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Turkish super-hero film ain’t half bad.

Turkish cinema usually gets a bad rap among film fans, and often with good reason. We’ve all seen clips of “Turkish Superman” and “Turkish Star Wars”. It often gets placed right next to Filipino filmmaking as the most laughable out there. Sometimes, though, that isn’t the case. Sure, they often just ride the coattails of whatever genre is hot elsewhere, but hey, the Italians made a whole industry out of that, so who’s to say anything bad about it.

In Demir Pence Korsan Adam, the genre targeted is of the superhero nature. It was 1969 and America was just tiring of Adam West’s Batman while Mexico was still delivering Santo films and Italy was churning out fare such as Danger: Diabolik. Masked avengers were in, and the Turks followed suit.

Things get off to a great start as our masked man (Iron Claw, the Pirate) confronts a gang of men by swinging into the middle of them and shooting two of them dead. We see right away that Iron Claw, or the Pirate or whatever he wants to be called, is not a hero to be messed with. The rest of the plot I’m not so sure about without having to check online sources because I never could get the English subtitles to work (a flaw of my DVD player, not the disc’s).

Regardless, it’s a quick-moving film with a pace that might tire out the Flash. There are constant shoot-outs, girls in bikinis dancing around and goons with the letter “F” (for Fantomas, their criminal mastermind leader) lumbering about. The film could easily pass as one of the Italian masked-men films of the time period. Fantomas, in business suit and gimp mask, comes across as pretty bad ass, even if I don’t know a word he’s saying. Iron Claw has one of the coolest costumes of live-action superheroes of the time too, predating the leather look of the X-Men by 30 years. And he shoots people.

Released overseas by Onar Films in extremely limited quantities (the jacket boasts only 500 copies printed!), the disc features a pretty nice, if occasionally soft, print of the film. There’s an interesting little documentary on the film’s director, Cetin Inanc, and we get to see images from some of his other films, which have me intrigued to see. Being a fan of “animal attack” films, his Jaws rip-off has me salivating to see at some point. Rounding out the extras are bios/filmographies, trailers and a photo gallery.

Even without subtitles, Demir Pence Korsan Adam proved entertaining to me, and that’s a pretty big accomplishment for any film. If you have the capabilities to watch PAL discs, this is definitely a forgotten treasure to be sought out. Better hurry though, because I don’t think Onar was kidding about the 500 copies thing.

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