Review of Seytan

Seytan (1974)
5/10
Erm....
15 March 2018
Think of bad movies occupying their own solar system, getting more and more obscure as you drift away from the sun. The inner rings would be occupied by Godzilla movies, bad US monster flicks from the fifties, Italian zombie films. Then you have the Filipino action movies and Kung fu flicks, culminating in a massive gas giant constructed solely of Godfrey Ho ninja films, whereupon things get sparser as you pass the rightly neglected Jess Franco planet and the Andy Milligan asteroid belt. Eventually, just as you are about to leave the system and see what counts for a bad movie to a bunch of aliens, you'd pass the Turksploitation film.

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

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

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

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

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

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