Altin Cocuk (Golden Boy)

Funny thing about the James Bond movies is that, while they are models of conspicuous consumption, their basic tropes are so much just that –- basic –- that one could recreate them in a backyard home movie and still have them be easily identifiable. Make your bald headed uncle wear his shirt backwards and put him in a high-backed chair with a cat in his lap and you have your villain. Get the babysitter to dance around in a swimsuit to a Ventures record and you have your credit sequence. Make sure that your hero’s suit has at least been recently pressed, and that he can hold a cocktail glass in a somewhat rakish manner, and you’re good to go. Then you can have your mom… Well, that got weird awful fast, didn’t it? Anyway, you see my point.

You’d think that it would be this aspect of the Bond films that made them ideal fodder for the make do, cash poor cinema of 1960s Turkey. But the fact is that’s not the reason that Altin Cocuk, Turkey’s answer to James Bond –- aka Golden Boy –- was made at all. Altin Cocuk was made because it was 1966 and, in 1966, every country on Earth with a functioning movie industry was constructing their answer to James Bond.

RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD

“Return of the Living Dead” is one of the movies that my teenage self considered awesome that has withstood the test of time. Counter to the movie’s oppressive feeling of dread is a ghoulish sense of humor. “Send more paramedics” is a perfect example. The zombies are preying upon the living by asking for more help. We, the audience, know what is going to happen to the next ambulance that arrives at the graveyard. It is ghastly, but we laugh because it is also clever and diabolically unfair.

Lesson Learned:
Lysol destroys 99% of the germs that cause the smell of death.

While waiting for an interlibrary loan to help my research into my next new piece, I thought I’d do a little house-keeping:

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First up, I have recovered, revised, re-formatted and added a few screenshots to:

THE DEVIL BAT (1940)

In which Bela Lugosi, kindly village doctor by day, mad scientist by night, disposes of his enemies by (i) creating giant killer bats; (ii) teaching his bats to home in on a certain ingredient in an experimental shaving-lotion; and (iii) persuading his enemies to rub some of the lotion on the tender part of their neck. It’s foolproof!

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I have also given a similar makeover to the film’s sequel-in-name-only, DEVIL BAT’S DAUGHTER (1946).

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Plus, I’ve re-formatted REVOLT OF THE ZOMBIES (1936) and ROCKETSHIP X-M (1950), and fixed up the screenshots in THE WALKING DEAD (1936). (Sort of; they’re still a bit dark, I think.)

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When I was younger, I was fascinated by the private eye profession. In television shows about private detectives, they always seemed to have a colorful life. They would charge fees running up to several hundred dollars an hour – which seemed like a fortune to me as a youngster. TV private detectives also always seemed to keep meeting sexy women, and they always seemed to need to use their firearm on creeps who really deserved getting shot. But as I got older, I learned the hard truths about private detectives. For one thing, I remember when MAD Magazine revealed to me that private detectives in real life mainly worked on getting provocative pictures for their clients who were involved in messy divorces – not a very glamorous thing to be doing. When I recently spotted the private detective movie Hollywood Harry at my local used video store, my first thought was if it would show me a sanitized look at the private detective life or something closer to the real thing. It also interested me in that Robert Forster was the director as well as the star.

Skull Heads (2009) — A creepy family in an Italian castle confronts the outside world when the teenage daughter falls for a handsome film director. Also, because this is a Charles Band flick, there are killer dolls running around.

Related: I goofed.  Reader Revenge Month is in April. It’ll be sort of like the time lag between Election Day and the Inauguration.  (I’m a lame duck!)