Movie Review: SALDIRGANLAR

aka THE SAVAGE BEASTS
Directed by Engin Temizer
Turkey; 1979

This is an ultra-sleazy softcore shocker from Turkey. Of course it’s totally incomprehensible. No subs, but they wouldn’t have helped anyway. Whole chunks of the movie seem to be missing and the situations depicted are unlikely, unbelievable and ultimately utterly mind-melting. Like other weird late 70s-early 80s Turkish skin flix I’ve seen, this movie featured no credits, no title sequence, it just flies straight into the depravity and before you know it, it’s all over. Just like that. It just stops. “SON” (Turkish for “FIN”). Weird.

The “plot” (not that it matters) is *whew* yet another “rape-revenge” story. For some reason I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE must have made a huge impact on the third world. The importance of female honor in countries like Turkey, Egypt and India must have something to do with the resonance of this particular stock story. Or maybe, like here and in Europe, it’s just an excuse for nudity, sleaze and violence – tried and true methods of putting butts in theater seats. It’s probably something somewhere in-between.



Anyway, a pretty girl hitch-hikes and is picked up by three slobbering criminal types, who of course rape her in brutal and crude fashion as stolen Italian soundtrack music (including Ennio Morricone’s classic score for BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE) blares indiscriminately in the background. They have their way and then split. She wanders to a nearby villa and is nursed back to health by a handsome bachelor. She must have amnesia because she doesn’t have the dude take her home, where her mother and brother (and his hot wife) worry in broad strokes. For some reason the criminals seemingly by accident come to stay in the bachelor villa, and well, you can guess what eventually happens. It doesn’t end up well.

The astonishing thing about this movie is the long, nearly hardcore sex scenes which take up about a third of the film’s running time. Mostly between the victim and her hero (although his thrusts into her bring back unseemly visions of her rape, but strangely she doesn’t seem to mind all that much), although the girl’s brother and his wife deal with the grief of his sister’s disappearance but humping away in fairly hot fashion. More than likely some versions of this movie probably featured hardcore inserts, but the sex scenes themselves seem to have been shot originally as softcore. At one point a busty Turkish babe is writhing on top of her man and the camera peeks from behind at her womanly bits and there’s nothing going in, if ya know what I mean. So yeah. Softcore. But like I said, fairly hot.

Not much really going on in this one. But it’s a weird enough diversion for an afternoon. And it’s always good to have a few more totally obscure foreign sex films under your belt. It will make you a better and more interesting person in the end.
Or just egg on your already growing out-of-control depravity.
Whatever.



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