Seytan (Turkish Exorcist) (1974)
** 1/2 (out of 4)
Turkish version of The Exorcist, which borrows nearly every scene from the classic movie and it also lifts the famous music score. This is the third or fourth Turkish film I've watched and this one took me by surprise because it actually tries to be a serious film and not just some sort of rip off or spoof. As you'd expect, a young girl gets possessed by Satan so her mother (Meral Taygun) gets help from a writer (Cihan Unal) who wrote a book on possession. As I said, I was really surprised that the film actually tried being a scary horror film and I was also shocked that for the most part it worked. There are some silly moments but overall this was pretty effective and gets the job done a lot better than many of the Italian rip offs out there. The opening sequences of the mother searching the attic and hearing various noises up there worked very well as did the final exorcism scene. I was also impressed by the performances especially Taygun as the mother. There are a few hysterical moments due to the lower budget and some of the possession scenes come off funny but I've found this to be the case in the majority of these films and that includes The Exorcist. The direction is a tad bit all over the place but for the most part it is good, although the zoom function is used way too many times and most of the time it's used very badly. Again, this film is far from a masterpiece but there's enough good stuff here to make it worth watching.
I'll also comment on the "official" DVD of this. I guess you'd call this an official bootleg since Warner would never let this film out there since it ripped their film off and used the same music score. I guess whoever was doing the subtitles just wrote them down on the paper and the makers of the DVD just copied them over without reading what they were working on. There are several times where the guy's notes are put in the subtitles and this leads to some very funny stuff. At one point there's talk of a letter opener and the subtitles include "what's a letter opener". Another funny moment is when the text contains a question mark with an added note to "search Google". When the film is over a "The End" credit pops up and the notes include "finally".
