A Turkey From Turkey

It's not on the IMDb's "Bottom 100," like The Hottie and the Nottie, Baby Geniuses, and Who's Your Caddy. We're not sure if it's been featured at the Dark Room's "Bad Movie Night," where they recently polished off an Elvis series. But even without such accolades, Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam, aka the Turkish Star Wars, is a famously bad movie. Shot in Turkey in the 1980s, which was a shitty time of many military coups and other dangerous strife (not to mention a lack of access to quality motion pictures), the film is often laughed at, not with, by people sitting safe and happy in their little pink houses. This could be you! At "Sabreteeth vs. Turkish Star Wars," the film is shown with a live improvisational jazz-metal soundtrack, sort of in place of English subtitles. Turkish YouTube commenters point out that the thing barely makes sense even to those who speak its language. Plus, there is an actual wooden sword involved, and much of the footage is badly pasted-in piracy of various films, of which Star Wars is only one. The band, interestingly, has a complex relationship to the film and its egregious production values: Calling Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam "One of the truly great copyright infringements of the 20th century," Sabreteeth insists that the flick is both awful and awesome.
Thu., March 20, 8 p.m., 2008