Director: Natuk Bayta
Screenplay: Duygu Sagiroglu
Starring: Cüneyt Arkin, Bahar Erdeniz, Yildirim Gencer
Year: 1975, 2020
Duration: 88min, 80min
Country: Turkey/USA
BBFC Certification: 15 (The Sword and the Claw) 18 (The AGFA Horror Film Show)
You’ll always be able to rehome a cute kitten. But what about an ageing tom, blind in one eye, violent, reeking and seeping from its infected bladder? To be clear: a new restoration of Citizen Kane? Thousands prepare their shelves, parting the plastic clinch of Cinema Paradiso and City Lights in giddy anticipation. A Blu-ray release of 1971’s gay psychopath shlockfest, Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things? A cruel collecting world stands guard before Sorcerer and Spirits of the Dead, armed with bleach and snobbery. When will the world learn? There’s beauty in the gutter too. All praise Texan trashophiles, The American Genre Film Archive, preserving and preening these cinematic strays so that those of us with wipe-clean sofas can tickle them behind their rancid, crispy ears.
This week sees the release of two new discs from AGFA’s UK distributor, 101 Films and, as always, they’re a joyful window into other worlds.
Sword and Claw (1975) is a Tarzan-esque Turkish delight featuring Cüneyt Arkın, a shining chunk of mahogany muscle who dominated Turkish action cinema throughout the seventies. A doctor who gave up his practice for the silver screen, Arkın trained for six months at the Medrano Circus in Istanbul learning acrobatics and horse-riding, skills that gave him a long and prolific career (and frequent visits to hospital as he performed all his own stunts). Here he is Lion Man, the abandoned baby of a slaughtered king, reared by lions – and perhaps frogs at the weekend given how high he frequently leaps. Few can survive a cuff from this growling hunk’s paw, especially not a goat who falls victim to his clawed hands – entirely offscreen – offering up two pieces of entirely bloodless raw meat which he shares with his feline family.
Naturally Lion Man will be drawn into the battle against the new King, avenging his family and pouncing from one perilous brawl to another. Perhaps ‘loping’ is a better word than pouncing, the pace is as uncertain as the plotting.
The film is nonsense, of course, badly re-scored from library tracks and dubbed with performances that range from delirious to listless. Still, the charm, effort and conviction carries us through and, as with all AGFA releases, the joy is in experiencing something that has slipped through the cracks for many viewers. These are films to be experienced like dreams, with all the inconsistency, impossibility and sin a good night can muster. The print is as good-looking as you’d want it to be (there’s a fine line for presentations like this, clean it up too much and something is lost).
The disc comes with a 2k scan of Korean martial arts mess Brawl Busters which was screened theatrically alongside Sword and Claw during a brief run in America in the early eighties. Not as charming as the main feature – and with far more print damage – it’s nonetheless a brilliantly dissonant and drunken slice of hysteria that, alongside a handful of trailers, brings considerable value to the release.
Also out this week is The AGFA Horror Trailer Show, a feast of delirium. A butcher’s shop drain of obscure trailers and drive-in adverts, sewn together into a feature-length mixtape that drags the viewer through the discarded popcorn cartons, cigarette-ends and bodily fluids of the drive-in. From Nightmare Weekend (“When Horrifying Humans Team Up With Terrifying Technology”, a tagline that could well be AGFA’s motto) to Old Dracula (or Vampira as it was known until Young Frankenstein turned a buck) with countless stops in-between, it’s an enjoyable ride. A meat raffle in a Ghost Train perhaps. In an exercise that could so easily have been all foreplay, the skilful curation and editing provide a viewing experience that’s fun, nostalgic and rich with the razzle-dazzle of exploitation cinema at its most brazen.
Special features offer a commentary from the team at AGFA discussing how the show was put together as well as two further exercises in AGFA archeology: Videorage, another feature-length mixtape, this time concentrating on video-shot titles and Say Goodbye to Your Brain a six-minute, fast-cut ‘experiment’.
The AGFA collection is an eclectic and vibrant look at outsider cinema. Thrilling, shocking, terrible and sublime, usually all on the same disc. These discs are no exception. The first should be filed between Sweet Smell of Success and Sunday Bloody Sunday, the second between L’Age D’Or and Altered States.
