Making fun of Turkish pop films is easy, and as Homer Simpson would point out, fun too. Maybe somewhere out there there’s someone who would insist on taking these movies seriously. That’s not me.
The historical epic Tarkan Versus the Vikings is more of a terrible wig delivery system than a proper movie. It’s set in a vague Middle Ages time and place, where Huns, Vikings and Chinese all mix it up.
Tarkan is a popular comic book character in Turkey. He’s a “Turk Hun” who travels around with an intelligent wolf named Kurt. Actually, at the beginning Tarkan Versus the Vikings Tarkan is accompanied by Kurt and Kurt’s son, also named Kurt. Tarkan escorts Atilla the Hun’s daughter Yonca to a Hun fortress in the wilderness. Soon after they arrive the fortress is attacked by a Viking force, led by rogue captain Toro. Yonca is kidnapped, Kurt the elder is killed, and Tarkan is badly wounded.
While Tarkan recovers and Kurt grows into a exact double of his father, Toro takes Yonca back to the Viking stronghold, and proceeds to overthrow the reigning Viking king. The Vikings conveniently have a pet giant octopus in the nearby ocean, so the deposed leaders are fed to it.
The major difference between Toro and the king he replaces is that the previous administration was really afraid of the Turks, and not afraid to say it. A lot. I’ve noticed this trend in lots of Turkish movies. The bad guys are always talking about how brave and wonderful the Turks are. It’s like Turkey is the Steven Seagal of countries. The fact that the bad guys talk up the Turks to be so great undercuts the bad guys as a threat, and isn’t very realistic. Just once I’d like to see the bad guys in a Turkish film say, “Boy, those Turks sure are fearsome warriors. And really insecure.”
Hey, wasn’t there some Turk guy in this movie…? Oh yeah, Tarkan! Tarkan runs across the Chinese people, then is made a slave on a Viking boat, escapes, hooks up with some Viking resistance fighters (all women, just to make things a little sexier), and finally participates in an assault on Toro in his stronghold.
Tarkan gets his name in the title, but this is really the story of Kurt Jr. If it weren’t for this super-intelligent hound, Tarkan wouldn’t make it more than a half hour before he died in some horrible fashion. Much like K.I.T.T. in Knight Rider, Kurt has to do all the heavy lifting, constantly rescuing Tarkan from whatever trap he’s blundered into and finding every plot specific clue. All Tarkan brings to the operation is two opposable thumbs and the ability to inexplicably woo various hot women who are impressed by things Kurt actually did.
How bad is this movie? When the very immobile giant octopus surfaces in the second act, it’s tough not to think “Ed Wood.” Almost every scene includes some new outrage against the audience’s expectations of quality, no matter how low they might be. When Kurt dies there’s what I’m sure is supposed to be a dramatic zoom in on Kurt Jr.’s face, but for some reason they use a shot of the dog looking in some random direction. Then they repeat the shot, just in case we weren’t sure that Kurt Jr. was distracted by a rabbit or something while his father died. As the movie goes on it appears that the costume department ran out of “historical” wigs for the vikings, because in the final assault some of the guards are wearing day-glo orange hairpieces.
It gets worse. Leaving beside the fact that the Chinese people
are all played by obvious non-Asians, at the end of the movie the Chinese woman tries to torture Tarkan to death by doing a strip tease in front of him (Torture me! Torture me! I deserved to be tortured!), when Kurt predictably shows up to pull Tarkan’s kebabs out of the fire. Kurt barks at the woman and she falls into a nearby snake pit, and you can clearly see the grip’s hands pulling her over the lip. Or maybe the snakes in Turkey have hands.
The fight scenes are all choreographed to about the level of a high school production of Romeo and Juliet, so Tarkan Versus the Vikings is unlikely to cut it with any audience as an action audience. If you’re a big fan of do-it-yourself MST3K, this may be the movie for you.
