Kizlar kampi (1987)

... aka: Girl's Camp
... aka: Kızlar Kampı

Directed by:
Kadir Akgün

Eight excessively happy young ladies, led by the pretty hot Fulya (Fulya Kumcu), decide to leave Istanbul and go on a little camping trip out in the sticks. When they stop for something to eat, Fulya notices some older, sleazy-looking guy (sporting sunglasses, a popped collar, a shirt unbuttoned to the waist and white short shorts!) lurking around. It's the same guy Fulya previously saw outside her apartment before they left and the same guy who cut them off when they were driving. Now he's there peeping on them again. Cause for alarm? Not if you're these chicks. They hop in their van, start laughing, singing and dancing, and occasionally look right at the camera with a sheepish grin. The guy (Nuri Alço) hops right back in his BMW and continues trailing them to the beach, where he spies on them while they're swimming and finds out where they'll be camping for the night... which also happens to be on a small plot of land covered with jagged rocks! When two girls go off into the brush and catch the perv trying to watch them pee, they chase him off. But do they pack up their tents and head elsewhere? Seeing how seven of the eight will find themselves dead soon enough, do we even need to ask?

Having now stripped down to a speedo, the stalker (who turns out to be Fulya'a ex) keeps watching as they play volleyball, grill, sunbathe and talk to a goofy dwarf hunter (Orhan Başaran) who wanders by. Later that night when the girls are doing a dance around a bonfire (!) to a song called "Fire and Ice," one of the girls wanders off into the brush and gets dragged off. No one even notices she's missing until the next morning, which prompts a search of the area that lasts ten minutes and consists of the girls walking around in the woods calling out the missing girl's name at least 100 times. The one chubby girl of the group ends up finding her bloodied corpse on the beach and then gets chased down and strangled / drowned by the killer. After finding both bodies, the others attempt to leave but their van has been tampered with.

 

In spite of what's been going on, these bimbos continue to wander off alone. When her friends go for a walk, one stays behind to be strangled. Then a girl walks off into the woods by herself and gets stabbed through the chest. When her body is found by the hunter, the girls simply dig a grave, put their dead friend in it, throw dirt on her and make a tombstone! Each death is followed by a group whining / crying session. The remaining four girls pack a bag, take directions from the hunter and decide to hike out of there to safety, which leads to more whining about how tired they are. In fact, most of the last 40 minutes consists of the girls walking up and down hills moaning, gasping and whining. Every once in awhile one will get picked off. One of the two lead males - the stalker and the hunter - tries to implicate the other in the killings with a series of false flashbacks.

This incredibly dumb and cheap (shot with a camcorder) Turkish slasher has plenty of laughs scattered throughout but gets bogged down by long stretches where nothing much happens, which barely robs it of its true SBIG glory. While there's no nudity, the primary focus seems to be on showing girls running around all over the place in skimpy bikinis, which they wear nearly the entire movie. Some of the camerawork is hilariously exploitative, too, especially a moment when the camera pans up and down a girl's body and then focuses on her crotch (!) while she's being strangled to death. They also left in a clearly visible shots of the cameraman's shadow and the flood lights they used for the night scenes.

Also worth noting are the bizarre wardrobe changes, with the girls modeling different suits from one scene to the next and characters showing up in new outfits even when they have no real way of getting them. But this does at least have a bad 80s movie dream aesthetic with all the big hair, giant hoop earrings, high waisted mom jeans, neon green shirts reading "America" and "Crazy Girl," excessive bangles, over the shoulder sweaters and the like. Seeing how Turkey had a thriving VHS market during the 80s and 90s, I'm surprised there wasn't more homegrown direct-to-video horror product than there was back then.

I could find no poster or VHS box for this title so I'm not sure exactly where / when / if it was even officially released. It certainly never saw the light of day outside of Turkey. The director also made BRUTAL STORM (1985), an unsanctioned remake of the Spanish film It Happened at Nightmare Inn, Şeytan Kızlar / "Devil Girls" (1987), Anahtar / "Key" (1988), Lanetli Kadınlar / "Cursed Women" (aka Bloody Mansion of Death).

★1/2

Korkunç tecavüz (1972)

... aka: Horrible Murders, The
... aka: Horrible Torture
... aka: Scary Rape

Directed by:
Ertem Göreç

I have very little experience with older Turkish horror films but everything I've watched thus far has been an obvious and sometimes even scene-for-scene plagiarism of something else. It didn't matter if that something else was an extremely famous film like The Exorcist, Jaws or The Shining, or something not at all well known outside of cult / horror circles (I doubt anyone was clamoring for a redo of A Candle for the Devil); everything was apparently fair game to them! As per my limited knowledge and equipped with next to no information about this particular title, it struck me that I was perhaps about to watch my very first "original" Turkish horror movie. Unfortunately, this was so bad it ended up making me pine for one of the rip-offs!

A bus transporting a male school teacher / coach and a bunch of high school girls travels through the mountains. They break out into a song that goes something like "La la la la la la la. La la la la la la la la la" before arriving at some remote resort hotel. Seeing how this isn't available in English, I initially had no clue what they were doing there but it has something to do with a girl's volleyball team needing a place to practice or something. Practice volleyball at a hotel, you say? Why yes, this hotel also happens to have a large, school-sized gymnasium in it. You know, like most hotels do. Moving right along...

One of the girls hurts her leg during practice and then, just seconds later, is seen bopping around with the rest of the girls without a care in the world. She and a teammate then go back to their room and strip down to their underwear for a wild night in the hotel bar. There, they dance around in hilarious sped up shots while strobe lights blink, a red light flashes, a record spins and the disco version of Yakety Yak (!) by El Coco plays while a bunch of perverted older men ogle them. Best scene ever? Perhaps not, but it's the probably the best thing I've seen all month. Speaking of perverts, hotel owner Ender (Naci Girgin)), who was previously seen licking his lips checking the girls out during practice as the camera zoomed in on their asses and legs, also shows up at the disco to stare the girls down while his jealous wife (Ayfer Feray, from Dracula in Istanbul) looks on.

The next morning, two of the volleyball girls (one of whom looks to be pushing 40) merrily skip into the woods. Also in the woods at the same time is pretty schoolteacher Serpil (Emel Özden) and about ten little kids she has out on some nature trip. When they attempt to drive around to look for a missing boy, the car gets caught up in some mud. A mysterious red light flashes and eyes peer at them through the brush. While going to investigate, Serpil finds the dead body of the 40-year-old "girl." Four men miraculously materialize in the woods at the same time as if to say "Hey! We'll be your suspects this evening!" There's the previously unseen square-jawed doctor Ekrem (Yalçin Gülhan), a photographer / reporter (Ayton Sert) who wastes no time taking pictures of the corpse, one of the hotel guests and, you guessed it, the perv hotel owner. The young boy who wandered off, Murat (Murat Erton), is also located but is now traumatized and left in a state of shock after witnessing the crime. When the police show up, they find the body of the other missing girl. Both she and her friend were apparently raped prior to being killed, though we don't get to actually see any of it.

 

As the police commissioner (Ismail Hakki Sen) starts to investigate, the hotel owner's wife begins to suspect her hubby may be responsible when she finds (gasp!) nudie pictures in his wallet. Meanwhile, the little boy is taken to a doctor (Necip Tekçe) who administers a drug to help cure his shock but it's to no avail. The black-gloved killer then sneaks into the hospital to kill the kid but first strangles a nurse to death while trying to rip off one of the two pairs of panties (?!) she's wearing. The rest of the movie is spent showing the psycho stalking, terrorizing and attempting to kill off the teacher.

Weak, formulaic writing, with bland characters, nary an original idea in sight and very clumsy use made of red herrings before trotting out a character we've never even seen before at the very end, ensures little to no plot interest is ever generated while poor direction and pacing ensures there's zero suspense and technical incompetence in nearly every other area (the editing is especially awful) dooms the rest. A few isolated moments show off some nice set design and / or giallo-like colors but it's not nearly enough to overcome all the rest. Neither is the disco scene, great as that was. 

As customary with most Turkish films from this time, all of the dialogue was poorly dubbed in later and never matches the lips. The running time is only 58 minutes and the only version available for viewing is in terrible condition.

★