Knock Off Week: Vahsi kan a.k.a. Turkish First Blood

Welcome back to Day 3 of Knock Off Week. So I was told of this bizarre film that we are tackling today. It has action, romance, zombies, military and really choppy edited car chases. Our main star of the film, actor and director (Deli Yusuf, Maden, Dunyayi Kurtaran Adam, Olum savascisi, Karate Can, Kopek, Turks in Space and The Class) has been in over 323 films and admittedly he does look like a terrifying bad ass that probably kills the other actors and no one is the wiser. This is Vahsi kan a.k.a. Turkish First Blood.

Hmm zombies or perverts?

 Our moving pictures opens with a house party which is so much like Communism in Vietnam when some lunatic biker gang from Psychomania decide to raze the whole party. My favorite part in this scene is a guy getting high kicked in the chest against a wall as blood was applied to his wounds because...boot heels are sharp? A young lady hops in her car to escape these dastardly demon bikers and for some reason the camera is set at crotch level and not to the passenger side or on the dashboard so the girl in a dress is driving with her legs crossed. Gotta say it feels like there may not be a stunt coordinator on the set.

Weirder still is she pulls up on the road finding five gored up men or they were have a scab and ketchup eating contest and passed out due to the heat exhaustion. Seriously the subtitles were created by someone without a firm grasp of the English language so I am left blinking a few times when sentence structure seems less than savory or satisfactory. The editing is so out there I swear I am watching a cross between Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes with zombies instead of rad mutants, Mad Max like bikers following up with First Blood

Turkish Christopher Plummer looks annoyed.

Love they even lifted Jerry Goldsmith's musical score for the film. Riza or Rambo if you prefer (Cuneyt Arkin) is being led away from a dirt road by armed guards when a car explodes and he just walks away from that and no follow-up to that at all. Armed men had him in custody and now they don't.

No sooner is Riza walking down the road again he gets ambushed by cast members of Turkish Mad Max as they spin in circles around him on bikes and a car. Truly stimulating. Riza proceeds to whoop the crap out of the bikers after they took turns slashing him with their steely knives but they could not just slay the beast. Not sure why he had to wait for multiple shallow cuts but hey I'm not writing this garbled crap. Turkish Richard Crenna giving his best Troutman impression tells the rest of this city to leave Riza to him but corrupt mayor/mobster thinks Riza is cramping his style. Hope he has a good supply of body bags. Yeah it was needed.

Riza meets up with said girl no longer burdened by a crotch cam but for some reason she automatically must be with the muscle bound goof and that slight dirty face she has means strip down and clean up in a lake. Still no clue if this girl has a character name or is it just chesty girl love interest. The mob/concerned citizens managed to find Riza and Girl With No Name in a massive rock quarry and cave...from like a completely different location. Again seamless editing Turkey. Considering it was day for Riza but night for the thugs and hell they were in a forest as well to his rock quarry. So it drags on and Girl With No Name ends up getting lightly tapped to death by foam rocks and Riza must get revenge the only way he knows how, by running at fast forward speed and slashing everyone's throat. That's right, Riza has the speed force at his disposal.

Finding an English subtitled version of this was damn near impossible without buying it outright. In the end I had to rent it for 5 bucks and boy howdy that was money well spent full of confusing scenes strewn together, fast cut edits, copy-written music lifted and Cuneyt Arkin looking either bored or psychotic.

So you got the poster shot?  Groovy.