• Directed by T. Fikret Ucak
• Written by Dogan Tamer
• Starring
  • Aytekin Akkaya
  • Deniz Erkanat
  • Yavuz Selekman
  • Teyfik Sen
  • Dogan Tamer

Your fortune-cookie wisdom for the day: “Everything lost is eventually found.” That includes the fabled gems of foreign cinema which have for decades been circulating as Nth-generation VHS dubs, their reputations growing as their image quality degrades with each successive duplication. If you’ve ever seen 3 Dev Adam before, that’s probably how you did it (unless you’re Turkish and caught it on its original theatrical release). It’s been scarcer than most obscure overseas productions because most of the original film elements were supposedly “lost in a fire” years ago (I suspect, but cannot prove, that the fire was started by a team of crack ninja attorneys from Marvel Comics). But those days of squinting at an almost unwatchable dub with no subtitles are past. You are now living In The Future. Onar Films, which specializes in rescuing unknown Turkish genre flicks for the DVD age, managed to find a better-than-rotten copy of the film and release it complete with subtitles (in English or Greek!) for the clamoring crowds who have been desperate to find out, really, what the hell is going on here. (Perhaps not so much of a crowd; Onar put this movie out in a 1200-copy edition in 2006, and has only sold about half of them.)

The title translates roughly as “Three Giants” or “Three Mighty Men,” and the first of them we meet is the villain: Spider-Man! Well, Spider-Mannish-Man, anyway, known here as “The Spider.” (And pardon some lax performer credits; there isn’t a complete credits list extant.) His costume’s red and green instead of blue, the costume design’s off in a million subtle little ways, and he’s got eyebrows that stick out from the eyeholes of his mask so far you’d swear they’re prosthetic. Also, he’s a psychopathic and sadistic crime lord. He demonstrates this by grabbing some girl who has wronged him in some way on the beach, throwing her into a hole in the sand, burying her up to her neck, and then having his goons shove the propeller end of a motorboat into her face. This guy ain’t your friendly neighborhood nothing.

A promotional consideration was paid by the Swiss Army.

Obviously, a psycho in green-and-red jammies is too much for the Turkish authorities to handle (who’ve probably diverted all their resources into combatting Kilink and the other native-grown masked masterminds), so they call in the big guns from the other side of the Atlantic on the next plane. We don’t immediately see them in their fighting togs, but they are none other than Captain America (Aytekin Akkaya) and Santo (Yavuz Selekman), along with Cap’s galpal Julia. Now, I’m a self-professed rabid winghead, so you might expect me to come down like a ton of bricks on this pretender Super-Soldier. But we’ve already set the low-water mark for character fidelity with the Spider, and I’ve seen another underwhelming version of my beloved Captain America recently, so I’m inclined to give him a pass as long as he kicks noble quantities of ass. In case you’re wondering why American and Mexican heroes are involved, Police Inspector Orhan (Dogan Tamer, also the writer) helpfully exposits that the Spider’s criminal network involves stolen artifacts and antiquities, which are then sold overseas for a pittance, then bought back for huge sums of counterfeit money. No, it makes not a lick of sense. I’m okay with that. At least Orhan has a throwaway line complimenting the foreigners on their command of Turkish.

The following exchange between Orhan and Captain America really sets the logical tenor for the premise:

Orhan: I have another question. Why are you putting on masks and outfits during duty?

Captain America: Spider is a child minded lunatic. He always wears a mask. When he sees someone else wearing a mask, he wants to destroy them. My special outfit is bullet proof.

Orhan: I see.

That’s the kind of alternate universe we’re in for the duration, folks. Sit back and enjoy the ride.

“Does this rope make me look fat?”

Thanks to the fact that the Turkish police have already done the legwork, this much is known about how the Spider operates: He’s got classified ads looking for antiquities. He tracks the owners back from the letters they send to his post office box. He’s also somehow involved in a circle of foreign fashion shows, and there’s a suspicious yacht in the harbor. Why they need the foreign muscle to show up for the heavy lifting, I don’t know, but with Julia covering the fashion show, Captain America watching the yacht, and Santo shadowing whoever checks the post office box, it doesn’t take long before things start happening.

Things! Things like Julia being caught snooping and taken to a hideout, only to be tracked by her snazzy wristwatch and rescued by Captain America! Things like Santo tracking the letters from the post office box back to a gym, where he sneaks in at night (if “sneaks” even applies when wearing a golden mask and a sequined cape) to snatch incriminating documents and fight a trio of karate masters! Things like Captain America chasing the Spider past an old drunk who immediately blames the colorful characters on the booze!

“But — I don’t want to be your sidekick.”

And in between, the Spider kills women, usually in the bathtub! These are the antiquities owners, yes, but you have to suspect that the Spider set up the entire criminal network just so he could play peeping tom and then strangle or stab women in their bathrooms. With that kind of setup, you start to get really uncomfortable with the way he then… fondles his artifacts.

Once you stop trying to make sense of things, the movie goes down really easy. By the time we get to the obligatory strip club, you no longer feel the need to remember why exactly the good guys suspect the strip club of being involved in the Spider’s crimes; you can instead concentrate on how hideously unappealing the stripper is. (There are, we see from this movie, many attractive Turkish women. The one who strips down to a G-string and pasties is not one of them.)

“Why yes, I believe I HAVE seen one of those before.”

It’s a very cheap movie, even (reportedly) by Turkish standards, but it makes up for it with INSANE amounts of energy. I would bet money that the script begins every sentence with “And then,” like a breathless fourth-grader telling you about the coolest comic book idea ever: “And then Julia shows up with a different haircut! And then Captain America watches the post office box and follows the girl and fights some dudes! And then the Spider tortures the gym manager who let Santo steal some papers, by letting starved rats eat his eyes! And then, um, I don’t remember how they got there, but Captain America and Santo find the counterfeit printing place in the basement of a mannequin factory and totally kick bad-guy butt! And then there are, like, a dozen different Spiders, so whenever one of the heroes knocks one down and crushes his head, another one pops out and laughs the same spooky laugh, and, like, they’ve all got the same wild eyebrows!” Just telling you about it makes me feel like I’m grinding coffee beans with my teeth.

Even though he isn’t terribly American in any recognizable way, it’s clear that Captain America is the top dog here; he’s smarter than Santo, he’s better looking, and he got to bring his squeeze Julia along for a “working vacation.” Cap is played by Aytekin Akkaya, a Turkish action star so renowned that, if you’ve seen a famous Turkish genre movie, odds are you’ve seen him. (That’s not too hard, because apart from 3 Dev Adam, the most famous Turkish genre movie is probably The Man Who Saves the World (1982), aka “Turkish Star Wars,” and Akkaya was in that.)

“Wait — I’ve gone this entire movie without my little head-wings? I feel so naked!”

People sometimes refer to this movie as being incomprehensible, but those are usually people who saw it without the benefit of subtitles; under those circumstances, MOST movies are literally incomprehensible. But once you get past any impulse to associate costumes on the villain and heroes with their corresponding personas in North American entertainment media, it becomes a simple tale of doughty heroes, a criminal organization led by a psycho killer, and one ugly stripper too many. I think we can agree that you can find a movie that fulfills those universals in any national cinema in the world.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 11
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0 (but one, Sonmez Yikilmaz, was also in Turist Omer Uzay Yolunda (1973), aka Turkish Star Trek!)