User Reviews

Here's a Turkish oddity about "the Phantom", the popular comic book strip hero created by Lee Falk, which goes out of its way to imitate the American serials of the 1940s - right down to being filmed in black and white (yes, I don't know why they call a film THE RED MASK and film it in black and white either, but there you go!). Actually this has pretty good production values for a Turkish movie, but you know straight away the film comes from Turkey when the opening theme is a direct rip-off of the James Bond theme tune! Although an action-adventure film at heart, there's a touch of the silly, over-the-top comic relief so beloved of Turkish movies for whose who like that sort of thing and even a bit of nightclub dancing, although for the most part it's wall-to-wall action - not that there's anything wrong with that. The often frenetic pacing is boosted by a full-bodied score which helps to add to the old-fashioned thrills.

There's plenty going on here to be enjoyed, including numerous energetic, high-spirited fisticuffs between our Phantom hero and his friends and various gangsters and hoods (the fights are of the "biff! whack! punch!" variety and pretty well staged - aside from the overbearing music that is, which is suddenly turned up a hundred decibels to enhance the on screen excitement). Add to this explosions, gun fights, a strange fungus thing that grows at an alarming rate in a dish (no, I don't know what the heck it was either, the film being in Turkish language, but the special effect is startling!), a rooftop fight ending in a bad guy falling screaming to his death, and a cool grinning bearded guy in a black vest who wanders around and beats up the bad guys and you have the makings of a fun film. If only Turkish film stock was of a little better quality this would look as good as the serials it resembles, but in any case the action sequences are just as much fun.

This is not the only remake of Lee Falk's The Phantom that was made in Turkey. This version is Red Mask, which basically gives you a Street Fighter-style palette swap of the Ghost Who Walks. There's also another Kizil maske that came out that very same year directed by Çetin Inanç. You can tell the difference because the former movie has a ripoff of the James Bond theme while the latter takes the Secret Agent Man theme. There's also the 1971 movie Kizil Maske'nin Intikami (The Phantom's Revenge).

The second Inanç-directed film also has a bad guy who looks like a Klan member with lightning bolts all over his hood and a Phantom that doesn't even try to disguise that he's completely taking the look and not caring about intellectual property. Actually, I kid, he has on a rad leather jacket and kind of looks like Dominic Fortune and there you go, that's a reference that proves why I do a small website and am not shared out by the film Twitter universe just yet.

Also, all of these Turkish films are way better than the Billy Zane movie, which I refer to as Slam Evil! Instead of its real title.

According to How the World Remade Hollywood by Ed Glaser, I learned that the Phantom was a big deal in Turkey. While he's purple in the U. S., he was originally intended to be grey. To make things somewhat confusing, in other counties, the Ghost Who Walks shows up in different colors: blue in Scandanavia, green in Australia and red in Turkey. Hence the title of this film.

And if you're wondering where those hooded bad guys come from in the Çetin Inanç-directed movie, Inanç's former boss was Yilmaz Atadniz, who directed Kilink: Soy ve Oldur. That's the very footage these characters are cut and pasted from before we get to the movie's main villains, "Al Capone" Arif and Fu Manchu. An Arabian Fu Manchu at that.