Keith Allison, Author at Diabolique Magazine

Hollywood is no stranger to remaking (or ripping off) foreign films. Although this inevitably spurs a round of grumbling from the people who hold dear the movie subjected to remaking, it's a mainstream, accepted practice. Many times, the bulk of an audience may not even know a film is a remake. However, when a foreign country remakes (or, again, rips off) a Hollywood film, often with far more limited technical and financial resources, it's held up as an example of "so bad it's good"—which ignores the chutzpah of the bunch of ambitious hustlers daring to remake a big-budget Hollywood film. Look, it's not like some of those remakes aren't a little...let's call them rough around the edges. Technically crude. Occasionally crass. But they exist for many reasons, from the cultural necessity to retool certain themes to a sense of humor and, yes, to make a buck—reasons which, like the technical complication of making many of them, are often lost in the online stampede to point and laugh. When Ed Glaser turned his eye toward documenting 65 international remakes of Hollywood films, collected together in his exceptional book, How the World Remade Hollywood: Global Interpretations of 65 Iconic Films (McFarland Press, 2022), he wanted to make sure he wrote about the films on their own terms, examining not just that they exist but why they exist and how they came to be. In delving beyond what can admittedly be some rather eye-popping surfaces, Glaser avoids writing about these movies from the condescending perch that so often plagues writing about such films. "I think you can imagine that I very much dislike the point and laugh attitude," says Glaser. "I think that you can delight in films like this without being derisive, which seems to be very common, I think, as these films have sort of been unearthed and put on YouTube. I'm not a big fan of the 'so bad, it's good' philosophy. I think this emphasis on a film's badness is really detrimental to conversations about it." This means one is able to sit back and, like Ed himself, genuinely enjoy the hell of some truly amazing, often shocking, and sometimes brilliant international takes on such films and franchises as Star Trek, The Exorcist, Jaws, Captain America, El Santo, Spider-Man, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and of course, Star Wars. To call what Ed does a review of these various films short-changes the amount of cinematic archaeology he does, unearthing interesting trivia and making-of facts as well as explaining the many factors that resulted in the making of each film. The insight, delivered in a conversational and informed voice (this is not one of those "masters thesis turned into a book" affairs), lends added depth to (and sympathy for) even the shaggiest of movies, and it comes from decades of seeking out cinematic treasure from the far-flung corners of the globe. Finding the Way. Like many people who came of cinematic age in the 1990s, Ed's introduction to the wide world of cult cinema came via local video stores and, when there was an absence of those in his town, Mystery Science Theater 3000. "I'm from the Mystery Science Theater 3000 generation and that was probably what really kickstarted my interest," says Glaser. "Where I grew up, there weren't the kinds of video stores like there were in New York that specialized in the obscure. The closest thing I had was bootleg videotapes table at a couple of Star Trek conventions I went to as a kid. That's where I picked up the 1994 Fantastic Four movie, some unavailable Godzilla films, that kind of thing." Like any good cult movie obsessive, Glaser didn't stop at watching films or at attending the odd convention. He wanted to know more about the movies he was seeing, and often times the spark that ignited a strange avenue of research came from unexpected places. In fact, the thing that moved him away from the MST3K canon and into the more remote waters of cult cinema was, of all things, Thomas Harris's "Hannibal" novels. "I was in college when I read all of the Hannibal novels," recalls Glaser, "and I was revisiting all the movies. There were two versions of Red Dragon, the one from 2002 and the Michael Mann version from 1986. I was curious if there were other adaptations that I wasn't aware of. So I went to IMDB, and IMDB revealed an unauthorized remake of the Silence of the Lambs from India. called Sangharsh (1999). And it was a musical?? Obviously, I ordered a DVD, even though it had no subtitles. I got a bunch of friends to come over to my dorm room, got a bunch of food, and we all watched it without subtitles, and it was wild." One of the things that most interested Glaser about Sangharsh was examining what was the same between versions and what had changed—and why those changes might have been made. "Why are there songs? Why is Buffalo Bill a child murderer? Why is Hannibal sexy?" Three Giant Men Who Saved the World. The discovery of Sangharsh led Glaser to wonder what other "international remixes" of Hollywood films were out there. He began researching any internet link he could find that might shed some light on the topic. That road led him, s it led many other like-minded seekers, to a film known colloquially as "Turkish Star Wars," aka The Man Who Saved the World, aka Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (1982). "The Man Who Saved the World is a wild sort of Flash Gordon-esque collage film that mixes footage from Star Wars, music from lots of other films, adventure stuff that's kind of like old sci-fi serials...and more colors than may be in the rainbow. "We watched that on Google Video, back when that existed, hooked up to a CRT screen, which if you know what that's like—sending a signal from a computer—it kinda looks extra blurry and terrible. That was a particularly psychedelic experience. It felt like it came from another universe. "But of course, it didn't. Actual people made it. There were reasons that it looked like it did. There was presumably an entire industry behind it, one that I didn't know anything about. So as I sought out other interesting international remakes and rip-offs. I started researching them—the people who made them, the conditions that were made in, the ways their cultures consume films, what are their contemporary political landscapes, and so on." Despite often being referred to as "Turkish Star Wars," The Man Who Saved the World doesn't reflect the plot very closely, although there are certainly parallels to be found—some of which are intentional and some of which are simply a product of the fact that so many stories, Star Wars included, hew to a set of archetypes and character arcs that have been in use since humans started telling stories. Plus, it's not like it only borrows special effects shots from Star Wars. There's a decent bit of the original Glen A. Larson Battlestar Galactica in there (itself a made-for-TV attempt to ride Star Wars' cape tails). Ultimately, both Star Wars and The Man Who Saved the World call back to the decades' worth of established pulp space opera. That there is a Ming the Merciless-like villain in The Man Who Saved the World isn't surprising—such villains have been used since the proverbial "time immemorial." In exploring further Turkish adaptations, Glaser found another, much more radical-seeming interpretation of well-known characters. 3 Dev Adam, aka Three Giant Men, gained nearly as much fame online as The Man Who Saved the World thanks to its inclusion of Mexican wrestling and cinema legend El Santo and American comic book characters Captain America and Spider-Man. All three behave a little differently in 3 Dev Adam than they do in their original versions—Spider-Man, for example, is a cackling, chain-smoking supervillain—and again Glaser was interested in why this was so. "I'm looking at Captain America, and this Captain America is very weird. He's a cop. He doesn't have little helmet wings. He doesn't have a shield. He uses a gun. It dawned on me that the version of Captain America that these filmmakers are pulling from is not the Captain America from the comics, because they probably never read Captain America comics. They know him from the 1940s Columbia serial, in which Captain America is a district attorney who moonlights as Captain America—in a costume without the little helmet wings, without the shield, and with a gun. Suddenly it all makes sense." "Spiderman had not been a thing in Turkey either," Glaser continues. "He would appear briefly a couple of years after 3 Dev Adam came out and then really not again until the eighties. So they were probably aware of him sort of peripherally. I think the American TV series had a couple of theatrical films released internationally that were edited from episodes of the series, and those would come out a little bit later also. But Spider-Man, I think it was just like, we're familiar with the existence of Spider-Man. I bet he'd be a cool villain. Let's do that!" And that was the sort of stuff that I was really living for, connecting dots that I hadn't been able to connect before." Jaws Wars: To Sue or Not to Sue. While India and Turkey have produced some of the most shocking reinterpretations of blockbusters, awareness of films from those countries was the product of the internet age and, more specifically, the rise of Youtube. Before that, the best-known blockbuster remixes were coming from Italy. They were often readily available on VHS and, in many cases, even received a theatrical release in the United States during the 1970s and '80s. How the World Remade Hollywood covers several Italian productions, including OK Connery (aka Operation Kid Brother, 1967), a James Bond knock-off starring several actors from the Bond franchise, as well as Sean Connery's brother, Neil. However, two Italian blockbuster remixes in particular capture the spirit prevalent in Italy at the time. One of the best-known and most beloved was Luigi Cozzi's Star Crash (1978), commissioned explicitly as a Star Wars cash-in but taking a...