure that the producers of this movie had made some money at the end, yet it was a useless risk for the big director Metin Erksan, who had won the Golden Bear in Berlin with his 1964 movie Susuz Yaz (Reflections).

If you are a fan of The Exorcist you probably should watch it, yet for others, it will probably only be a waste of time. It is not so funny either, so if you attempt to watch it for a few laughs, in many cases you will just end up being bored. There are some Ed Wood/Cetin Inanc type low- budget B-movie mistakes in this one as well, yet someone has to point them out, so maybe you should invite some friends over to share this ridiculous experience, or maybe a talk-show host should examine the movie with the help of a studio audience, and in Turkey that was actually done for this movie ;)

Seytan (Turkish Exorcist) (1974)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Turkish version of The Exorcist, which borrows nearly every scene from the classic movie and it also lifts the famous music score. This is the third or fourth Turkish film I've watched and this one took me by surprise because it actually tries to be a serious film and not just some sort of rip off or spoof. As you'd expect, a young girl gets possessed by Satan so her mother (Meral Taygun) gets help from a writer (Cihan Unal) who wrote a book on possession. As I said, I was really surprised that the film actually tried being a scary horror film and I was also shocked that for the most part it worked. There are some silly moments but overall this was pretty effective and gets the job done a lot better than many of the Italian rip offs out there. The opening sequences of the mother searching the attic and hearing various noises up there worked very well as did the final exorcism scene. I was also impressed by the performances especially Taygun as the mother. There are a few hysterical moments due to the lower budget and some of the possession scenes come off funny but I've found this to be the case in the majority of these films and that includes The Exorcist. The direction is a tad bit all over the place but for the most part it is good, although the zoom function is used way too many times and most of the time it's used very badly. Again, this film is far from a masterpiece but there's enough good stuff here to make it worth watching.

I'll also comment on the "official" DVD of this. I guess you'd call this an official bootleg since Warner would never let this film out there since it ripped their film off and used the same music score. I guess whoever was doing the subtitles just wrote them down on the paper and the makers of the DVD just copied them over without reading what they were working on. There are several times where the guy's notes are put in the subtitles and this leads to some very funny stuff. At one point there's talk of a letter opener and the subtitles include "what's a letter opener". Another funny moment is when the text contains a question mark with an added note to "search Google". When the film is over a "The End" credit pops up and the notes include "finally".

Just from the box art, you know your in for a treat. This movie made me laugh so hard i almost choked! They follow the Exorcist from the start to the end. This baby must have been on a budget of $100. The FX are horrible, the acting is stale, and they play tubular bells 800 times in this movie! But it is so bad its hilarious and i highly recommend it. Pure cheese! One part during the exorcism, the room is all lit up, when the girl levitates, the room becomes dark [to hide the wires i guess] and when she comes back down, the room is dark again. Its in Turkish though, but if you want it dubbed, just dub the Exorcist audio over the whole movie, i am sure it will fit.

"Seytan" is a shameless Turkish remake of William Friedkin's "The Exorcist" that copies it scene after scene.It uses the same exact set-up as "The Exorcist"-a young girl,living with her well-to-do mother,becomes possessed by Satan after tooling around on a Ouija board.Of course there's the head spinning,the mustard spitting,the message written across her abdomen and even the scene where she comes downstairs to pee herself to the dismay of her mother and her guests.Some of the shots are even exactly the same and the house they use as the setting for most of the film looks pretty much like the one in Friedkin's "The Exorcist".This film is simply hilarious,so grab some beer and give this amusing piece of trash a look.5 out of 10.