Seytan

Saw this the other day. What a laugh! Apparently, some films in the 70s were suffering from attention from Warners, who tried to ban them saying they ripped off their classic "The Exorcist". How this slipped by them I'll never know! Not a subtly or even majorly similar film, this is a complete remake! I mean even the same SOUNDTRACK! Tubular Bells is played EIGHT times in this movie. Get some imagination! They try their best I suppose. The actress playing Gul hasn't got any stunt performers standing in for her a la Eileen Dietz puking all over poor Jason Mller, no, this babe hurls the yellow (not green for once) puke herself. I totally loved the dramatic organ music when the bed levitated (God, it took so LONG!) and then the same music a few minutes later when the bed descended. Fantasticaly crap! The mother reminded me of my make up tutor. Hmmm. Couldn't look at this actress without seeing a foundation pot and a bruise wheel. Not to worry. How these people think they can do this and not get sued (hell, they managed) I will never know. Turks have BALLS! See it. It's trash, badly made and completely pants. Great stuff. :O)

A hallucinatory alternate-reality Turkish shot-for-shot adaptation of the infamous American "horror" film The Exorcist in which Christian iconography is replaced with Islamic iconography. Over-the-top scenery-chewing performances and high-school science-project-quality special-effects make this the prefect film to experience with a few friends and a lot of mind-altering substances. This film follows in the tradition of other Turksploitation films in providing similar thrills on a limited budget. I can truly say that this has to be seen to be believed. If this is the kind of thing you're into, there's a whole genre of Turksploitation films known more commonly by titles like "Turkish Star Wars" and "Turkish Spider Man" and "Turkish Indiana Jones".

Seytan (the devil) is almost and exact remake of William Friedkin's "The Exorcist". The only differences are the special effects look very cheesie, and instead of using the Bible they use the Holy Qur'an; not to mention the differences in acting, etc. I saw this film before I saw "The Exorcist" and it really did scare me. But I was a kid. Also you should check out the scene where the girl sits on her bed and twists her head 360 degrees. You can easily see the head resting on a stick and her night gown pinned to the bed. Very fake effect but still fun to watch.

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 ;)