6 Hilarious Special Effects From Turkish Cinema

The Turkish are cinematic geniuses, able to recreate any Hollywood special effect for less than zero dollars. Turkey's films are vibrant and artistic expressions of previously made American films. If a cultured woman pulls a Turkish movie out of your video cassette recorder, her other hand will instinctively pull her wedding ring and panties off.

For years, moviegoers have wondered how they created all these fantastic visual effects. Puppets? Sorcery? Palsy? Well, for the first time ever, I am about to pull back the curtain on Turkish special effects. I'm going to risk everything by exposing six secrets that the Turkish Film and Sanitation and Textile Manufacturing Council has fought so hard to keep.

To create the illusion of star men vanishing into space, four actors stand as still as possible until the cameraman hits pause. Then it's simply a matter of running off frame without anyone bumping the camera. After screwing that up, the footage is handed over to the man in charge of the company penny. This man scrapes clumsy, almost random chunks of the film off until it looks like something has happened to the film in outer space. Unfortunately, in a country whose leading export is oil wrestling, this process is also going to get a good deal of cloudy lubricant on the film. So we're left with what looks like an out-of-focus VCR accident.

Not to throw around wild accusations, but it's a suspicious coincidence that thousands of children disappear every year and Turkey's special effects look like they were designed by thousands of unwilling third graders. But in fairness to Turkish Star Trek, this example is taken way out of context. Every bad special effect is surrounded by shots of the Turkish Enterprise's female crew, and their regulation mini skirts so short that if they ran into their gynecologist at the grocery store, he'd feel like he was at work.

So instead of a dazzling credit sequence, the film opens with a shaky man holding a camcorder and jogging through a shed filled with Christmas ornamenno wait, holy shit, they think this looks like space! Sometimes Turkish visual effects make you feel like you've solved a puzzle when you realize what they were trying to do. I mean, some of these planets still have glitter snowflakes on them. And those are the ones that look the most realistic since they don't have the fish-eyed reflection of a Turkish camera man bobbing towards them.

It was a pretty ballsy move to include credits. All artistic crimes and copyright issues aside, most of the props and vehicles in Turkish Superman are illegal to touch without a Class 7 Toxic Waste Disposal License. These people drive cars that would give motor oil hepatitis and one of their cameras only films in blue. If the skinny guy wasn't wearing a Superman costume, I'd think I was watching a training video on how employees should hunt junkyard intruders.

Dorothy's endless dancing wastes more film than a cat owner with an Internet connection. After weeks of prancing across twenty feet of forest, Dorothy and her friends finally reach the Emerald City. And let me tell you-- it is worth the wait.

Turkish Emerald City is such a breathtakingly crappy model that it would have cost more if they'd made it out of macaroni. If you were five and sculpted this out of Fimo, your mother would refuse to bake it and your father would make you take a DNA test. This depressing thing looks like they found a cake in the trash from a birthday where everyone was murdered.

And when they get inside, this is the great and powerful Wizard of Oz. This. And behind that, it turns out the actual Wizard of Oz was Turkish John Oates the whole time.

"After all this time, has someone finally come for me?

Oh god... in Turkey, the prison term for child molestation is so, so long."