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Cinema Scope with Andy Nelson takes you on a captivating journey through the ever-evolving landscape of film. Moreover, it offers a unique and engaging perspective on the art of cinema.
Welcome to CinemaScope, where we boldly go where no copyright law has gone before. I'm Andy Nelson, your fearless guide as we explore the untamed frontier of remake exploitation. Get ready for a cinematic adventure like no other as we uncover the audacious and often bizarre realm of unauthorized remakes. From the action-packed streets of a Turkish Star Wars to the spine-chilling horrors of a Bollywood nightmare on Elm Street, we'll discover how filmmakers across the globe have daringly reimagined some of the most iconic films in popular genre cinema, creating their own unique interpretations that challenge our understanding of adaptation, cultural appropriation and the very nature of filmmaking itself. Join us as we navigate the key characteristics, cultural contexts and surprising delights that define this fascinating film movement and explore how these brazen remakes of beloved franchises like The Terminator, James Bond and Batman have become so prevalent that they've formed a cinematic phenomenon all their own, regardless of the genres they're riffing on. Buckle up, because this is going to be one wild rock. Joining me today, I have Dr. Iain Roberts-Smith, senior lecturer in film studies at King's College London and author of The Hollywood Meme, transnational adaptations in world cinema. Ian, welcome to the show. It's a real pleasure. I'm really excited, Andy, to be talking about these films. Like I've been obsessed with re-exploitation for maybe two decades and I've been kind of obsessively telling people about the Turkish Star Wars. So the chance to really kind of explore this in depth is a real pleasure. Well, I can't wait to dig in. I am curious, starting with you and your background, transnational cinemas is a specialty of yours and an emphasis on the way that material is adapted across different cultures and contexts. It's such a fascinating road to kind of end up on. How did you land on that and how did it become one of your specialties? Yeah, that's a great question because, yeah, as you might tell from my accent, I'm Scottish. I was always obsessed with films that you weren't able to access. This was always a thing like growing up as a teenager into my twenties. So for a long time, I was one of those classic kind of UK film fans that was obsessed with the video nasties and kind of anything where like it was difficult to access these films. So kind of trading illicit copies of Cannibal Holocaust or even The Evil Dead at one point. And so, yeah, so I was part of those kind of collector communities. And then over time, yeah, some of the collectors had built up libraries of some of these remakes. So I remember the first time, which probably was about 20 years ago, that I'd seen the Turkish reworkings of Star Trek and Exorcist was from the same guy that I was buying Cannibal Holocaust and Cannibal Fair Oaks from. And it was this, yeah, it was this like interest in films that I hadn't come across, hadn't heard anything about before. And that just followed that path down when I then went to study this kind of academically and my master's into a PhD. Part of the interest was there's so little written on these kinds of films, like they're being traded. There are people who are obsessed with the films and collecting them. But actually, there was very little scholarship. There was very little sense of, in fact, many of these films weren't even subtitled at that point. Yeah, one of the things that I've been trying to do over the years is help get some of these films restored, help get them subtitled, help get them seen, because they tell such a fascinating story about kind of globalization and how films circulate around the world. No, it's so interesting, the draw to that. But I can certainly see it because they're very fun to watch. And there's a peculiarity in the passion that the filmmakers clearly had in like telling the story mostly the same sometimes, not really the same at all other times, but just using the familiarities, like whether it's Batman or James Bond or aliens or whatever, just throwing those things in there. And I find it to be such a fun, interesting thing that kind of came to be. Before we dig into it in more depth, can you give us kind of a brief overview of why it's called that, I guess? Because I've also heard like mockbusters and although in my head when I've heard mockbusters before and I guess mockbusters as I was digging into this, I didn't realize how far back the term actually went. I thought mockbusters, I always associated with like asylum and all of the asylum releases that they would make of different movies like instead of the day the earth stood still, the day the earth, I can't remember what it's called, but like they had the silliest names for their other versions of it. It's like almost the same but not the same. The day the earth stopped, that's what it was. Is there a difference? Are they kind of the same thing or where's the line there? Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, I mean, I tend to think of mockbusters exactly as you say, films like Asylums, Snakes with a Train, ones which are kind of playing on the title. And I guess, yeah, there's the kind of long history of filmmakers in the US doing kind of exploitation versions of whatever the big hit is at that time. And sometimes that's to capitalize on the kind of interest and awareness of the major film. Sometimes it's to try and almost pass their film off as that one that you're in the video store and you might pick up the box and accidentally take out the mockbuster version rather than the real one. I wonder how many little kids, like their grandmother who was clueless just bought the wrong one because she's like, "I think that's what he wanted." Yeah, Snakes with a Train, yeah, that sounds right. But I guess part of my fascination was always that this is something that was going on in industries all around the world. And I think part of the reason I think re-exploitation works as a concept is that exploitation cinema itself, like exploitation films are always capitalizing on whatever is popular at that time. They're always kind of low budget films that don't have the resources that Hollywood has and are therefore having to capitalize on something. And it's always, "Oh, well, that was a hit. Let's make our version of that." So yeah, when Jaws is a hit, you then get the international phenomenon of Jawsploitation or sometimes called sharksploitation. It's that idea that, "Oh, let's, yeah, we can do one of those. Let's rush that into production." But yeah, the fact that there are so many exploitation films that are just reworking a particular hit. So like when Star Wars is successful, you're then getting films made in Japan, in Brazil, Italy, Turkey, all over the world that are all just using elements from the Star Wars iconography, the soundtrack. So I think re-mechploitation is something that really comes to prominence from the 1950s onwards. It's a kind of post-World War II moment when loads of industries around the world start building up a kind of popular film industry, as opposed to a kind of art cinema production, and are often looking out for material they can borrow from, rework, capitalize on. I mean, we'll get into Turkey in a bit, but yeah, this was a hugely productive industry that was making over 300 films a year. Many of those films were just written by three screenwriters. And so often the excuse that's given is like, "Yeah, we don't have the time and the energy and resources to write loads of original scripts. We just watch whatever is popular at the time and like, okay, yeah, let's do a version of that." And so yeah, this was something that was really popular all around all the kind of popular film industries around the world up until the kind of 1980s, '90s. I mean, to some extent, Bollywood keeps going for a while, but yeah, it kind of dies out partly to do with copyright and various other things that I'm sure we'll talk about in a bit. Yeah, sure, sure, sure. Do you know where the term re-mechploitation came from? Because I feel like you introduced me to that term. I was like, "I don't think I'd ever heard that term before." So I don't know how new it is. Is it, I mean, I know it's the remakes, the exploitation, all that's been in there, but had they concatenated those words at that time? So as far as I know, I think it was Ed Glazer who helped bring that term to prominence. I'm not sure if he'd maybe heard it from someone else that passed it on, but certainly Ed Glazer with his videos, he had the Deja View kind of YouTube CDs, which yeah, there was an interesting kind of parallel going on with him in the US, me in the UK. Like I was doing a PhD on these films. He was making a kind of, yeah, YouTube channel based around them. But actually, yeah, we were kind of separately doing a lot of similar work in terms of getting some of these films translated and subtitled, just tracking down the best quality versions to the point where we ended up collaborating on doing a restoration of the Turkish Star Wars. But yeah, I would attribute it to him. Certainly that's where I first came across that as a way of talking about these films. Yeah, right, right. Let's talk about where, like the origins of it. You talk about kind of going back to the 50s and everything. Obviously, like Hollywood had started doing it themselves around that time. I always think of like the monster of Piedras Blancas, kind of like the B Hollywood version of it, B movie, the Creature of the Black Lagoon. Like they were already starting to kind of rip off their own stuff. I know, like one of the most prominent ones that I always think of is Fistful of Dollars, which was Sergio Leone's unauthorized remake of Yojimbo Kurosawa's film. Is that around kind of when these things were starting or like what kind of triggered this to begin? Like you mentioned like the beginning of these industries, is that kind of all of these things snowballing and happening at the same time? Yeah, I mean, it's really the kind of shifts in kind of international popular cinema throughout the kind of 1950s and 60s. Loads of industries are, you know, so yeah, you have the example of with Leone with Fistful of Dollars, like the Italian industry is a kind of classic example of this where yes, it had a kind of established art cinema production by that point with the kind of neorealist tradition from the mid-40s onwards. Yeah, you've got the growings of a kind of popular industry. Yeah, it's not kind of state supported that is built around kind of lots of small production studios all competing with each other, all making very kind of low budget films. And so yeah, I think with the spread of cinema and especially yeah, Hollywood cinema around the world and then the rise of these various industries that are to some extent competing with Hollywood, but then to some extent also kind of borrowing from Hollywood and using it as a model for their own productions. I think that's a big part of why we start to see a lot of these films appearing. And then of course, yeah, there's then specific contexts within each country. So like within Turkey, part of the shift was that there was an attempt to get the local industry producing more films. So there were various tax changes that were made. So the taxes on movie tickets for Turkish films were cut in half. Yeah, there was also weird things where like, because of the devaluation of the Turkish lira, it became more difficult to import films from the US. And so you had all of these cinemas that needed films, they needed content to bring in audiences. And so the kind of local producers filled that gap. But yeah, I often think that the Turkish industry is like all the things that we know about the Italian industry, but to the nth degree, like it kind of has all those elements of the Italian industry of like, yeah, the Spaghetti Western where it's taking elements from the American Westerns and also from the Japanese samurai film. And then yeah, just making hundreds and hundreds of films along those lines until audiences tired of it. And then you bring in another, there's another hit and it starts a whole other Filoni. So yeah, I feel like, yeah, the Turkish industry just does that even more. The films are even on a lower budget. There's more films being produced on a faster schedule. And their borrowings from American cinema are even more extensive and blatant than the Italian industry. To the point where, like, as I was doing my research on this, I realized that they have their own term for all of this, which is turxploitation, which I thought was kind of funny. That's like, okay, so that's just a very, like almost a sub genre within re-exploitation of just the ones that are coming out of Turkey, which I think is, it's telling. Yeah. I think, yeah, when you're able to kind of condense and yeah, to be able to talk to audiences and be like, yeah, what does turxploitation mean? Yes. So that sense where, yeah, just one national industry can have a whole branch of exploitation cinema named after it because there's such a distinctive relationship with exploitation filmmaking that is different from any other country. And it's, yeah, it's to do with the copyright, it's to do with that, the kind of set up the production schedule, it's to do with the sheer number of films being produced. So yeah, turxploitation is interesting. And also occasionally, one of the terms that sometimes is used, which is similar in a way, is a Turkification. There's a Turkish academic called Savas Arslan who tries to kind of work through like, are these films a Turkification of all of these kind of Hollywood and American films? Yeah, that's always an interesting thing. Like are these films trying to make the film suitable for Turkish audiences or is something more complicated going on there? Is it just about taking something that's foreign and domesticating it for your local audience? Or actually is, is it more than just about that kind of national context? So yeah, that's always something I'm interested in. I think that's a topic that we can certainly bring up again as we go through some of these films because there are some specific changes that I definitely feel like, okay, they're probably making some of these changes because it's taking place in Turkey or in some of the other countries that we're talking about. So just as a kind of backtracking for a second, this is, we're specifically talking, like this is a movie phenomenon. Like it doesn't also cover things like, for example, Nosferatu, which is an unauthorized adaptation of a book. It's not really a remake of a particular film. I mean, I'm always interested in copyright. So I was always fascinated by Nosferatu as a case where, yeah, I guess in some ways it's a precursor to this kind of phenomenon. But then yeah, famously also, yeah, there's a legal case around that film that meant that the film was almost lost because of being sued by the estate. So yeah, it's always interesting that where the limit lies in terms of how much can you borrow from a source without getting an official license agreement. And if you step over that line, what limitations are put on? Are you being sued? Are there restrictions on where you can release the film? Like lots of the films we're going to be talking about dance over that line and get away with a lot of things that they wouldn't be able to get away with if they were, for example, releasing the film in the US rather than, yeah, in Turkey in the 70s and 80s. And to that end, are any of these countries doing anything that are outside Hollywood or are they specifically, is part of this remake exploitation, specifically Hollywood movies that are getting remade because they're the ones that are mostly getting shown? My main interest, and in fact, yeah, my book, The Hollywood Meme, is very much about how were Hollywood films being reworked and adapted in industries around the world. But it's definitely not limited to Hollywood. I mean, I would say Hollywood is a kind of globally dominant cinema that dominates cinema chains all around the world. That's part of the reason why these films are being reworked in industries in so many countries around the world. But there are, like Turkey was remaking Italian films, Egyptian films, Indian films. So there were, yeah, I mean, there are fascinating examples there in Turkey. The Jalo, Strange Vice of Mrs. Ward is remade the following year as the translation is Tharshan Stafer, Sex, Love and Murder. And it's... That almost sounds like a Jalo title anyway. Well, exactly, yeah. It's a good classic Jalo title. And also one that's, it does the exact thing I was talking about where it's like the Italian industry to the nth degree. So yeah, you've got Strange Life of Mrs. Ward, but it's much shorter. Like it has all the same scenes, but everything just done much quicker. It's on a much lower budget, but it still hits all the same story beats. It's been produced in a much quicker schedule. But yeah, just to kind of capitalize on like, oh yeah, we just saw a great film. Let's make a version of that next week. Let's Russia ends. We've got it in cinemas in a couple of months. But yeah, like in India, yeah, some of the biggest kind of global successes like Avara were then remade in Turkey. So yeah, it's definitely not something that's limited to Hollywood's influence, but I would say Hollywood is the dominant one just by nature of being the dominant cinema around the world. Right. Okay. That's really interesting. Yeah. Because we're talking, all the ones that we're talking about are all films that originated in Hollywood. And so it's interesting to imagine some of these other ones kind of coming out of all of this. That's pretty interesting. As far as the draw to genre films, I'm guessing that a lot of this comes from the fact that genre films are easier to translate and to sell overseas. Right? I mean, because we're seeing, I mean, the films we're talking about generally are like science fiction and horror. We have one comedy and, you know, I mean, certainly we see influence of things like martial arts films in these as well. Is that largely what they're doing with this as far as remake exploitation? Yeah, I think that's true. Yeah. There's definitely an emphasis on, yeah, certain kind of internationally popular genres, ones that do travel well. So yeah, science fiction, horror, fantasy, partly because, yeah, those are some of the films that were circulating and playing around the world. And then also, yeah, if you're a kind of exploitation film producer, those are also films that you feel you can sell, that have an audience, that have a market. So I think, yeah, in general, it's mainly, yeah, kind of popular and kind of genre films that are most often the ones that are being remade. But it's not always the case. And yeah, there are always interesting examples where there are, I guess, more mainstream films, more kind of art house films are still being remade. And yeah, I mean, I guess in some ways, like the reworking of some like it is an example of a film where, yeah, this isn't a sci fi film, it's not a genre film, but it's still very popular. It was remade twice in Turkey. I mean, I think, in a way, part of the reason for the emphasis on those genres is just that exploitation cinema itself is particularly interested in those kinds of styles of filmmaking, partly because they work so well for low budget filmmaking, that's going to attract an audience without having a big star, because you've got the promise of special effects and sex and violence and all the things that the genre films tend to have. Well, and that, to a large extent, even holds true here in the States and in Hollywood, like especially in horror, you often hear that it's the genre that you don't necessarily need any star or big budget or anything, as long as you have the great concept, it can very easily find an audience. And I think that's one of the things that translates pretty well to this whole idea of these remakes and why they're being made. Imagine for the evolution of this. And I guess maybe I'm not sure if it's an evolution of it so much as just a different way of approaching each of the films, but I'm curious because there are films that are definitely more of a scene by scene remake, and then there are films that are, let's just call them very loose adaptations. Is that just kind of story dependent or is it just, or is it something like an evolution? Because like over time, they start feeling like they can be more flexible with the way they're telling them. Do you have any sense of that? I think it sometimes depends on audience awareness of the original text and then what are they kind of attempting to do with it? So yeah, for some films, especially ones based around superhero characters, there's a kind of looseness to the stories they're telling with those characters because part of the idea is, okay, audiences recognize these characters from comic books. They recognize the costume, the logo, the name that will draw the audience in. And that's really what we're interested in. And we can then play around with them so we can have a film with Captain America teaming up with Santo to battle Spider-Man in Istanbul. Like it's, you have a much more kind of playful and loose relationship with the original. Whereas yeah, the motivation around others is different. So with Metinaxon's remake of The Exorcist, that's a film that's not going to be released in Turkey for a number of years after that point, the original. And so they're able to just make almost shot for shot kind of direct remake that almost replaces the original on kind of Turkish screens. So yeah, I think, yeah, I'd say it less as evolution and more as our audience is aware and what are they trying to capitalize on in choosing to borrow these elements. Interesting. Okay. So for example, Shocking Dark, which is an Italian remake of kind of Aliens and Terminator, they likely had already seen audiences likely had already seen Aliens and Terminator play in the country. And so this was just an opportunity for them to exploit it in a way where you could kind of throw all of it into the mix and audiences would recognize it, but they weren't feeling like it was just a remake. Because some like it hot, they hadn't seen it. That film likely didn't get distribution in Turkey, so they just did their own version of it. Yeah. That's kind of what you're saying. Okay. Exactly. Yeah. And I think, I mean, we can see that in other industries like in Bollywood, for example, where because Hollywood films are really not popular in India, like by far the dominant industry, there's the Hindi language, Bollywood industry. Yeah. They're able to remake films with the knowledge that their main domestic audience have no familiarity with that film at all. And so it's much less about having recognizable costumes and iconography and all these kind of elements that might lure in an audience and more about, well, yeah, here's a great story that we can now use, do our own version of. And yeah, it's about that relationship with the audience where they're not aware of that. And therefore we can just do our own version. So yeah, it's true of the Turkish, some like it hot remake, it's true of loads of the Bollywood examples. And then yeah, you're exactly right that the huge difference then with something like Talking Dark, which is released as Terminator 2 in some territories, it's released as Aliens 2 as well. So yeah, it's very much about capitalizing on, okay, yeah, audiences have seen the James Cameron original, therefore I want to see more of that. And yeah, so I think it is about capitalizing on something quite different, the motivation behind the remaking is very different in each case. Gotcha. Yeah, yeah. That's really interesting. And I suppose it's easier probably then when they were weren't as concerned, I guess we'll just say or didn't have to worry so much about the copyright law. And obviously things will shift over time as far as what they're going to have to have to pay attention to when it comes to that sort of thing. Yeah, yeah, very true. Yeah, I mean, I think a big reason that a lot of this this kind of phenomenon largely died out around the world is just the kind of increasing kind of global regimes of copyright. So you're no longer relying on very specific national copyright laws, many of which have less interest in enforcing copyrights for rights holders outside of that country. And so yeah, as the kind of global regimes of copyright become more interlinked towards the end of the 20th century start the 21st century, a lot of these films become, yeah, it's impossible to make anything like the Turkish Star Wars today. Certainly as a film you're releasing into cinemas. Maybe you could really do it as a kind of fan film, you could put it online, but it couldn't be a kind of theatrically released commercial film. Yeah, that's actually an interesting point because certainly like the Star Wars example specifically, like they have kind of, from my understanding, have welcomed like fan films, right? And like to the point where they have a library of sound effects, like official sound effects that fans can use in their fan films that they're making. But the whole thing is like, as long as it's never done for you to make profit from it, it's only done for fun. That's an interesting, perhaps, I guess we could call it evolution of this over time. Like that's kind of where it is now because of copyright law and how it's gotten so strict. Yeah, definitely. And these corporations that own things like Disney, for example, have become so global with such a firm grasp, we'll just say. Yeah, yeah, I think that's very true. To the point where at one stage there was a sense in which Lucasfilm would be more upset around the kind of fan films, maybe two decades ago. And then there's a kind of evolution in how they've treated those films to the point where they're almost trying to kind of not bring it in house, but to try and kind of make it part of, you're allowed to do this, but you need to follow our rules, which are very different from the kind of rules where Chetan and Ansh making The Man Who Saves the World is just taking clips from the film. He's taking music from-- No rules at all. Yeah, yeah. Just completely-- There are some Raiders of the Lost Ark music. Sure. Exactly. You don't need to worry about copyright. Yeah, no, exactly. We've talked about a lot of the specifics that you're finding in these. I see this kind of as a film movement since it kind of encompasses so many different genres and subgenres in all these different genre films. We've talked about kind of how it's often low budget, very simple special effects, pulling elements in from the films, multiple films, unrelated films, all of that. I want to talk a little bit more about kind of this idea of replacing any cultural references with local ones, because that is something that has popped up in a few of these films as we're watching them. I find that to be an interesting element. We'll talk about some specific examples. I'm very curious about like the Turkish Exorcist, for example, when we get to that one. Well, and also, I should say, as part of this, it's not just replacing American cultural references. It's also, in some cases, bringing in references, not even replacing one, just bringing something in from their own culture that they wanted to do, like tourist Omer, for example, that we'll be talking about in the Turkish Star Trek. Is that a prominent element of these? Like bringing in, whether it's an actor that everyone's going to recognize, like the Philippines James Batman, or things like that, where they're trying to find ways to just, I don't know, bring in a bigger audience, I guess? Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. It's the kind of classic exploitation thing of bringing in numerous ways of trying to draw in an audience to try and not simply be, "Okay, yeah, you recognize Batman, you recognize James Bond. Let's do James Batman, and let's get Dolphie in and play a dual role." Dolphie being a prominent Philippine comedy actor at the time, right? Exactly, yeah. So it's a big star in loads of comedies. He appeared in quite a lot of James Bond kind of spoofs, like Dalpinger. Like they would all have elements that would kind of play off. That's a very meta title, just bringing the actor's name into it, too. That's fantastic. So yeah, I think the studios were very kind of aware of, yeah, we've got a comedy star, and then we can riff on the various imported American films and get an audience in that way. But then, yeah, so some in cases, as we'll get into, it's about localizing it to try and make it appeal to the domestic market to take elements that might seem overly foreign or unfamiliar and to try and make it work within this particular cultural context. One of the things I often find interesting is there's some work that's been done about Indian cinema and how, yeah, as I was saying, like many of the remakes in Indian cinema, the ideas that audiences there will not be familiar with the original. You've got teams of writers who will be sat watching American films and will be tasked with, okay, can you adapt this for Indian audiences? And then it becomes a question of, okay, well, what changes do we need to make? And so some of those are, there's certain assumptions about cultural attitudes where they're like, okay, yeah, so the protagonist can't do this because audiences in India won't sympathize with them if they do that. If the villain does this, that's going too far. If the heroine does this, audiences won't go along with that. So there's some things along those around cultural sensitivities. And then there's some things which are just based around what audiences expect from a popular film. So if you have an American film, you need to remake it in India, it becomes, well, it needs to be three hours long. So like, it needs to have music. It needs to have music. So like, you need to have six moments where you can like break into song during the film. And also you need to have more than one plot line. So like, part of the reason for the three hour length of loads of Bollywood films is that audiences tend to find a kind of single plot line to be boring. It doesn't really kind of grab their attention. A 90 minute film, it's not enough. You need to have various different overlapping plot threads that then come together by the end. And so part of what they're doing is they're watching a film and saying, okay, well, let's add in this extra plot line. Let's add these songs at this point. Okay, this will make a film that Indian audiences are going to enjoy. And there's various assumptions within that about what India and audiences like and what they will appreciate. Some assumptions which have been challenged over more recent years as Bollywood cinema has kind of actually shifted away from that style, has moved much more towards like two hour length and not all the different plot lines and not all of the song and dance numbers. But yeah, so it is about kind of making a film that will resonate with the local audience and that will be popular with that local audience. Yeah, and I suppose that's what any of these countries is going to have to really think about in context of this. Like, you know, we can sell a Batman film, we can sell this, but what can we do to put a twist on it that will also bring in bigger crowds in our local theaters? Like what do the local people want to see? And I suppose that's something that they really have to think about. So it's such an intriguing movement in the way that these films really kind of turned into their own thing. Let's take a break. We're going to come back and we're going to talk about five Turkish films. My Turkish, I don't have any sort of census to Turkish pronunciation, so I'll just try. Fistic Gibi, which is the Turkish "some like it hot". Tourist Omer Uze Yolunda, which is the Turkish Star Trek. Three Dev Adam, or Three Giant Men, which is the Turkish Captain America and Santo battling Spider-Man as you were talking about. Seitan, which is the Turkish, the exorcist. Dunyai Kurtaran Adam, or the man who saved the world, that's Turkish Star Wars. And then for our members, we're going to talk about five other films. And for those, we're going to be going around the world. We're going to be talking about James Batman, which is the Philippines, James Bond and Batman and Robin teaming up. We've got the Mexican Batwoman called La Muhermursiellago, Lady Terminator from Indonesia, Shocking Dark from Italy and Mahakal, which is the Bollywood Nightmare on Elm Street. So it should be a lot of fun films to discuss. So we'll be right back. Before we jump into these films, I wanted to get a sense from you because obviously there were a lot of options as you were talking about. Is there a particular, are these just like really good examples of like what people can expect from Turkish, kind of these remake exploitation films? Is it that, you know, there are kind of a lot of the other ones are just harder to find? Like how did we end up landing on these particular five ones? A big part of it is that, yeah, I mean, as I was saying, like the Turkish cinema of this period, which I should say is, is kind of known within Turkey as Yeshilcham. So this is, it's the name of a street in Istanbul where many of this studios had their offices and so it translates as green pine. But yeah, Yeshilcham is just, it's like it's all of the, yeah, the street where all of these films were being made, all competing with each other, making really low budget films and making hundreds of films. So it's been claimed that Turkey was second only to India and the US in terms of the number of films that were being produced every year throughout the 1970s. So huge industry, huge, at least a hugely productive industry, which was really prolific. But yeah, a lot of those films, like they weren't looked after, they weren't seen as being like big significant films that need to be archived and preserved and looked after. They were films that were rushed into production, rushed into cinemas. Once they've made enough money to then make another one, just, you know, keeping the cycle going. And so many of the films for a long time, they were circulating largely on VHS. Many films have been released in Germany on VHS. And so yeah, as I was saying, like I'd come across them through craters of like, you know, rare films that are difficult to find. And so many of those were copied off German VHS tapes. But then over the years, some of them are now being restored. There's a company in Istanbul called Fanatic Film, who for a yeah, for their YouTube channel, they've been restoring loads of the films in HD. And so yeah, it's getting to the point where now a lot of them are becoming available, but then relatively few of them are subtitled. And so yeah, part of the reason I chose these five was, yeah, these are films that are in HD that have been subtitled. Yeah, I ran a festival of Turkish film remakes in London. And so we screened all of these HD restorations. Some of them were like new new subtitles. So the some like hot remake had never been subtitled in English before we did it for that festival. And then yeah, I guess the one exception there is 3Dev Adam, which is still circling in DVD quality. I actually have a HD scan of a print, but unfortunately, the print was incomplete. It was the kind of classic, you know, one real missing problem of exploitation films, where yeah, I'm now in a slight quandary as to what to do next. Because yeah, I guess we could just for that one real just use the the kind of DVD quality version and then have the HD restoration for the rest. But my preference would be to find another print and actually do a proper restoration. So yeah, that's the one exception. But the others it's Yeah, these are the ones that are that are in H, in HD that have been subtitled. Okay, great, great. Yeah, it's great to know. And just, you know, as usual, I'll put links in the show notes for people so you can track these down. Most of these are on YouTube. There have been a few that have been made a little more accessible, like I think I found like Satan on Amazon. And then the Batwoman has also that one has been released on Blu-ray. A couple of them have actually been released on Blu-ray and some pretty nice versions of them. So it's all have links in the show notes for people to check them out. Well, let's start walking through these I just put it in chronological order. So let's start with Feastigibby or some like it hot. This is Hokusaner who directed this. In Billy Wild or Some Like It Hot, but said in 1970s Turkey, where two working musicians witness a murder and have to disguise themselves as women to escape gangsters. Instead of joining an all female jazz band, they joined a traditional Turkish musical troupe. The Jack Lemon Roll falls for a wealthy older man like Osgood. While the Tony Curtis character pursues a beautiful singer like sugar cane, using both his female persona and when in male clothes pretending to be a wealthy businessman. The film recreates many of the original original's plot beats and comedic situations, but with distinctly Turkish musical numbers and cultural touches. Even the famous last line gets a little bit of a different spin. This is one of the ones that's more of a straightforward remake. And I think that it's kind of fun to watch because it does put it all into this Turkish context. It's doing a good job of kind of tracking along with the story pretty much. But I was curious about this and you know, I guess I'm not as familiar with like Turkish society, particularly in 1970. The idea of cross dressing or dressing in women's clothes like this, even to the point of like the whole thing at the American one with the end with Osgood. Nobody's perfect. Like that whole ending. I was like, how is that? How does something like that play for Turkish audiences? And do you know, like, have you talked to people as far as like the general reaction to this concept in Turkey at the time? Well, interestingly, there's a book that scholar, Burgo Dabak wrote about cross dressing in Turkish cinema. And she argues that actually it's got a kind of a long history through theater and into cinema. And so I guess along with, yeah, I mean, countries like the UK, there's a kind of history of kind of cross dressing within kind of popular culture generally and kind of drag. So I think the film is kind of following within a fairly kind of local tradition around, yeah, playing around with gender in that way. But it's I guess part of what's interesting there is that if we think about this as a film that translates the film into into Turkish culture, one way of thinking about it would be yeah, oh yeah, this is just a Turkification. This is an attempt. It's a Turkish translation. But then as we see in the film, it's also a Turkey that is very much connected with global culture in terms of fashion style. This kind of is the kind of it's the 19th, the long 1960s, like it's 1970, but it's very much still part of the kind of fashion and style of that of that period. And it's a moment where, yes, there is kind of traditional Turkish music, but is also playing around with so many kind of cosmopolitan elements that are being imported from from from Europe, from Western Europe, from the US. So it's a really interesting mix of cultures, even if on one level, yeah, it's a very clear Turkish translation of some like I thought it was fun or funny to see like some of the other like the changes because the Jack Lemmon character, his he is very once he once he realizes the benefits of dressing like a woman like he's pretty hands on pretty often. I was like, well, he is like, like, I mean, even if I were a woman sitting with him, I'd start feeling comfortable because he's just like grabbing their poking their breasts and grabbing their butts or whatever. I'm just like, wow, okay, he is just nonstop with this. But it kind of made it funny. And I was wondering, as far as like these two actors, are they were they more prominent, like comedic actors in Turkey that people would have recognized and like, like, you know, Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, like ones that we would have recognized? Like are they casting people that very particularly the Turkish audiences are going to click with? Not so much in the equivalent of the Tony Curtis role, but definitely the Jack Lemmon role as you say, yeah, Sadri Aliszczyk. It's yeah, a very popular comedian in Turkey. And yeah, yeah, he gets very handsy with all of the women in all of the scenes where they're in the bedroom. But it is definitely played for laughs. It is played for a kind of the ridiculousness. And he plays up to that. Right. It's not quite rapey. Like it's not getting into like uncomfortable territory. Like it's it clearly is designed to just be comedic as the way that he's doing it. Yeah, definitely. And yeah, and so he's yeah, very popular. And then the actress that was in the kind of Malin Monroe, the sugar cane kind of role, she was a kind of young aspiring star. So it's a film that is definitely kind of finding equivalence in a way of the kind of stars from the from the original. But yeah, I think part of the reason the film is so popular still in Turkey is is Sadri Aliszczyk in the in the in the Jack Lemmon role. Like there are lots of fans who just want to watch his work. And interestingly, yeah, the one that we watched here, this 1971 is the kind of color remake of a black and white film that they've made six years earlier, which still had Sadri Aliszczyk in that role. So he kind of he has returned to the role in order to, yeah, further establish like he was the most popular part of that original remake. And so I see. Yeah. Sadri Saner again, like, did both like, I mean, he is the director is one of the legends of Turkish remake exploitation like he. Yeah, as we will talk about, he also directed the reworking of Star Trek. He was the producer on the remake of The Exorcist. Like he I think, 77 feature films he made, producer on nearly double that like he's a really big figure. And he's behind the tourist Omer films also, right? Which is that's and that's the Sadri Aliszczyk, his name, Aliszczyk. He is tourist Omer, right? Isn't he the actor who will end up playing tourist Omer in the Star Trek one? Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, same actor. And I think, yeah, they are kind of partnership worked really well, like through a whole, yeah, long number of films and yeah, in Hulke Saner's biography, he talks very warmly about yeah, working with Sadri Aliszczyk and the kind of their partnership really helping, you know, working well for both of them, establishing them in the industry. I guess one of the things I find interesting with the film is also because there's sometimes a danger with re-exploitation that there's a sense that, oh, well, the original, that the source text is the original, like there's this kind of like, okay, yeah, everyone around the world is making a version of Jaws or Star Wars or The Exorcist. And it's like all the other countries are doing copies and Hollywood is doing the original film. But it's always good to question that, especially in a case like this, where some like it hot is not actually the original, the one that we're all familiar with, the Billy Wilder, Marle Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lyman was partly based on a French film from 1935, Fanfare of Love, which was then remade in Germany. And then so the, you know, this is the kind of second remake of Fanfare of Love. It's just that some like it hot is the kind of dominant film that is then being remade in Turkey, like it and it, and this Turkish film is, it's very clearly playing on some like it hot rather than the French or German previous films. Like the gangster subplot, which was introduced in some like it hot is very much in the, in the Turkish film and it's not in either the French or German ones. But yeah, it's that thing where, yeah, it's always good to question this idea that the source text is always somehow an original because even that original is also an amalgamation of sources and can sometimes be a remake itself. Yeah, that's actually a really interesting point because I like, I don't think I knew that some like it hot was based on those. So that's actually interesting to see. But I think that just speaks to how sometimes it's the popular one that ends up becoming dominant because it kind of pushes anything else aside. And I think that's an interesting way to kind of look at the kind of the way that these go. And I don't know, I guess I'm just in one particular property, but I think an example of that that I always think of is Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy because it's like, what is the original version of that? Was it the original radio show, which kind of like kept changing when there was it the book that he kind of wrote from that or like how did he finally come to whatever is the final official version of it? So I think that's an interesting exploration in one particular property. But to see it play out here, I think that speaks a lot to the nature of this type of storytelling. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And I think it's, yeah, it's always good to question, yeah, what is the original and what extent is it even a useful kind of concept to be like, oh, yeah, well, here's the original, like because we often when we're talking about adaptations, talk about, oh, it's really good if it's faithful to the original. But then is the original just the text that you were familiar with first? Like is it is it the one that you're like, oh, yeah, I read the novel and therefore I really valued these aspects. Therefore I want that to be captured in the adaptation. Or are we trying to kind of delve into like what actually was the original and what sources was it drawing from? So yeah, I think it's always good to be questioning that. Like I mean, yeah, like Shakespeare, one of the great play playwrights, arguably very few of the stories in those plays are the original. But we then look at some of the best adaptations of Shakespeare, like in Kurosawa. Many of those are not using Shakespeare's language. So like if it's not using Shakespearean language and it's using a plot line that was he was actually borrowing from from various other historical sources and other plays, then where is the Shakespeare there? And so yeah, I'm always interested in questioning those ideas of a kind of set original text and then aspiring to be faithful to that original. In some extent, it all kind of turns into a ship of Theseus, right? It's like, it's like, where what is the actual original at this point? So yeah, that's actually really interesting. And the way that this story unfolds, I had a lot of fun looking at something like this with the Turkish music in it, which was kind of a fun. I mean, you walk into the story, you know that, okay, they're musicians, they're going to join a band. So there should be music in the film. And so it was kind of fun to kind of get a sense of 70s Turkish music that like that people would be playing in a situation like this. And I that was an element I enjoyed quite a bit is just kind of getting that a little bit of that taste as we went through this film. Definitely. And yeah, I think for anyone, I often find that these films work well as a as a kind of like initial introduction to Turkish cinema and culture that people who might otherwise not watch many Turkish films, listen to a lot of Turkish music might be drawn in like, Oh yeah, maybe I'll I'm curious to see what a Turkish some like a heart is or a Turkish Star Wars is. And then yeah, become fascinated with the culture. And yeah, I mean, Turkish music of the 1970s is incredible. And as I said, like, I didn't come across this through being a very cosmopolitan upbringing or loads of travel in my youth or anything like that. This was just being an obsessive film fan, just watching films from around the world. But through that brief introduction, you know, that first DVD or copy of Turkish Exorcist, which then started me on this journey, I'm now fascinated like, like my record collection is filled with Turkish 1970s music, because yeah, the whole Anatolian rock scene from that period is incredible. And so yeah, I think the music we get in in fistic give is really, yeah, it gives a kind of brief taste of some of the incredible stuff that's going on there where Turkish musicians and artists are engaging with elements borrowed from the West, but then adapting it and reworking it and combining it with with local elements to create these fascinating new kind of hybrid forms. Right. No, it's so interesting. Speaking of bringing in these local elements, let's move to our next film, which is Tourist Omer Uza Yolunda or the Turkish Star Trek, also directed by Hökizanur as we just said, and also starring Sadriya Olusik. What I found interesting looking at this is this is technically the first Star Trek film that has been released in theaters, which I don't think many Star Trek fans might even be aware of. For this film, imagine Star Trek, the man trap, but Dr. McCoy's shape shifting ex Nancy is now dating an evil doctor who pulls a hapless Turkish tourist named Omer through time and space, specifically yanking him right out of a forced wedding. The doctor plans to frame Omer for Nancy's salt vampire murders both on his planet and aboard the enterprise. While our hero just wants to understand why the doors go whoosh and how he ended up in space. The episode plays out similarly to the original with crew members being killed by the salt creature, but now with Omer's slapstick reactions to future technology providing comic relief, particularly driving the logical Spock to increasingly un-Vulcan displays of exasperation. In a wild departure from Trek canon, Spock actually grants Omer some of his Vulcan powers along with a set of pointy ears before sending him back to his own time, which he uses to scare off the wedding party. This was really funny, and I think a lot of it is because of this inclusion of the Turkish Omer character. Can you tell me a little bit about the popularity of this character because this is, I guess, the last of his, I don't know, I can't remember, seven films? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And I think you're totally right that also many of the pleasures of this film are the interactions between Omer and Spock. Like it's Spock's Spock's raised eyebrow and he'd always look at the camera like, "Whoa!" Yeah. So funny. They're such a great kind of comedy double acts. They're really, yeah, they play off each other so well because Omer kind of plays up the kind of irrational kind of character and, yeah, playing up against Spock and trying to upset him, rib him, just kind of play jokes on him. And so, yeah, it is really, that is one of the best aspects of this. Because yeah, Tuda Stonemer was a kind of comedy character that, yeah, Hulkish-anner developed with Sadriyala Shik. They'd worked on a number of films up to that point, decided to, yeah, make a film. Initially it's the ideas that Omer is a kind of poor, kind of brutal character who travels to Istanbul and finds himself like a kind of tourist in the kind of urban city. So he's kind of... Okay. So that's why he's initially called a tourist Omer because he's kind of wandering around aimlessly like a tourist and it plays off that kind of fish out of water kind of narrative like he's a kind of rural bumpkin character who's now in the city. And then in subsequent films, he travels to different countries. And so you have Tuda Stonemer in Germany, Tuda Stonemer in Africa, Tuda Stonemer in Spain. And often it's kind of based around stereotypical ideas of that national culture. So yeah, Spain, it's all kind of bull fighting and other kind of iconic aspects of stereotypical aspects of Spanish culture that he's unfamiliar with, not really pokes fun at, but kind of interacts with in comedic ways. And then after all of those films, they then in the final film, it's Tuda Stonemer in space. So it's Tuda Stonemer in the world of Star Trek, but it's really the specific episode, the Man Trap. So there's something really interesting going on where it's not just, yeah, let's just do a new story in the world of Star Trek. It becomes like, let's recreate an episode of Star Trek, except now Tuda Stonemer is there poking fun at all the different elements. So there's a real kind of fun kind of meta layer to the film where, yeah, he's now inserted in the story and is now just making jokes at everyone's expense throughout. Right. Like he's playing, he grabs, I can't remember what the thing is that he grabs, but he's playing with one of the pieces of technology and everybody else on the ships, like the captain thinks that they're under attack and like goes into red alert and all this sort of stuff. He's like, no, no, I was just doing this. I was just playing with this thing. It's like, he is a real goofball in all of this and trying to, like watching them trying to like manage him, like Spock, you go take care of him. Like just the things that they would do. And it played in a really fun way. And I really enjoyed the way that it played. And the way that it tied into that loose revisioning of the original, like that Star Trek, the very first episode where you have this kind of the salt creature sucking everybody, everybody's salt out of them. But the way that that played throughout and the way that he kind of kept being folded back into the story was actually quite a bit of fun. And I enjoyed the way that they gave that to us because I don't know, it's having like this anachronistic character brought into the fold of this Star Trek episode just made it like you said, it's pointing out a lot of those silly sci-fi elements that as an audience member of like just watching Star Trek, like sure, we might think about the door wishing or hear the stories about just like the grip that's back there, sliding it back and forth and like all of that sort of thing. But to have somebody like meta calling it out during the actual process made it pretty funny and it was kind of fun to see. Was Star Trek, like would audiences in Turkey have been familiar with the TV show at this time? I think I've got a little bit of reception to this and I've found like TV take up across the country as a whole wasn't as established as it was in some other kind of European countries and in the US, but it was playing on the main kind of Turkish station. And so yeah, I think audiences, especially around Istanbul would have been familiar enough with the series. But then for other audiences, it still works. It still works as a kind of tourist stoneware is now in outer space for fans of the tourist stoneware series. Like it's paladying Star Trek, but in a way that you don't need to have seen Star Trek to get all the jokes. And yeah, like they're recreating various other scenes from the show, but there's less of a sense of like a kind of wink, wink, like, oh, we're going to now, now we're going to do a scene from I Mad or what the little girls made of or something like that. It's more just let's just take more material from Star Trek. Like, oh, that'll be a fun scene to do. Let's try and have Kirk and Spock do a battle and then Omar can get involved. And so yeah, I think audiences, some audiences would be familiar with the show, but I think they were also trying to make it so that the film didn't rely on that. Yeah, you could. Well, and to that end, I suppose it's smart to pick the very first episode because it's just like anyone who is watching the show at the time also is just being thrust into the world without having under, you know, known about any of the stuff that was going on. So so to that end, I think it plays pretty well. Let's now move to three dev Adam or three giant men. This is the the villain Spider-Man battling Captain America and the Mexican wrestler Santo. The director's name Fikret Ushak. Yep. Ushak. Okay. Ushak. Okay. Imagine a superhero movie where Spider-Man is actually a violent crime boss in Istanbul who tears people apart with his bare hands while wearing a cheap Halloween store Spidey mask and only the team up of Captain America and Mexican wrestling superhero El Santo can stop him. Instead of web slinging, this Spider-Man uses martial arts and brutal mob tactics rather than Peter Parker's with great power comes great responsibility. He leads a gang that steals ancient artifacts and murders people in increasingly brutal ways. Captain America, who looks nothing like Steve Rogers and carries a gun and El Santo, who at least looks like the real El Santo, must work together to bring down this bizarro evil Spider-Man leaving to fight scenes that completely ignore any Marvel canon or Spider-Man actual powers. It's like someone described American superhero comics to Turkish filmmakers who'd never read them then added ultra violence. This was a very funny film to watch, particularly because at the start of it, we have a beach scene with Spider-Man, the villain and his group who bury a woman in the sand and then proceed to pull a boat with its with its spinning rotor right up to her face as a form of torture and trying to get something out of her and then just proceed to push it into her face and splatter blood everywhere. This film starts with a pretty brutal, violent scene on behalf of Spider-Man. It is a very eclectic approach to this adaptation and very creative in the way that it's pulling all of this. What is it saying and maybe it's not really saying anything, but I'm just curious about the characters' understanding or relationship to the original properties as far as any sense of loyalty or was it just a sense of let's do something with this because it's fun? Yeah, I think because we were talking earlier about fidelity to the original. This is definitely a filmmaker who does not feel any need to be faithful to the original comic books or movie serials or anything like that. It's very much, "Let's take these characters, let's take their costumes, their iconography, the elements that we can put on the poster and we'll draw in an audience who are fans of comic books." But then let's make it a much more ultra-violent, crime-revenge film rather than taking any real interest in the film. As superheroes, because as you say, superhero powers are not really part of what's going on in this. You would think, "Captain American Santo, battling Spider-Man, I wonder how they'll use their superpowers to defeat each other." It's really just ordinary men waiting costumes, doing battle with the kind of ultra-violence and sadism that we really don't expect from a Spider-Man film. Yeah, not at all. Yeah, and I was curious watching this because there ends up being a woman who is at cap's side for a while helping out. I'm like, "Okay, so are they pulling off a Black Widow for this or where are we going here?" I'm like, "Maybe not. They just needed a female to be involved in the story." It was fun to see what they were doing with it and the way that they played these characters. Also, just the logic to have the way that they were playing with logic, which isn't necessarily superhero logic, but for Captain America, he says, "Spider is a child-minded lunatic. He always wears a mask. When he sees someone else wearing a mask, he wants to destroy them." I'm like, "Okay." I guess they're coming up with some logic for why this version of Captain America has to also then wear an outfit when he goes into battle. It was just fun and nonsense, the way that they would play with all of these characters. That's what I found really fun. It made me think about, are they looking at these characters as the idea of people wearing these costumes to go fight crime or to go commit crime is already kind of silly in the world of comics and everything. I couldn't help but think that there was an element to this where they were playing with the interpretation of why people would wear these things. On one extent, allowing it to be very childish as far as all of the logic, the way that the story plays out, but also that ultra-violent aspect seems to be drawing in perhaps more of an adult audience for them. I was curious, who were they targeting for the audience for these? That's a good question because I think you're totally right that in some ways, it seems quite silly and ridiculous and so seems more aligned with something that would be aimed at a younger audience. Then, the violence goes so far beyond what you would expect in a kid's film. I think this is actually something about Turkish cinema of the 1970s and how much closer it is to Italian cinema of that period than US superhero films and things like that. There's a kind of violence and sadism in quite a few of the films that seems almost out of step with some of the elements they borrowed from elsewhere. There's a remake of or a reworking of Batman made in Turkey around the same time where he's gun-toting, smoking anti-hero character. It's still Batman and Robin, but it's really a violent revenge film, crime film that just so happens that the heroes, the anti-hero figures are Batman and Robin and have the costume. It's got nudity, violence. It's got lots of things that you wouldn't expect within a 1973 Batman film. I think part of the audience they're going for are older teens, people in the '20s that are familiar with those characters that recognize Spider-Man, Captain America, and Santo and are curious to see them in a Turkish context. Did it happen often where they would take a character and so drastically shift them? Spider-Man, we're turning him into just a complete villain. It's not even really in any sense actually Spider-Man. I'm thinking like James, Batman, they're both still heroes. You were just talking about the Batman and Robin anti-heroes in that version, but it sounded like they were still probably fighting crime, just a much more punisher sort of way. Do you see more of these shifts where it's just a complete, let's just take this character, but yeah, more interesting as a villain? That's a good question. I think actually, yeah, the way that they've treated Spider-Man in this film is kind of an exception. It is a rare example where they've really just decided, okay, let's make Spider-Man the villain and let's make him as villainous and over-the-top villain as we can, almost a kind of mustache twirling kind of villain. But yeah, those then just become, yeah, the costume is almost, in terms of the plot line is not that important. It's a way of, it's an exploitable element that they can use to bring in an audience. And then of course it becomes part of the fascination for fans who are curious to see this sadistic villain Spider-Man in Istanbul. But then, yeah, I think the film itself is less interested in kind of deliberately playing with our expectations of the characters. But the film was successful. Like many of these Turkish films, part of the reason that they are the way that they are is because they were aimed at a domestic Turkish audience. They weren't really exported much. They were able to get away with a lot because of that. But this was one that did actually circulate around kind of the Middle Eastern market. So Libya, Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, like they all, like this film managed to reach audiences in all those countries, which was, yeah, relatively rare at that time. I mean, Turkish television today is really global and reaches audiences around the world. But yeah, Turkish cinema at that time was hugely prolific. One of the biggest industries in terms of number of films, but actually relatively limited in terms of where those films circulated. They were really just aimed at the Turkish market and then later would then get released on video in Germany, but mainly for the Turkish guest workers, yeah, working in Germany. Gotcha. With the popularity of films like this, were they making their own sequels to them or not? That's a good question. Yeah. So unlike Italy, which would just any successful film, you would get sequels, you would get unofficial sequels, you've got lots of different, like Django, something like that. You had loads of different producers all making their own versions and their own unofficial sequels, and then competing over which one is Django 2 and Django 3. Whereas in the Turkish industry, actually, it's relatively rare for sequels, certainly at this point. So yeah, there isn't an Ichdev Adam 2 or 3. I mean, there are certainly films which rework similar plots over and over again. So the Godfather plot was popular and there were a number of films that were reworking that plot line. But no, there's – yeah, I can't think of examples of ones where they were actual and official sequel that would then – yeah, people who were fans of that first one would then follow on to the next. That's really interesting, because obviously, there were – like the Tourist Omer example, there was something that they had kind of created some form of a franchise with. But it's interesting that with the rest of these, that they never tapped into the possibilities. It seems like they could have found ways to bring in the Turkish Captain America in some other context and have him fighting Batman or something else. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, it is strange because, yeah, as we'll talk about later when we talk about the Philippines, like, yeah, the Philippines definitely was doing that. There were a lot of Batman films and they kind of kept going with that. Whereas, yeah, in the Turkish industry, most of these, they will do it once. They will do a version of Star Trek or Captain America, but then, yeah, they won't then reappear in subsequent films. Yeah, right. Let's move to 1974's Seitan, the Turkish Exorcist, directed by Metin Erksan. Imagine the Exorcist but set in Istanbul, where a young Turkish girl becomes possessed and her mother seeks help from both medical science and religious authorities. The film follows the original's plot, almost scene for scene, from the girl's increasing disturbing behavior to the climactic exorcism, even keeping some of the Christian elements. Rather than Father Caris, we have Tugrul Bilj, a failed researcher/psychologist who must rediscover his faith to perform the exorcism alongside the priest. The film even recreates iconic moments like the head-spinning and vomiting scenes, though with blue pudding instead of a green pea soup, while tubular bells play almost nonstop throughout. This film was really kind of fun to watch. I'm like, you know, they did a pretty good job of recreating this story in a lot of different ways. How does this as a direct imitation - we've talked about some of the ways that people would do these more direct remakes when the original wasn't going to be reaching them - but how does it say about that balance of faithfulness to the source material and then the need to adapt it for a local audience? Yeah, Shaytan's a really kind of fascinating one because, yeah, as we talked about, the original wasn't going to be released in Turkey until 1982. It was an attempt - people had heard about it. There was controversy, there were news reports about the screenings of The Exorcist in other countries. Hulke Saner, the director of the two Stomer films and also a hot remake, he decided, okay, let's capitalise on this. Everyone's talking about The Exorcist, let's make our version of this. He hired Mitt and Erksan to do it. Part of what's interesting there is that Mitt and Erksan was a hugely celebrated filmmaker in the 1960s. A decade earlier he'd won the Golden Bear at Berlin for his film Dry Summer. That's one of the films that Mark Scorsese's World Cinema Foundation, one of the first films that they restored and released on Blu-ray, one of these neglected classics of world cinema that Scorsese really wanted to bring to prominence. That's Mitt and Erksan. Ten years after that film, he's making a film which is near shot for shot version of Exorcist, which is using tubular bells on the soundtrack over and over. What is Criterion going to put that out? Exactly. I feel like, yeah, I mean, in interviews Mitt and Erksan's often, he's not all that happy with the film and I think it reflects his sense that he'd lost some of the artistic vision and individuality and the sense of him as an auteur that he once had. Oh, now I'm getting hired to go over to London, watch a film and then do a copy of it for Turkish audiences. So he felt his career was in decline by that point. But he is a very talented director. So there's a weird thing where because many of these films used to circulate on clips, and I mean, I guess they'll do, like some people on YouTube and other places will, there'll be a short clip of the film and they'll be like, oh, isn't this funny? Here's a Turkish exorcist and here's the head spinning scene or here's the bed scene with levitating beds. So there's an element like, oh, it's low budget and it doesn't manage to achieve the special effects of the Friedkin film. But actually, when you watch the, yeah, this HD restoration and you see it within the context of the whole film, actually, it's a pretty well made remake. Like it's, yeah, it doesn't have the resources Friedkin has, is working on a much more limited budget. Some of the special effects don't quite work. But overall, it's actually, yeah, very interesting film, despite the fact that, yeah, the director himself is not proud of it. And it's maybe less original than some of the other examples in terms of it's largely retelling the story of exorcist, but with a few key changes in order to translate it for the Turkish context. Well, and that's an interesting part of it because, I mean, the exorcist, it's a Catholic story about an actual exorcism and everything. And we're in Turkey, which I believe is more of a Muslim country. And so taking the elements there and figuring out how to modify them so that it still kind of fits within their religion and just the way that, I mean, it's not like a Muslim exorcist coming or anything like that. I mean, it's still, they keep some of those elements, but Damien isn't, the Damien character, isn't really a priest. Like he's just, he's written this book, Shaytan, and is doing like psychological studies and everything and kind of has lost his faith and everything. But you're getting this sense that some of these changes were made because it's like, well, we can't make it too Catholic or too Christian. We need to modify some of those elements to fit in with what our audiences would expect. Yeah, definitely. And I think, yeah, one of the reasons for that, that kind of change to the kind of main protagonist to be a kind of secular kind of journalist rather than himself a religious figure is partly because then it's that weird thing where you can do a shot for shot remake in a different context. And because it's now taking place in that different context, it has a whole set of different ramifications. So like Turkey is a country that, especially in the kind of mid 1970s, was, there's a kind of, I guess, a clash between secularism and religion that like for a long time, you know, really since the, since Ataturk, since Turkey was established in 23, there was a kind of push towards secularism as being the kind of model for a nation state. So it's a predominantly Muslim country, but one that was very proudly secularist in so much of its public sphere. And that was starting to be questioned. There were a number of people, I mean, as in France and many other countries where there's a tension between secularism and religion. And so this story takes on a whole lot of different implications when it's now about the kind of secular figure who's researching possession, but is kind of skeptical about it. And then is now seeing, actually, maybe there is more to this religion that I'd been kind of pushing away. And so that's one of the things I find most interesting is that the kind of religious aspects of the exorcist around Catholicism are now translated into a different sphere where it's then commenting much more on, on that relationship between secularism and religion within Turkey. Yeah, that's interesting. And it also, instead of like questioning his faith and everything that you know, Father Damian is doing, like it gives a different sense of that ending when he's kind of just having to buy into the fact that all of this is real when we come to the ending. And he makes the, you know, the whole thing of like welcoming the demon into himself and then throwing himself at the window and all that. So it's an interesting shift in the way that the story unfolds. Definitely. And, and it's interesting that the film kind of adds an extra scene at the end where the young girl and her mother visit a mosque. Because I feel like over the years I've changed my reading of that slightly. I think when I initially watched the film, I kind of read it as affirming the place of religion within Turkish culture. And so therefore it's a much more overt commentary on some of the limitations of the kind of secularist system as it existed at the time. Now I look back on it and I feel like some of those were strategic decisions by the director based on the political climate of the times, rather than he himself is wanting to make a commentary on the significance of religion and more about how can I make an adaptation which will satisfy a Turkish audience, but will also satisfy censors and various powers within the industry. So yeah, here's an element to the film that is more what's teaching everyone about the value of religion in their life. Therefore, yeah, please don't censor this film. Yeah, it's an interesting little shift there that we have. And you know, I mean, it's a film that's really enjoyable and it's kind of just fun to watch as it all plays out. I'm assuming that with films like this, we were talking about kind of like that, where does an adaptation start or a remake start? Is there any sense that these filmmakers were actually making an adaptation of the original Blatty novel or were they, I mean, it's so shot for shot often that it seems like they just were only looking at the film, not really at the book, but do you have a sense that the book came into the conversation at all? For this one, I think there is an interview where Hokusaner is trying to make a claim about how they're actually drawing on the original novel. I'm not entirely convinced of that because the film is so clearly sticking to the film and using the soundtrack and it's very closely built on that. There are other ones where there is more of a sense of going through the novel. So the Dracula and Istanbul, which is one of the earliest examples because it's a fifties example of the kind of remake flotation in Turkey, it's adapting a Turkish translation of Dracula. So it's based on a novel, but it's a Turkish translation which made a few changes. And so, yeah, there are sometimes examples where it's not just the film that's being reworked, it's also the novels. And especially in cases where there's a translation, there's an extra interesting layer of adaptation and translation going on there. But yeah, with this one, I think it's in the same way that like all those other exorcist reworkings around the world, like the Black Exploitation Abbey and was it the Mario Bava one where they re-edited Lisa and the Devil as House of Exorcism? All these ones where, yeah, it's not the novel, it's the film. It's clearly, yeah. Yeah, it's so funny. Well, you know, this, I suppose, will be part of our conversation with this next one, which is adapting Star Wars along with a few other things. This is Dunyayi Kurtaran Adam or The Man Who Saves the World, aka Turkish Star Wars, which most people seem to know it as. Directed by Shetin Inang? Yeah, Shetin Inang. Shetin Inang. Imagine Star Wars, but our hero is a Turkish martial artist who learns his powers through intense desert training montages with an ancient master set to stolen music. Instead of X-wings attacking the Death Star, we get stolen Star Wars footage intercut with our hero working out to the Raiders March. Rather than lightsaber duels, we get kung-fu fights against guys in spray-painted cardboard robot suits, while our hero must stop aming the merciless-esque evil wizard with a mummy and monster army. The whole thing plays like a fever dream where Star Wars collides with kung-fu cinema. I started watching this and I got like, I don't know, 10 minutes in and I'm like, "I don't know if I understand what's going on." And I went back and I rewatched the beginning and I'm like, "Maybe we're not just supposed to understand what's going on with this one." This plot is so patchwork as far as all of the different things that they're trying to pull from. I mean, just the opening, all the footage of Star Wars trying to craft this story together. And then we start intercutting two of our Turkish heroes who are in these, "I never could quite figure out which ships they were supposed to be." And I'm like, "Are they in the TIE fighters or are they in the X-wings or who are they? Millennium Falcon? I don't know what they're flying, but they're flying something and clearly they're not dying, so they're winning." It was such a strange amalgam of the story as far as trying to figure out what was going on. This to me is the perfect example of not doing a direct remake of just saying, "Let's take these elements and throw in some kung fu and we'll throw in this guy from Flash Gordon and we're just going to mix it all together and just put something on screen that's going to be a lot of fun." This reminded me of the sort of film that my friends and I would make in high school where it's just like, "We're just pulling whatever and just throwing it in there because it's fun." This really seems to be saying a lot about the relationship to copyright and intellectual property in the realm of remake exploitation and to a certain extent also like the resourcefulness and I guess you could say the audacity that these filmmakers are using when they're putting stuff like this together, right? Yeah, no, definitely. I mean, yeah, I think resourcefulness and audacity is a great description of what Chitin and Ouch is doing here and it's such a big part of why we love these films. This is the one I have the most fun screening. Audiences always respond to this film. Shaitan is great. The Arturo Stoneware and Star Trek is really fascinating. These are all really good films but there's something about just taking clips from Star Wars, music from Raids of Lost Ark and Flash Gordon and Battlestar Galactica and then adding- Black hole, I think I heard. Yeah, exactly. Black hole's in there and then just adding kung fu fights and furry monsters and just loads of elements all tucked together. I think it's partly there's a kind of energy to it. I think through the editing, like Chitin and Ouch, some of his other films have a really, he's got a really distinctive approach to editing which is really fast paced and it just, yeah, it's relentlessly entertaining. It's great to see with an audience and yeah, and it doesn't make sense. Like it's a film where, yeah, I always whenever I intro it, I'm like, for the first 10 minutes, you'll be like, what is going on? And just allow that to wash over you because very- It wasn't just me. Yeah, yeah, definitely not just you. Like it's a weird hodgepodge of philosophy and religion and science fiction and none of it, it doesn't really tie together and it doesn't make any sense and it doesn't really, it becomes increasingly ridiculous as the film goes on. But nevertheless, it's so fun to watch and Junet Arkin who plays the lead role, yeah, he's a big star and loads of kind of Turkish, yes, you'll tell films. But this one, part of what's interesting with it is that it's a film that within Turkey is like a kind of so bad it's good classic because there's sometimes a question around these kind of films is our international audiences laughing at the films and is that something that's imposed from a kind of Western perspective on the films? Like were audiences at the time seeing them as funny and especially for, you know, when clips of the Turkish Exocet circulate, there's a kind of worry around that. But yeah, Turkish Star Wars is a film that audiences within Turkey love as a so bad it's good classic. Like people talk about this as being the plan lines from outer space of Turkish cinema, you know, Chet and then that's just the head wood of Turkish cinema. So yeah, working with very limited resources but with a very distinctive and personal kind of style. And yeah, it's such an incredibly fun, dynamic, insane kind of watch. Yeah, it's also a film that because of how blatant it is with copyright, that's part of the pleasure. It's just how far the audacity of how far he has gone in just taking like not just, oh, let's recreate a bit from Star Wars and let's have some of the costumes and let's have book and spock in Star Trek. It's like, no, let's just take some clips. Let's just edit that into our film. Well, that yeah, because like, I mean, Turkish Star Trek, they pull like the opening credits like the you know, with the ship flying by and everything. So we're getting kind of that at the open and close, but it's like, okay, I feel like it's the opening close of the show. This is like taking actual footage of all the space fights, cutting it up in all sorts of ways, however they want to make it look like some other sort of fight, you know, and so it really is like, like I was as I was watching this, I'm like, I feel like, am I like about a third of this footage is like actual just pulled from Star Wars? Like, I don't know what the actual percentage is, but there's a lot of Star Wars footage in here, just all cut in wherever they feel like they needed something, a space fight or a ship taking off from a planet, or whatever the case may be, or Cantina when we have, you know, all those different creatures and everything. So that was, I thought, so fun and clever in the way that they were integrating it and to a certain extent, going back to our conversation about like the fan films and everything, this feels like what you would almost expect from like a fan film these days where they're just they're pulling this stuff in just to make it cut in. And to some extent, I suppose you could even go back to something like Dead Men Don't Wear a Plaid, you know, Steve Martin's like owed to all the the classic film noirs when he did that black and white detective movie, intercutting himself having a conversation with footage of like Humphrey Bogart from one of his movies, which was very clever, you know, and, and to a certain extent, you can see that that's kind of the same mentality here, like, how can we use this footage and intercut it with our guys? And like, what do we need them to say? So all of it makes sense. It's it's, it's very fun, maybe a little more, you know, less focused than even Dead Men Don't Wear a Plaid. Yeah, no, I think that's fair. Yeah, I remember screening it for some of my colleagues. Because yeah, I teach it in Kings Callers London. And these are colleagues who in general, write about art cinema, write about some of the great kind of film movements within like European art cinema. And so this is a film that is very much outside of their normal kind of wheelhouse. And their initial response is to try and piece together the narrative and to try and work out like, so what is the filmmaker trying to say here? Like, that, oh, there's really interesting kind of religious connotations going on in this segment, what is the commentary here? And I think the part of the issue is, that's not really what Chitin and Ansch is interested in. Like it's not a coherence is not one of the things that he is, he values within his filmmaking. It's it's kind of energy dynamism is it's all the things that yeah, people making fan films, it's got that handmade feel like you feel like you're part of a team who are just coming up with crazy ideas. And yeah, let's try that. Like, let's give that a go. Okay, yeah, that makes sense as a line of dialogue. Great, let's do it. Let's try this for the costume. But it's got that really kind of creative fun energy, which works so well for that kind of so bad it's good or the kind of love of trash cinema that's not about laughing at it, but just embracing the kind of energy that it has. Yeah, it's a real prioritization you see of like the spectacle of like the joy, the excitement of just the film itself rather than any of what you'd call traditional storytelling conventions, right? It's just what can we do that's fun? Like that's what I'd rather focus on is the way that really feels like it's unfolding here. Definitely. And, and it's also something where yeah, it became a huge cult hit in, in, in Turkey, and then to the, to the point where they decided to make a sequel, the films, Doniai Kurzaneh Dam translates as the man who saves the world. So they did the son of the man who saves the world. But it didn't work like it. It was, it was a bad film, but in not the pleasurable ways that the original was. And that was much later, right? Like that was in like the last like 20 years or something. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So the century and partly capitalizing on the popularity of Gora, a kind of sci fi film that was kind of unexpectedly popular with them, Jim Yilmas. And so they were like, okay, yeah, people like Turkish sci fi. What other sci fi films could we do? Oh, let's do a sequel to manage saves the world. But yeah, it plays it for laughs but in just ways that are deliberate and are unfunny. People sometimes use Susan Sontag's work on camp to try and understand why audiences love a film like this. And this is very much naive camp. Like that's the pleasure of what, what they're doing. And, and the sequel is, yeah, it shows the problems of deliberate camp of trying to create something that has the elements that everyone loved and found comedic within the original and then to try and do it again. And it just fails miserably. Well, that's interesting because it's also the problem that can arise in legacy sequels anyway when it's not the same filmmakers, but it's like decades later, different filmmakers who grew up with that and now are trying to retell that story and capture the same magic. I mean, it has worked, don't get me wrong. There are some fantastic legacy sequels that have been made. But there are also examples of ones that's like, they wish that they just left it alone, you know, where they shouldn't have messed with it. And it sounds like this, that one really falls into that same category. Yeah, definitely. I think, yeah, there was something quite magical going on in Turkish cinema throughout the 60s, 70s, into the 80s. I mean, Turkish television is hugely popular now. So it's not like Turkish film and TV has kind of completely in decline. Like there's great stuff being produced now, but the particular magic of this period is really, it's really up to the 1980s that all of these fascinating films are being made. And then it, yeah, it really kind of pales off at that point. Well, let's, let's take a break. And then when we get back, we'll talk more about kind of the end of all of this, some of the challenges, criticisms and, and the legacy of these remakes. Getting into like what we were talking about is this whole idea of the end of all of this. Obviously, there are challenges and criticisms. It had been going on for decades. Were there situations where filmmakers or studios were actually trying to like file lawsuits against these these films and to get them from, get them stopped from being released anywhere? There are some examples. I mean, it's actually, yeah, relatively rare. In Italy, you've got the example of the great white. That was the Jaws, their Jaws remake. The Jaws remake, exactly. Yeah. The Universal sued and prevented from, from being released. There've been other films. I mean, yeah, Jaws is an interesting one because the Bruno Matay film Cruel Jaws, that's had copyright problems even, even now with Severin's Blu-ray release, there were issues around copyright there. But it's relatively rare. I think often because the films are not circulating outside their domestic context. So yeah, you would think that the Turkish Star Wars would be a film that would definitely have been sued for all of the use of footage and music and all those elements. But actually, no, they got away with it. Yeah, it's kind of interesting to kind of speculate as to what is it that makes certain films, are they going to be released in the US? Are they directly competing within the same market? And also, is there an opportunity to use local copyright law in order to try and like, where are we going to do this legal case? That's often the challenge, I think. There's a few examples in Bollywood where Hollywood studios have threatened to sue. So the remake of Memento Gajini, they were threatened based on copyright infringement to the point now where actually quite a few of the adaptations of Hollywood films made in India are licensed. So yeah, they bought the rights to make it rather than just doing it unlicensed. Well, and I suppose that's the eventual shift that around the world that people have had to make as these different studios, as different copyright laws, global copyright laws, global policing of all of that came into stronger hands that were going to handle it better, or manage it more efficiently, or whatever the case may be. But I suppose that's the eventual way that these sorts of things go, is that it gets harder and harder to do these sorts of things to the point where they just aren't going to do it anymore because it just isn't worth it. Because they're either going to get sued and owe money, never get to release the film, etc, etc. And so, I think that's a big part of it. But also, for these films that have been made, I mean, you talked about how in most cases, they weren't really designed to be played outside of their countries of origin, and often weren't really designed to be played still today, like it was kind of designed to release, make some money, and then move on. Where a lot of the elements and stuff are probably in disrepair. I mean, it sounds to me like another situation, kind of like early silent films, for example, where some of it is just like, well, it's kind of a lost film, or it's in such disrepair that you can't really do much with it. Or, or like that sort of thing. That seems like a big issue that you're likely, especially for you, who you've been working to kind of restore some of these. But even then, do you now run into issues as you work on this and try to find those elements where you're saying like, look, I've done a restoration of Turkish Star Wars, I'd love to work with somebody like Severin or whoever to release it. Now we have to contend with the Disney company and actually cross the line of copyrights so that we can actually do that. Like, are you still going to be running into those issues? Definitely. Yeah, this is such a big part of what I've been doing over the last few years. So yeah, I wrote the book, The Hollywood Meme. That was my PhD. I've been studying these films for years and years. But often for a long time, they were just, it was bootleg copies that were fan subtitled and not in great quality. So I've been really invested in trying to be involved in HD restorations, getting proper translations done for the English subtitles. But then yeah, once you've done that, there's then the hurdle of how to release these films. And I can do, I feel fairly comfortable and confident in doing one off screenings, especially if it's framed within a, like I do an intro and a Q&A and maybe we have a guest from Turkey, it's more of a kind of educational, like it's so it's playing a film festival, but it's still, there's a kind of cultural value from that, that it's not a kind of money making venture. But yeah, releasing the films, yeah, getting severing or someone. I think when Ed Glaser originally found the 35 millimeter print, he talked to quite a few different distributors who, like they're all cult film fans themselves. They're as fascinated with Turkish Star Wars as anyone else that they love the film. But all of them, when they when they really look into the copyright implications, they step away. They decide actually, yeah, that's, yeah, we can, we will go so far. We'll like, there's, we, you know, we're okay with these films, like Shocking Dark, where, yeah, it's Aliens and Terminator. But it's not actually using clips from Aliens and Terminator. And it's not using music from all these other films. So yeah, it is tricky with that one to, to properly release the restoration. And then, yeah, it's true of a lot of these other ones, like, so we're, yeah, restoring, which of Adam just now. But again, it's Captain America and Spider Man, like is, is Disney going to be happy with that? I'm not sure. It's going to be a tricky one, I think, to, to see whether a kind of legitimate release could be done. But I mean, there are possibilities. I mean, the, you know, indicator of brought out that lovely 4k restoration of the Mexican Batwoman. So I think, I think Turkish, Turkish Star Wars is a special case, given how blatant the copyright infringement is. With other ones that are more kind of influenced by these characters and using the same names in the costumes, there might be ways of defending them as, as parodies that do allow them to be released. Yeah, I can only imagine it's a tricky line to navigate. And that I think ends up being the biggest challenge with all of this is the, is the legalities that end up arising because of the way that they ended up getting made, particularly something like Turkish Star Wars, which yeah, it's, it's, I suppose, frustrating in all of this. How did these films, how would you say they might have shaped international perceptions of these particular countries like Turkey and the culture that produced them? Like, do you feel like, is that an angle you're also looking at? Like, as outside audiences looking at it, like, what is it saying to us about what we see as what is Turkey? No, it's a good question. Because one of my worries, sometimes when I scream these films is, and especially if I'm collaborating with cultural institutions from Turkey, there's a sense like, what is the impression of Turkey that you're giving to foreign audiences like British audiences, American audiences, and it's slightly different from screening, I don't know, Yilmaz Guni films or Nuri Bilge, Jalan kind of art house films, like that gives an impression of Turkish culture that is critically acclaimed and celebrated in the art house. And these films give a very different impression. And sometimes there's a worry about, is this a negative impression? Like maybe we should be embarrassed of these films. I mean, it's part of the reason why these films haven't been looked after and restored and archived as, as the sense like, there's almost a slight cultural embarrassment around the fact that this was such a huge phenomenon. And maybe this is something we should just hide away. But actually, I think, taking the film seriously, like restoring them, subtitling them properly, doing proper screenings in which you're contextualizing them and helping under audiences understand why they are that way and how they were made. And I think that's one of the key things there in terms of learning, like teaching audiences about Turkish culture. And often, when I do screen these films, there's a documentary that Jim Kaya, who's a Turkish German kind of filmmaker based in Berlin made, called Remake Remix Ripoff, which is just a really fascinating feature length documentary all about a lot of these remakes. And it, it really helps because I think it is so important to, to not just see these films as, yeah, oh, look at this weird Turkish Batman film, isn't it funny how they've used that character and it becomes, well, no, what does this tell us about Turkish culture in that period? How might this help us learn and understand about what's going on with cultural globalization through the mid 20th century? So yeah, it's always something that I've been thinking about. Yeah, it's an interesting element. Like, obviously, we're seeing our influence on them through these films, but then we're also seeing a little bit of them by watching those remakes. And so it's an interesting cycle of that, you know, as we're kind of, we're also getting their view of us, you know, there's something really interesting about all of that I find so fascinating. As far as would you say, Mark, we'll just call it on on cinema. Do you feel like by like these films being out there, have you seen any sort of sense of a broader impact that they've had on cinema in general, as far as like, homages, parodies? I mean, obviously, we've talked about how this is probably not necessarily kind of able to go on anymore because of copyright laws. But the fact that these films exist, is there an element that you've been able to track through films since then? I mean, there are some films that, especially like in Turkey, that are there films that kind of play on memories of kind of yeshilcham. And so there'll be a kind of brief parody moment within a more contemporary feature film. There's also as a whole phenomenon, there's a video on YouTube that went viral maybe 15 years ago or something like that called the Italian Spider Man, which is a kind of parody trailer for this fictional Italian version of Spider Man, which if people haven't seen, I would definitely recommend looking up because it's not only a playful spoof of various tropes of Italian cinema, but is very much a spoof of re-exploitation. Like it is an attempt to kind of emulate the styles and aesthetics of all of those 60s and 70s films that were reworking Hollywood superheroes. So yeah, the Italian Spider Man, I think, which is an Australian comedy team that put that together, who then made the TV show, what's it called, Danger 5? That's not the title. But yeah, but like, yeah, really fantastic kind of knowing comedies that are padadeing and playing with B movies and exploitation films. I'm looking at it on YouTube right now. They even include like the VHS static of like of the role and everything, which is pretty fantastic. I'll put a link for that in the show notes so people can check that out too. 37 minutes, so they did a pretty lengthy bit of time putting something together. So that's pretty fun. Well, you know, I find this to be such a fascinating thing to explore and look at and the way that different countries have kind of disregarded copyright law to tell their own versions of these stories. And I think that's a really interesting outlook to kind of take with an approach to cinema and production. As far as like any final thoughts that you have as far as like remake exploitation, the movement and its place in film history and the ongoing influence. And as far as like, especially somebody who's doing a lot of research and digging into it, the the opportunity to kind of watch more of these. Yeah, one of the big things I've been working on is I would love to restore more of these films. So I'm hoping that in the next few years, that more and more of these films will be restored, will become available, will be screened, will tour around festivals. Because I think, I mean, there are so many fascinating films out there, like there's a pre revolution, so pre Iranian revolution film called Jane Bond 008. So it's a kind of co production between Iran and Pakistan, centered on Jane Bond. It has all of these elements that we've been talking about that that kind of mixing of cultures and throughout 60s and 70s, the way in which yeah, Iranian filmmakers decide, okay, yeah, let's make our own version of James Bond, but now a female Bond. And it tells a fascinating history, which sometimes we're not always aware of, that there's this kind of sense of cultures being quite separate and different around the world. But actually, there's a kind of intersecting history that we can tell through these films. So like I'd love to restore Jane Bond 008. There's an Egyptian remake of Rocky Horror Picture Show. And yeah, I'd love to restore and screen. There's the in Pakistan, the adaptation of Dracula is really fascinating. So I'd love to try and yeah, do a proper HD, like it's been released on DVD by a Mondo Macavril, but like a proper Blu-ray restoration would be incredible. Because yeah, I think there's this kind of forgotten history of all of these different cultures around the world and the way in which they're reworking and adapting and borrowing on elements. So when sometimes when we think about cultures as quite separate and different, especially when it's cultures like Iran and Pakistan and Egypt, there's this sense of like a clash of civilizations and yeah, the threat of other cultures. And it's like, I think by tracing this kind of history through these remakes, it draws attention to the way in which actually these cultures are much more culturally hybrid and mixed and borrowing from elements from a whole range of different sources. And yeah, I think it tells us to worry about globalization, which maybe we need today. So yeah, that's one. That's one too. JS Well, it's fantastic. I'm so glad that we ended up talking about this as a film movement and just like exploring these films and the impact that they have, you know, I think it's definitely a valuable thing to look at. And so I'm glad to have had you here talking about it with me. So thank you so much for joining me. JS Well, thank you, Andy. Yeah, it's been really great. JS Use this as an opportunity to plug some of the stuff that you've been writing. You already mentioned to your book, The Hollywood Meme. What is that about? And what are some of the other things that you've been writing or kind of co-editing? JS Yeah. So yeah, my book, The Hollywood Meme, Transnational Adaptations of World Cinema, it was my PhD and then became a book with Edinburgh University Press that's really an overview of this whole phenomenon. So it does talk about the Turkish Star Wars and Star Trek and Captain America and Spider-Man and Santo, like it covers all of these films. But I've also edited a book on Transnational Film Remakes, because I'm always interested in how films are adapted around the world. And right now I'm finishing off a book on global cult cinemas, that's, yeah, should hopefully be coming out next year. And that, yeah, covers a whole range of different cult film editions from all around the world. So yeah, that's what I've been doing recently. JS Fantastic. Well, we'll have links to your website where people can learn more about your books and all of your socials and everything so people can reach out and say hi and ask you questions if they have any. We'll have all that in the show notes. So Ian, again, thank you so much for joining me. It's a fantastic conversation about an absolutely fascinating film movement. Ian Thank you. JS Next month, we will dive headfirst into the fast-paced, quick-witted world of screwball comedy. We'll explore how this genre, born from the constraints of the Hollywood production code and the despair of the Great Depression, managed to captivate audiences with its zany antics, battle of the sexist humor, and sly social commentary. From the lavish art deco settings to the mismatched couples navigating class conflicts, we'll uncover how screwball comedies dared to explore women's freedoms, challenge traditional institutions, and humanize the poor while lampooning the rich. Join us as we examine the genre's defining characteristics, from the rapid-fire dialogue and madcap eccentric to the sexually-charged antagonism and love triangles, all while acknowledging the troubling tropes of the era. Get ready for a laughter-filled journey that prioritizes the silly over the sentimental, as we explore how screwball comedies offered a much-needed escape from reality while still exposing the vices and stupidity of the time. [Music] Thank you for joining us on CinemaScope, part of the True Story FM Entertainment podcast network, music by Orkus and Gil Kata. Find us and the entire NextReal family of film podcasts at trustory.fm. Follow us on social media at The Next Real and please rate and review us if your podcast app allows. As we part ways, remember, your cinematic journey never ends. Stay curious. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]