Now I don’t want to come all over Radio 4, (that
would be a bit messy), but our next movie is subtitled. At last, a bit of
culture in 'Colin and Wes Watch 100 Bad Movies', I hear you cry. ‘Indeed’, I reply,
but this is me and I’m afraid I’m not so much Mark Kermode, but more like Mark
Commode. Therefore the
smutty humour will probably still come out.
Our next film is the Turkish ‘comedy’: 'Keloglan
vs The Black Prince' (2006). Regular readers of our blogs will know that if we
can’t find the movie we are supposed to watch on our list, then we have to
watch 2 films from our back up list as punishment and yet again, there was a
real possibility we would have to go to the ‘subs bench’. This proved more
difficult to find than Tesco’s accountants.
With the fear of an Adam Sandler double bill beckoning, we decided we would have to search beyond our street, outside of our town, heck we were even prepared to go out of our county. And to much relief find it we did......in Turkey! (Well OK, we didn't go to Turkey. Amazon did that bit for us).
Success! And so we settled down for an evening of subtitled, high-brow
entertainment. We put on our smoking
jackets, ironed our copy of The Times and poured out a nice brandy……
Someone farted and I chuckled…….
Set in a Fairytale land, Keloglan, (Mehmet Ali Erbil), is trying to
win the hand of the Princess, (I’m not sure what’s wrong with the rest of her).
He starts the movie with long blonde hair and is not called Keloglan in an
attempt to confuse me. He is called something else which sounded hard to spell (and
which the subtitles suggested meant Goldilocks). Keloglan means ‘bald man’, so
you can probably guess what happens to our hero early on in the movie,
(nevertheless, I’ll refer to him as Keloglan throughout as it’s easier and less
letters to type than the other name).
Keloglan feels that in order to woo the Princess,
he must do something elaborate and so he asks the Sultan for tasks in order to
prove his worth. The Sultan does not seem all that bothered as Keloglan's luscious
blond hair is enough evidence of his great potential, (To be honest, I
think the Sultan just wants shot of her and would give the Princess away for
free in every box of Cheerios).
A disappointed Keloglan goes for a walk and as
luck would have it, stumbles upon the Princess who is being attacked by a
dragon. Realising this is the chance to prove himself, he sets about trying to
defeat the dragon, but is stopped in his tracks by the Black Prince, (Ozcan Deniz).
The Black Prince is a handsome, (so I’m told),
but evil man. After a little rant about
how great he is and how Keloglan is not, he turns around to save the Princess
and promptly knocks himself out on a tree branch.
Seizing his opportunity, Keloglan grabs the Black
Prince’s sword and cuts off the dragon’s head. The Princess is grateful and is
about to pucker up and plant one on him when she suddenly remembers that this
particular dragon has 2 heads. A shocked Keloglan turns around to see the other
head, which is launching some nice hot fire in the direction of his hair.
Keloglan, hair on fire, dunks his head in a nearby pond, but it’s too late and
he becomes Keloglan: the bald man.
Now he’s a slaphead, the Sultan decides that
Keloglan should maybe prove himself after all and sets Keloglan task after task
since the singed bonce incident. The latest challenge is to get a belt of a
giant (!?), Unperturbed, Keloglan
sets off on the task with a Jack Sparrow lookalike, (although he’s less Pirates
of the Caribbean and more Pirates of the Caribbean: On Strangers Tides).
Meanwhile, we get a background story as to why
The Black Prince is such a meany. He is pissed off that all the goodies in
Fairytale Land get a book with them as the main star and he doesn’t have a single
book, not a sausage. He finds
inspiration in Robin Hood, a baddie, (erm, no he wasn’t, he was the ultimate
goodie!), who had many books written about him.
He reckons that if he manages to get it on with The Princess, the story
writers will be flocking to write books about him.
Back to Keloglan and joining him and Jack Sparrow
is a man who suspiciously looks like a woman with a tash sellotaped to her
upper lip. This is because she is and it
turns out she rather likes Keloglan and is trying to woo him and convince him
to forget about the Princess, (I don’t remember her name, so I’ll call her Bob,
(short for Kate), in honour of the Blackadder character this whole thing
reminds me off).
Keloglan, Jack and Bob come up with a plan to
hire an actress as the giant. They will
then blu-tac a false beard to her, (Bob has a vast collection for some reason),
wheel her to the Sultan and be married to the Princess in time for Emmerdale.
The plan works and the Sultan gives his blessing
to Keloglan to marry the Princess who is now doing her best Queen Victoria
impression, (she is not amused). The
Black Prince is having none of it and suspecting that the tale of how they got
this giant is as fishy as a mermaid’s wet bits, finds his own giant and takes him
to the castle.
Keloglan’s plan unravels as the Black Prince’s
giant is actually the giant actress’s boyfriend! Recognising her fella, the beard falls down,
(ooer), all is revealed, (double ooer) and Keloglan loses the princess to the
Black Prince.
Does Keloglan give up, oh I really wish he did,
but by Jiminy he carries on prolonging the agony of this movie and engages in a
sword fight with The Black Prince during the pre-wedding reception, (The Black
Prince is annoyed, he wanted a toastie sandwich maker).
Keloglan loses and the Black Prince gets the
Princess and it looks like Keloglan has lost.
However, he realises that the Princess is not a ‘goodie’ but is bad and
that the Princess was never his real true love.
This pisses the Black Prince of a bit because now that he has a ‘baddie’
Princess, the book will not be written about him.
Keloglan gives Bob a smackeroo and his hair grows
back. It turns out his true love was a girl
in a moustache all along……..and they all lived happily ever after!
I was brought up with the advice ‘if you can’t
say something nice, don’t say anything at all’.
So thanks for reading my blog, see you on the next movie…..
That off course was a joke, which means that I
have a least one more joke in my blog than Keloglan manages throughout the
entire movie. Keloglan fell into the old
trap we are seeing on our bad movies list, of being a comedy movie, that is
completely devoid of comedy.
As I sit here trying to review this laughless
film, I am questioning whether I have not found this funny due to a cultural thing? Did the gags get lost in translation,
(remember, this was in Turkish and so I had to watch the movie with English
subtitles)? The answer, I believe, is
no. The reason is that this is a movie
largely relient on slapstick comedy and is therefore visual, language should
have been no barrier.
The truth is that this movie is like the top of Keloglan’s
head, there’s nothing there. The gags
are very much of the ‘Meet The Spartans’ or ‘Epic Movie’ genre and like these
films, they are lame, not clever and above all, not funny; The CGI has been
borrowed from the SyFy channel and sometimes it looks OK, but they just add to the
already cheap feeling of the movie; and the script was so sparse, that actually
we did not need subtitles after all.
At the end of the day, I actually quite liked the
idea of the baddies in Fairytale Land trying to get the books written about
them and being jealous of the goodies. I
feel that this has potential but has been poorly executed by this movie.
This land of Fairytale and their traditional
characters, will obviously bring on comparisons to movies such as Shrek. In fact in many ways, this movie is exactly
like Shrek. Unfortunately it is more Shrek:
The Third, (a truly awful version of the franchise).
Therefore my advice is to avoid this movie, which
if you live in the UK is nice and easy as it is not on general release. If you do go against my warning, however, be
aware: This is not a Fairytale, it’s more like a nightmare.
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