Attack of the Turkish Cult Film! A Look at Onar's Double Bill Release of The Dead Don't Talk and Thirsty For Love, Sex and Murder

Up first on this disc is The Dead Don't Talk, a 1970 production starring Aytekin Akkaya who will be well familiar to fans of Turkish cult film and a complete enigma to everyone else. He's kind of a Turkish Jack Palance, a stiff and wooden tough guy who neverhteless manages to exude a good amount of charm and charisma no matter what sort of shlock he's in. The shlock in this case is a black and white haunted house tale that begins with a sort of classic Universal horror vibe and then jams as much else into it as possible. You've got your superstitious cabbie, creaky doors that open and close themselves, the insane servant in the crumbling old mansion and, just in case that's not enough, a soundtrack that blasts you with the theme from 2001 when the lead pair enter an emtpy dining room just to make REALLY sure that you understand how important this room is. You've got your basic undead, your ghosts and ghouls and the like. What you DON'T have is a script that gives even half a damn about character devlopement or plot. This is pulp film making at its most basic: find the elements the young folk crave and milk those to the exclusion of all else.

With a title like Thirsty For Love, Sex and Murder the second offering here couldn't be anything but an attempt at giallo and that's exactly what it is. A luridly colored tale of, well, love, sex and murder the film wastes no time at all laying on nudity, rape and muder-by-straight-razor within the first ten minutes. Of course, when your total running time is slightly less than an hour you can't really afford to waste time, now can you? But here's the thing about cranking this stuff out so incredibly fast and cheap: beyond the simple nostalgia factor these films have an undeniable energy that seeps through purely thanks to the way they were produced. Sure, the weaknesses of the film are obvious but it is this sense of energy that makes it so very easy to like.

By today's archival nature of most DVD release the image quality of these two pictures would be unacceptable. The image is grainy, the prints obviously much weathered. But Turkey never archived any of these films and the simple fact that they still exist at all is nothing short of miraculous. Bolstering the films themselves are a good assortment of extras including image galleries of posters and stills from a variety of Turkish cult films, a gallery of Aytekin Akkaya's work and extensive interviews with Akkaya and a pair of Turkish cult film historians. Fun and informative!

These releases are purely a labor of love for Onar, a company that is basically one ery dedicated fan investing a huge amount of time and no small amount of money into digging up surviving materials and preserving them the best he can. And good on him for doing it. It's a shame the films haven't been better preserved but at least they're not going down without a fight ...