This is an almost shot-for-shot remake of the classic, and one of my favourite movies of all time, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, in Turkish, with very very bad visual effects. Most people will have the pleasure of never even hearing this movie (apologies for bringing it to your attention if you’re reading this review), but, being such a fan of the original, I couldn’t help but track down a copy of Seytan.

Most of all, it’s cute. For some reason you can’t help imagining these little Turkish men behind the camera, genuinely excited to be using the equipment. I imagined a crew behind the camera not unlike that seen in Frank Oz and Steve Martin’s Bowfinger. This is just bizarre speculation by me and likely nowhere near the truth, but it’s the only way of seeing past how badly made this movie is.

The weird thing is, although the movie is really really bad, there are actually at least a couple of sparks of near-great invention. Though I’m almost certain nobody had seen the original ending of the real Exorcist movie in 1973 (except the film makers) – the “happy ending” which has now been tagged onto the end of The Version You’ve Never Seen, my preferred cut of the movie – here in the Turkish remake, made just a year later, they go for such a happy ending, no hurling the audience out with a haunting “but is it really over?” hint. For this reason, I really couldn’t entirely put the movie down, because it really took me by surprise.

What I did like about Seytan was that watching it almost reminded me of watching The Exorcist for the first time. The quality of the copy I managed to find was a dirty VHS duplicate or something, and because the movie has perhaps the lowest budget of all time, the movie, too, looks filthy. It looks like something you’re not supposed to be watching, just like The Exorcist was in the UK when I first saw it. This has nothing to do with the cinematic value of the movie, of course, but it’s worth mentioning because the only people who will really get anything out of Seytan will be the die-hard Exorcist fans like myself.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 27th, 2004 at 9:01 am in 2 hearts, Movie Reviews and tagged as horror, possession, trash. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.