KARATE GIRL (1973) BAD MOVIE REVIEW

KARATE GIRL aka Karateci Kiz (1973) – As fans of Psychotronic movies know, Turkish cinema’s imitations of B-movies from around the world are known for very eccentric acting and for ignoring international copyright laws.

Turkish Star Wars has long been a favorite of Turksploitation fans but most of us were introduced to the country’s Psychotronic cinema via their home grown costumed crimefighter called Killing or through the movie 3 Dev Adam (1973). Three Divine Men or Three Giant Men as it’s called in English featured the U.S.A.’s Captain America and Mexico’s El Santo teaming up against Spider-Man, who for some reason was depicted as an international criminal.

The Turkish “screw you” attitude when it came to the fact that they didn’t own the trademarks to those three figures added to the bizarre charm. Similarly, Turkish films appropriated whatever music they wanted to use in their productions. For instance, Karate Girl shamelessly uses the Shaft music to accompany its martial arts revenge storyline.

Turkish superstar Filiz Akin stars in Karate Girl as Zeynep, a beautiful young woman who sells flowers to raise money for an operation to fix her vocal chords so she can talk. Zeynep lives with her good-natured father, who verbalizes to the viewers what his mute daughter’s personal sign language means.

Trouble enters when five convicts escape from prison already wearing casual street clothing instead of prison uniforms. The quintet start carrying out home invasions and one of those homes is, of course, the one where Zeynep and her father live.

The detestable villains steal the money that our heroine and her father have saved up for her operation. Far worse, they kill the father and assault Zeynep in some very ugly I Spit on Your Grave kind of moments that I sped up through.

After the thugs leave, Zeynep discovers her father’s corpse and the shock makes her able to speak. (I’m not joking.) Along the way to this point in the movie we viewers met Murat Akdogan (Ediz Hun), a cop whose brother was killed by the same five criminals who struck at Zeynep and her father.

Murat decides to join forces with our beautiful title character in order to get revenge on the bad guys. While teaching her marksmanship and setting her up with a karate teacher, Murat falls in love with Zeynep and she with him.

Our villains mortally wound Murat when he foolishly confronts one of them alone. Zeynep is at his deathbed as he passes away, and she goes full Revenge Mode, becoming an Istanbul police officer without so much as a training montage.

Karate Girl is beloved by people like me because of the awkward fight scenes in which Zeynep very obviously never makes contact with the men she pretends to kick and punch. The foley for when she’s firing her gun is hit and miss, with occasional sound effects for shots being fired when she’s obviously not firing and occasional lack of sound effects when our heroine clearly IS shooting.   

A hilariously long and drawn-out death scene by one of the criminals shot repeatedly by Zeynep became an internet meme over a decade ago under the title “The worst movie death scene ever.” The death is shown in slow motion and the actor hams it up like he’s in an old Police Squad episode.

Zeynep keeps firing and the actor keeps dragging out his character’s death throes while we viewers keep laughing our asses off. The international edit of Karate Girl keeps the entire embarrassing scene intact, but copies intended for Turkish consumption have cut the scene down to a much less funny amount of time.

Our title character tracks down her targets to different locations around Istanbul and dishes out karate vengeance. The last villain standing grabs an obviously fake baby from its crib and uses it as a hostage so he can make it to the roof. 

Zeynep joins him there and hilariously cops a “Baby? What baby?” attitude as she rains karate blows on the bad guy completely oblivious to the infant in his arms and in harm’s way. Just as your laughter from that is subsiding, several Turkish cops on a roof across the street open fire on the villain even though the baby AND Zeynep are in the line of fire.

As you’re struggling to catch your breath and tell the movie “Stop it, dude, yer killin‘ me!” it polishes you off by depicting our heroine getting into a tug of war with the criminal over the baby. In real life the infant would be long dead by now but in our film it remains unharmed while Zeynep wins the battle for possession of the football child.

The bad guy is sent plummeting to his death in the street below and, no longer burdened by her quest for revenge, Zeynep cuddles the baby and talks about raising children of her own, just like she and Murat talked about as he died at the hospital. The End.

Along the way, we got all the little extras that Turksploitation fans have come to expect, like scene changes so abrupt they cut characters off in mid-sentence and an uneven tone that can jump from a gang rape one moment to slapstick, inept police antics backed by clownish music the next. Weird.