rating:
company: Anit Film
and Kunt FIlm
year: 1983
runtime: 75′
director: Çetin Inanç
cast: Cüneyt Arkin, Emel Tümer,
Salih Kirmizi, Hüseyin Peyda,
Nejat Gürçen, Baykal Kent
writers: Çetin Inanç
and Cüneyt Arkin
cinematography: Sedat Ülker
music: Various . . . stolen
Not available on home video in the USA

You would be forgiven after a viewing of Çöl, the Turkish Jaws, for failing to grasp the tenuous connection between it and the American blockbuster it is purported to imitate.  The actual title of the film, which translates as ‘wasteland’ or ‘desert’, offers nothing in the way of commonality and the narrative never touches on either the existential horror or sea-faring adventure of Spielberg’s classic.  To be fair much of Çöl does take place on a boat, albeit of the very big and permanently docked variety, and it does recycle a few of the cues from the Jaws franchise.  There is even a shark, though its prominence within and importance to the narrative is far from what many will suspect.

So what is Çöl, the Turkish Jaws, about?  Çöl is about a man – Cüneyt Arkin (Turkish Star Wars, once again pulling double duties as writer and star) to be specific.  Beyond that I’m not terribly certain, as the copy I viewed wasn’t exactly English friendly.  Like much of the Turkish cinema of the decade Çöl was produced with a rather liberal interpretation of intellectual property rights in mind.  While nothing so offending as Turkish Star Wars‘ wholesale retrofitting of mass amounts of unlicensed film footage is on display here, the score offers a licensing nightmare for anyone looking to secure the rights to distribute the film outside of Turkey.  Aside from the aforementioned riffs on John Williams’ themes (which could come from William’s score for Jaws 2 or Alan Parker’s for Jaws 3), Çöl also features Survivor’s ‘Eye of the Tiger’, an instrumental cover of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and a host of other unoriginal tracks I’ve been unable to identify thus far.

The likelihood of Çöl ever receiving an official English language release may be low, but don’t be too disappointed – I’m doubtful that any amount of translation could ever make real sense of it.  Co-writer and director Çetin Inanç spent most of the 1970s making sleazy sex pictures, something that undoubtedly had bearing on the structure of his later films.  Here Inanç appears to have simply substituted action for sex (a no-no due to new censorship guidelines enacted in the wake of a 1980 military coup), with the plot remaining noticeably low on the list of priorities.  That’s just fine with me, as my level of understanding would likely be at basement levels regardless.

Çöl follows in the tradition of many an action film before it, with Cüneyt Arkin setting out to right some egregious wrong perpetrated against him by the most violent means possible.  There is a love interest, the pretty Emel Tümer (who spends most of her time standing in weird poses on seaside rocks), and an assortment of bad guys with increasingly absurd mustaches (including Hüseyin Peyda, also of Turkish Star Wars infamy).  Arkin runs around being generally badass, frightening rapists, getting into high speed car chases and dispensing with hordes of social miscreants with his mad martial arts skills.  Meanwhile a handful of men in suits sit in an office they never leave, talking about things I can’t even hint at.

After some requisite backstabbing on the part of Arkin’s presumed friends Çöl enters its bizarrely intense conclusion.  Arkin is captured by a bunch of Peyda’s lackeys and dragged out to sea, where he is tied up and left to die on a bit of floating wood.  Things look bad until the deformed plastic head of a shark arrives and tries to eat our hero, a plan that backfires with horrific hilarity.  After swimming all the way back to shore Arkin takes to massacring those responsible for his oceanic abandonment with a bit of sharpened wood he keeps clenched between his teeth, somehow convincing Peyda to throw his riches into the sea and shoot himself in the process.

Though they may have spent a good deal of their ’80s collaborations ripping off Hollywood hits, one could never accuse Inanç and Arkin of lacking in creativity.  Working with minimal resources and completing their projects in as little as ten days, the duo’s roughshod and ramshackle approach to filmmaking led to unexpectedly entertaining results.  Everything about Çöl is marked with intensity, from the credits to the fights to an awkward dream and exotic dance sequence that assaults the middle of the film.  Combatants are often filmed in first person, with the participants appearing to attack the camera head on – good stuff!  The choreography may be awkward, the undercranking obvious and the continuity all over the map (at one point Arkin manages to fight in two hallways at the same time), but I’m at a loss to think of anything in the modern action market that’s even an ounce as much fun as what’s presented here.

Çöl is prototypical ’80s Turkish craziness from start to finish, and that’s just fine.  I’m still scratching my head as to how anyone could knowingly push the film as a Jaws knock-off, but to each their own.  There are evidently subtitled copies of this one floating around at a variety of ridiculous gray market prices (just Google ‘Turkish Jaws’ to find them), but I say skip ‘em and give your favorite torrent client a whirl instead, language barrier be damned.