A tediously wacky spoof that sends up Star Wars and The Fifth Element (ooh, daring), G.O.R.A. finds a gobby Turkish carpet salesman (Cem Yilmaz) abducted by ETs. With effeminate robots, lightsabers and a villain who looks like a Klingon crossed with Richard E Grant, it's got fewer laughs than Mel Brooks's tumbleweed blower Spaceballs. Beam us up, beam us down but beam us anywhere but here.
A long time ago in a country far, far away (well, Turkey in 1982 to be exact), a group of nutty filmmakers decided to create a movie that became known as "Turkish Star Wars". Recycling clips from George Lucas's space opera epic with some homemade film footage featuring Turkish actors and plywood special effects, the result was a goofy, copyright-infringing comedy mess. Twenty-two years later this lame parody tries to follow in its footsteps with some state-of-the-art Turkish CGI and a comic turn from writer/star Yilmaz as a Brylcreemed, cocksure salesman sent off to the planet Gora.
"THE GAGS COME WITH THEIR OWN COBWEBS"
Lots of chatter about The Force and a man dressed as The Emperor from Star Wars are the extent of the Hot Shots style spoofery, as Yilmaz goes through his wheeler-dealer comic shtick (imagine the Turkish answer to Del Boy). The gags come with their own cobwebs: depressingly homophobic humour, a blue-faced alien who looks like Bernard Manning (is there a connection there?) and a "Rastafarian" Turkish bar owner called Bob Marley Faruk. It's tedious, pointless and about as entertaining as a cholera outbreak. And at 128 minutes it's a real star trek.
In Turkish with English subtitles
G.O.R.A. (2004)
