Satans Four bandits, led by brutal Kemal, break into the peasant house, hiding from police persecution. Having spent the night at the expense of a good-natured old man-owner, in the morning Kemal’s associates brutally deal with him, and his underage daughter Zerrin is raped. After a while, a beautiful girl Aisel appears in Istanbul, whose only goal in life is revenge against rapists.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s reform policies had a tremendously beneficial impact on Turkish society throughout the 20th century and by the 70s, Turkey was even more secular than it is now. The desire for Western standards and European values of life, the careful eradication of radical Islamic currents from society, the policy of containment and balances in society, of course, could not but affect Turkish cinema, which in the 70s also swept the world eroticization. And, although the then Turkish cinema was not widely available and remained purely local, the Turkish cinema of the 70s masterfully absorbed the main trends of the “erotic 70s” with their frankness, uncensorship, sometimes turning into pornography, and grand house cruelty.
One of the last sensual sighs of the Turkish erotic grindhouse was the 1979 film directed by Naki Jurter “Revenge of a Woman”, which is a remake of the cult ravenge “Woman’s Day” by Meir Zarki in 1978. Literally following the plot tropes of the original American film, the film by Nucky Jurter still looks much more modest. Modest – since the scenes of rape and sex in general in the film of Jurter pull more on light eroticism than on going beyond reasonable pornography, and the righteous revenge of the main character is not able to cause shock to the viewer, because the imagination of the screenwriter Recep Filiz clearly had time to dry up on erotic scenes, so lovers of sadism catch in the Turkish version of “Woman’s Day” simply nothing. The film is not boring, because its laconic timekeeping in a little more than 50 minutes does not allow the viewer to get bored. There are no scenes that are too long and do not carry any semantic load, and all the events in the film are compressed to the bottom and presented to the viewer in a concentrated form to the accompaniment of a very rhythmic and melodic soundtrack.
As in the film of Meir Zarki, in the Turkish remake, a clear directorial position is tangible, expressed in the human right to fair justice, and in its obvious absence, to revenge. For in fact deeply patriarchal Turkey, the idea of women’s revenge on the representatives of the stronger sex, who were exposed in the film entirely either sadists or fools, was bold and essentially revisionist in spirit, and Naki Jurter, as one of the representatives of the new Turkish cinema of that time, expressed this idea most loudly. However, after a while, everything returned to the patriarchal circles of its own and the Turkish grindhouse, which regularly challenged society, disappeared with the end of the 70s and altogether, like many of its directors, who remained in obscurity, and now completely forgotten. Also, it is impossible not to mention the rather tolerant, given the pristine rootlessness of the picture, the level of acting in it, but especially successful and convincing in the artistic structure of the tape are the characters of actress Zerrin Doan (aka Zerrin, she is Aisel), the main sex symbol of that freedom-loving time, actor Kazim Kartal, who brilliantly played the sinister Kemal and the secondary hero of Sam Eser.
So, “Woman’s Revenge” is a rare and slightly exotic film, the Turkish version of “Woman’s Day” by Meir Zarki and Co., which looks like a rather modest copy of the original, but for the Muslim state of the period of the 70s, which is openly provocative and scandalous product. The moral is the same as in the tape of Meir Zarkey, only served to the viewer in an unusual shell. Fans of film rarities and non-standard grindhouse for mandatory viewing of the film are recommended.