I'll admit right now that I get a kick out of watching rare movies. By rare, I mean really rare films – the type that Roger Ebert or Leonard Maltin have never even heard of, and the ones that bypass even the fans of the film's genre. These are the films that were never released outside of their own countries, the ones that were never dubbed for an English market. More often than not, they're diabolically bad. But I like 'em, anyway.
Turkish E.T. is one such film. As you might well guess from the title, this is a cheap rip-off of Spielberg's E.T., made without a budget and without much in the way of inspiration. It fits into a whole Turkish sub-genre of rip-off movies; we've got variants on STAR TREK, STAR WARS, RAMBO, THE EXORCIST and THE WIZARD OF OZ floating around in the ether out there, and none of them are much cop. Unless you dig bad films, that is.
Turkish E.T. is definitely one of those. The alien, called Badi, is a poor cousin to the lovable Spielbergian creature. He's played by either a kid or a midget in a rubber suit, with a huge, elongated head (a bit like the creatures in the ALIEN films) and poached egg eyes. He blows smoke when he gets annoyed and he makes some pretty creepy growling noises. All in all, Badi is a sinister creation, and not something you'd let your kids hang around with. Hang around with him they do, however, in an extraordinarily slow moving plot that's generally played for laughs and not a lot else. The film takes an age to move from one scene to another with the impression that the actors are just making it up as the go along. Badi hides in a cupboard, Badi goes to a funfair, Badi enters a schoolroom and makes the teacher faint. There are a few good set-pieces – like when the gang of kids ambush the authorities – but these are far and far between.
The comedy value is high. The rip-off of the bike-over-the-moon sequence is pure comedy gold, as Badi and his buddies grab an old handcart, tie a load of balloons to it, and proceed to fly through the air. I actually liked it better than the effects in the Spielberg movie. On the whole, though, this is a cruddy movie, of interest to those with a REAL liking for cheap world cinema in all its forms.
