Gobsmacking Cinema: 3 DEV ADAM (1973)

I'm not long back from my trip to the London Film Festival and I'm about to head out to Dublin for the next week for their Horrorthon festival (it is Halloween after all). So, no time to write up these festivals I've been at recently but just to keep things ticking over here's another entry in my neverending quest to expose all the normal people I know to somewhat less than normal cinema...

Have you ever heard of the Mexican hero Santo? If not, he was the masked star of a string of Mexican wrestling movies in the 60s and 70s. Yes, there really was such a genre of movie, and I guess it inspired the recent Jack Black film NACHO LIBRE. Which I won't be seeing, by the way. It looks awful. But I digress.

I've watched a few Mexican wrestling movies (a couple of Santo films and the excellently-titled NEUTRON VS THE DEATH ROBOTS) and enjoyed them a lot (usually they involve a hero fighting some outlandish criminals such as mad scientists or aliens and winning by carrying out some great wrestling moves), but I didn't think for one moment that they would possibly be popular enough for someone to actually rip them off.

And yet Santo does make what I assume is a totally unauthorised appearance in the mad Turkish film 3 DEV ADAM (translated as 3 MIGHTY MEN or something like that). But that's not the worst of it. The film also rips off music from other films - I recognised snippets from the scores to SHAFT, something else that I think was by Ennio Morricone but I couldn't remember which film, and what I thought might have been DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER.

And yet that still isn't the cheekiest aspect of it all. Check this out for a concept.

Santo and his best mate Captain America - yes, that's right, the Marvel superhero, here played by a dark-haired Turk in what can only be described as a slight departure from his comic book image - are sent on a mission to fight an evil supervillain who is flooding the economy with fake currency, torturing and killing people and also laughing in a really maniacal way.

Oh, did I mention that the villain happens to be called the Spider, and bears a not insignificant similarity to a certain wall-crawling Marvel superhero? Imagine Spider-man was a really nasty guy with an evil laugh, his costume was more homemade looking (and slightly green) and he liked torturing people in really amusing ways... and you have an idea what the villain in question looks like. Also, he has long hair which pokes out from the eye holes in his mask, giving the impression of having huge, comical eyebrows.

This shameless blend of stolen material all comes together in a no-budget kaleidoscope of badly dubbed dialogue, poorly-choreographed and unconvincing fight scenes and other such eye-popping crapness as a scene in which a man is tortured by having a big tube held up to his face with a couple of rats entering from the other side.

There are some scenes that transcend the crapness to become something truly special however. The finale in particular has Captain America seeing off several men who all wear the aforementioned cheapo Spider-man costume, only for a new one to pop up, laughing menacingly, every time one is felled. This might be annoying in a more serious film, but here it becomes side-splittingly hilarious, and sets up the rather bizarre closing scene of the film.

Turkish cinema of the 70s and 80s is a wacky world of rip-offs and weirdness and this is a great place to start off. After all, in which other movie could you see both Santo fighting a bunch of Karate experts AND Spider-man strangling a woman in the shower? Unless Sam Raimi has been doing an awful lot of drugs on the set of SPIDER-MAN 3, I suspect 3 DEV ADAM is probably the only candidate.