Cobwebs #72: Turkish Spider-Man

You think you’ve seen all the Spider-Man movies there are?  Pretty sure you saw the Captain America fights Spider-Man on the silver screen?  Well, you haven’t seen this Captain America fights Spider-Man movie!  That’s right, dear reader, the Crawlspace leaves no stone unturned (no matter what may be under it).  Grab your popcorn (and Tums) and get ready for a ride you were NOT expecting!

A while back, I treated you to the fan film The Green Goblin’s Last Stand, by Dan Poole.  This month, well, let’s say ‘treat’ isn’t the right word for it, I’m subjecting you to 3 Dev Adam (3 Giant Men in English).  This is a Turkish film made with absolutely no respect for the copyright of the characters and absolutely no time put into actually trying to nail the characterization.  This is bad, folks, I’m not going to lie.  But take heart!  It’s not Star Wars Holiday Special level bad!  It’s more like “Why didn’t Mystery Science Theater 3000 pick this one?” bad.

Folks, you could spend over two hours of your life watching the whole thing HERE.  But what is the fun in that when I’ve wasted significantly well over that to bring you all the … ‘good’ … parts with running commentary in between?

OK, let’s get started!

This clip is the opening scene, so without further ado, let’s watch it!

Let’s hear it for the director because he wastes no time making us go “What the heck?” That’s right, Cobwebbers, this Spider-Man is every bit the menace Jonah took him for and more!  Who needs webs or a gun when you have a boat motor and some shovel carrying lackeys?  Am I right?

By the way, here is actual footage of Hornacek when he saw this clip the first time.

After this, we see our three heroes walking in from the airport, followed by this opening title sequence:

POP QUIZ

What Bond movie is that soundtrack ripped off of?

A. Goldfinger
B. Thunderball
C. You Only Live Twice
D. Diamonds Are Forever
E. Live and Let Die

So, who are the three heroes?  None other than Captain America, his Brazilian girlfriend Julia, and El Santo the Mexican wrestling phenom!  Move over Hulk Hogan and Dwayne Johnson, this guy was in 52 movies!

Istanbul needs their help because Spider-Man is ruthlessly imposing his crime organization on them and using counterfeit American dollars to do so.  It’s bad too.  Spider-Man does have an evil Robin Hood side to it since he only rips off “rich people with ties to the mafia”.

In fact, here is Spidey cleaning up the town of mafia scum bags:

Adios Mafia indeed!

In a classic Dungeons and Dragons blunder, the heroes split up.  El Santo goes to the post office, Captain America goes to the morgue, and Julia goes to, in a not at all gender stereotype, a fashion show, which appears to be held, oddly enough, in someone’s living room.  Oh my gosh!  The music during the fashion show just about made me go all double Vincent Van Gough, if only I didn’t need my ears for Covid masks.  Think that awful Christmas song from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but potentially worse.  Julia can’t take it any more either, so she sneaks out to go through someone’s office, but surprise!  She gets captured by Nadja, the very same mean lady we saw on the beach watching the other lady get decapitated by a boat engine.  Oh no!

Then a random scene of people working out to music that absolutely no one but whoever it was that picked the music for this movie would pick to show a random scene of people working out (not even IMDB knows – they credit John Barry, but this is NOT John Barry!).

In a move that is totally not creepy or stalkerish, Captain America’s watch starts beeping letting him know that his girlfriend’s tracking device just went by him on the road.  They turn their car around and follow the car to the docks.  I would like to tell you more about the car chase scene, but the camera guy must have been having some problem with fitting the camera in the car because we are seeing everything BUT what is going on in the scene and it is awkwardly edited to show Santo just walking around the post office.  I must have missed why he needs to be there.  I guess they figure eventually Spider-Man must have to pick up his mail and then they’ll have him! Genius!

Finally, we get to what we came here for – Captain America and Spider-Man showdown!  See if you can spot the George Berryman cameo as drunken old man!

Finally, Santo dons his costume (I’m not particularly sure why he left his post office post) and sneaks into the gym we saw earlier to steal some papers from some guy’s office.  He keeps his lock picks in the front of his pants, which looks in no way odd to see him digging around in there to retrieve them.  He also stuffs a letter that was torn up and thrown away into his pants.  He’s not good at stealth and is easily found snooping by the office owner, who compliments him on his body, which is something I guess is not unreasonable for a gym owner to do.

Did he just rip off that guy after beating him up?

So Santos has his lock picks, trash that may be important, and that guy’s money or id or credit cards safely stored in his pants.  Before he can escape, three guys who work out at the gym mistake him for a thief (well, they’re not exactly wrong…) and attack him in a fight scene that makes Adam West’s Batman vs. Riddler henchmen look like UFC.

In a series of awkward edits, we see Santo return to HQ and give all of his stolen evidence to the authorities, Spider-Man get a check from the gym owner, and there is a random girl dressing.

Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever spider can!  And here he does just that and follows up his wall crawling abilities with a little murder in a Pervy Parker fashion.

Hey!  Isn’t that the same shower tool that Mary Jane will use later in Peter Parker the Spectacular Spider-Man #112?*

All of that was to just steal a statue that was on her dresser that he could have easily done so while she was distracted in the shower, but who am I to question a master criminal mind?

Actually, Spider-Man is really into these miniature statues.  I bet this has something really important to do with the plot.

Well, the headline, “Rich Woman Murdered in Shower” has Spider-Man written all over it, but our heroes can’t act until the lab finishes restoring the ripped-up letter from Santo’s pants.  Now the letter wasn’t exactly shredded (it was only ripped into two or three pieces), so I can’t understand why it takes a crime lab to put it back together again unless… (insert whatever JR-ish dirty joke you’d like to make about the letters getting soiled in Santo’s pants).

After some rather unsettling scenes of Spider-Man stroking the statue, we see that he and Nadja (the mean lady) have stolen lots of ugly small statues that are apparently worth millions.

Just to show you how awful some of the soundtrack is, here is a scene where Captain America picks on some random loser who resembles BD with hair.

Meanwhile, Santo is hanging with an Instanbul police officer.  The police have the whole beach area staked out, but haven’t seen anything, but Santo literally walks around a corner and sees three bad guys hanging out on the beach, beats them up, and finds counterfeit money.  No particular reason for them to be hanging out on the beach with counterfeit money, but hey, these things happen.  After some fight scenes and minor police brutality, the gang is caught and the money confiscated.

Back at HQ, the letter has been restored and Julia has wasted no time sending the police to all the addresses there to protect those innocent rich people with mafia ties.  Spider-Man is rather pissed about finding out that the police have all his targets staked out.  He puts two and two together and unlike Winston Smith, he comes up with four, which means since only he and the manager of the gym knew the addresses of his targets, the manager is a rat!

The manager pleads his case that he is innocent (he doesn’t know about Santo’s magical pants), but that doesn’t stop Spidey from doing the only thing you can do to a rat – feed him to more rats!

Now, I looked it up (because of course I did) and rats can only go for four days without eating so someone is feeding these little buggers behind Spider-Man’s back.  Also, I’m pretty sure those are Guinea pigs, so someone lied to their boss when they came home from the evil pet store.  But no matter.  Take a moment to relish the keen photographic genius of this scene.  We get to see it from afar, up close, manager cam, and rat cam!  I am sure this scene is still used today in film schools across the world.

Spidey decides to ship out the counterfeit money at 11:00 tonight, but it is only 10:00, so we have time to go to a nightclub and watch a silhouette dance that would make Maurice Binder salivate.  The guy staking out the club gets a great idea to get Julia, Cap’s girlfriend, to pretend to be the stripper that comes on tomorrow night.  I’m sure Cap won’t be too upset about that.

Spidey’s men set up the money to be shipped only to be apprehended by Captain America and Santo, but Spider-Man wasn’t there.  He was breaking into a house and disrupting one of the most awkward shower love scenes ever filmed.  He stabs the couple with, what looks like a really long mixer beater, and stands there laughing as someone pours tomato soup down the shower drain.  Or maybe it was blood.  Or pizza sauce.

A guy breaks into a house and kills two women by strangling them.  One of them calls him her love and Hikmet, which is what the shower guy from above was called.  Then he runs out, looking like he is carrying another statue.  We learn that Spider-Man was behind this.  It seems that the real Hikmet was indeed killed in the shower with a woman obviously not his wife (since she is the one killed here) and the guy who killed her was disguised as Hikmet.  Boy, that Spider-Man really is a devious S.O.B.  I’m counting this as a guest appearance by the Chameleon (or maybe it was just one of those other Chameleons we saw recently in ASM).

To celebrate his successful plan to get around police protection, Spider-Man and Nadja have an …odd… love scene.  I wasn’t going to put this in, but it is SO odd, that, well, I feel compelled to do so.  And Nadja’s a red head, so Chi-Town can pretend that she is MJ.  Women, children, and men with weak hearts should probably skip this clip.

OK, YouTube shut that down hard and fast.  I guess they drew the line at Spider-Man puppet sex and has now flagged my account.  The bullets I take for the Crawlspace… Let me use my command of the English language to try and do it justice.  Spider-Man and Nadja are going at it.  He has removed his costume, but is being very careful to not show his face.  Both individuals are naked, but no nudity is actually shown.  Just a lot of fingernails and Nadja’s face in some really awkward moments of ecstasy.  All this to a disco-esque version of “Flight of the Bumblebee”.  Then, right at the pinnacle, the apex, the zenith of the moment, we get this intrusion:

What the heck?  And now that you’ve seen that, you will NEVER be able to unsee that (though it is not as nearly disturbing as watching it with the actual love scene).  I have an old college friend from Turkey.  So I asked him about it.  I haven’t talked to him in years, so I’m sure me bringing up weird super-villain puppet sex out of the blue made him remember why he hadn’t talked to me in years.  Burak told me that he had no idea, but he did read that in a couple of movies, some people put stuff like that in.  So my assumption here is that it is not a Turkish cultural thing, just a director’s oddity.

Immediately after, Spider-Man gets a phone call telling him that his counterfeit stash has been taken from him by Captain America and Santo.  Spider-Man vows revenge.

Then we VERY abruptly cut to Spider-Man breaking in to steal yet another (most likely important) statue, but this time, Cap and Santo are waiting!

Now, are you starting to get the feeling that just watching the clips makes it harder to follow this movie?  Let me assure that this is not the problem.  This movie jumps more than Batroc on a trampoline.  Whatever the case, that previous clip still made more sense than the entire clone saga.  Who needs Professor Warren?  Whenever Captain America or Santo kills Spider-Man, he just reappears in a cloned body.  No flour.  At least, the ability to clone upon death is the general Internet consensus about what is going on, but it does seem like there are multiples of Spidey running around at the same time rather than replacements.  But I apply logic and there is no need for that here.

Captain America and Santo, in their civilian outfits, go to the strip club while Julia is in the back pretending to be a famous stripper and talking to the manager.  Cap and Santo are spotted by a woman who recognizes Santo as the guy who stuffs random things down his pants.  After a few whiskeys, our two heroes get into a fight with the manager and his goons.  They do very well until they suddenly don’t.  They get captured and taken away.  Julia calls for back up then knocks out the snitch with her shoe.  Well, the whole substitute Julia as a stripper into the bad guy network could have gone better.  Surely the bad guys will just kill these captured and defenseless good guys and not take them straight to Spider-Man’s hidden operation.

The bad guys take Cap and Santo straight to Spider-Man’s hidden operation then lock them in a regular storage room that certainly no one would ever be able to escape from.  Cap sees a guard watching through a sophisticated spying device (the keyhole) and then starts yelling at Santo and beats the crap out of him.  At first Santo doesn’t understand that this is fact, part of Captain America’s plan to escape custody, and gets his feelings hurt.  The guard runs off to get help thinking that these captives might kill each other before the bad guys kill them.

Meanwhile, the snitch wakes up and refuses to talk, even though the police threaten her with jail and even death.  They give up.  She will never crack.

Then this happens completely out of the blue.

Fearing the good guys are dead, the bad guys open the door only to get ambushed by the absolutely not dead good guys!  The fight goes well until BD, I mean the strip club manager, pulls a gun on Captain America!  Oh no!

After a brief chase scene where there are more cloned Spider-Men, Spidey decides to see if Cap can respawn as well and shoots him.  But, as we know, that is a stupid tactic doomed to failure.  The police arrive at the scene where the fight started.  But no one wants to see that!  We want to see Spidey beat Captain America with an industrial fan!

Ha!  What the heck?  Bullets can’t stop Captain America, but an industrial fan can?

*RESEARCH BREAK*

I looked up the power behind fans.  The best I could find that looked remotely similar to this one was the K Tool International 42” Belt Drive Drum Fan.  This bad boy can crank out 14,800 Cubic Feet per Minute (that’s how you measure wind speed).  A typical ceiling fan is anywhere from 4,000 to 6,00 CFM.  To knock a man down, it takes wind of up to 70 mph, which, if the online calculator is correct (what do I know, I teach English) is about 237,000 CFM with this size fan, sadly a tad shy of what this fan should be able to produce.  I can only assume that stinking American safety regulations prevents us from having this type of high-quality high-speed fan like they had in Turkey back in the ’70s.  However, some of you may remember this scene from an earlier Cobwebs.

I assume Turkish Spider-Man got his hands on Reed Richard’s old equipment.

*RESEARCH BREAK OVER*

Santo, Julia, and the police walk around trying to find where Captain America and Spider-Man got to.  *Yawn*

Captain America continues to fight Spider-Man and continues to be surprised that whenever he kills Spider-Man, another appears (Hydra could learn a lesson or two from Spider-Man!).  And Cap doesn’t mind killing, either.

The fights last for a long time and I have a sneaking suspicion that the fight choreographer had a laissez-faire style.  The whole time, we keep going back to Santos, Julia, and the police who are still just walking around looking for Cap.  They run across the other two dead Spideys and are just like, “Huh.  Well, I’m sure Cap had good reason to brutally murder this guy multiple times.  Let’s walk over here slowly….”  If they had been more responsible, maybe we could have saved Ben Reilly here.

That guy is toast and I am pretty sure that jamming a guy into train tracks then running over his head with a cart of cinder blocks never made Berryman’s list of 101 Ways for Ben Reilly to die.  Whatever the case, that is the last Spider-Man. Or is it? BWAHAHAHAHAHA!

With Cap’s killing spree over, Santo and friends finally catch up with the Captain and just look around like, oh well.  Figuring that there is no way of ever knowing if they actually killed the final one, they decide it is best to just assume they did and part ways, the job done.  But is it?

Ah!  That lovable scamp (looks like a young Neil Bogenreider) that we at no point ever saw before in this movie!  Cue credits!  Is there an after credit scene?

No!  In fact, there are no credits.  The screen says (translated by Google Translates) End.  Local Movie.  Thanks.

And that’s that! And the best part is, I am going to assume that the real Spider-Man is out there still!  Victory for our web head!  THIS IS THE SPIDER-MAN WE SHOULD HAVE SEEN IN THE SPIDER-VERSE!

We never do figure out why Spider-Man was after those statues or why all the mafia families had one.  I guess it was just priceless art, but kind of odd that all the crime families were into small statues. Nor do we figure out why it is called Three Giant Men as the heroes only have two men in the team.  Math is tough.

We also never get to see Spider-Man’s face.  So for all of you Peter Parker fans out there, here is the actor, Tevfik Sen:

Now, I’ve heard that there is some Patreon goal to get the podcast panel to watch Spider-Man III, but I want to start a petition right now to change that to the masterpiece 3 Dev Adam!

Sadly, despite the film’s success, there are no other Turkish superhero knock-off movies out there.  But there is a Turkish Star Wars…

 

* Yes, Peter Norbot, I put that reference in just for you.

 ‘Nuff Said!