Welcome to “This Is a Thing,” a new monthly feature where your humble film editor will examine a piece of popular culture — a film, an album, a television special, whatever — that I wouldn’t believe existed had I not laid my own eyes upon it.

I’d heard about the Turkish films for a while. They’ve been a longtime object of fascination for bad movie connoisseurs; it seems that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, filmmakers in Turkey had something of a cottage industry in unauthorized remakes of American blockbusters, in which plots were appropriated, characters were bastardized, and music, shots, and even entire sequences of the original works were lifted wholesale (often in jarring contrast to their terrible homemade special effects). In other words, the Turks were “swedeing” movies long before Be Kind, Rewind. There was the Turkish Superman, Turkish Star Wars, Turkish Wizard of Oz, Turkish Star Trek, and so on. They were spoken of in hushed tones by lovers of terrible cinema, who swapped third-generation VHS dubs, always (and this seems a point of pride among those who view them) without subtitles. They sounded too terrible to be true, so when I spotted a copy of Badi — helpfully labeled “The Turkish E.T.” — on the shelves of my beloved World of Video, I took a deep breath and walked it up to the counter. … Read More