Honourable Mentions: the Hunt for Vlad the Impaler

This is a 2018 Turkish film, originally entitled Deliler, and directed by Osman Kaya. Probably the most infuriating aspect of the UK release is that it is dubbed – and very badly dubbed too. This obfuscates any level of acting under the horrible dub and brings back memories of older dubbed movies, when bad dubbing was the only thing you got. Why on Earth this couldn’t have shipped with the original Turkish dialogue and subs is beyond me – except that such an aesthetic didn’t fit with it being sold as an action adventure.

The other thing to note, from a TMtV point of view, is that the film has absolutely no vampire aspect to it whatsoever. This is refreshing, but I have included it here because of the inextricable link that has been developed between Vlad Ţepeş and vampires.

deliler

So, the other thing to note is that whilst Vlad is often depicted as bad or perhaps a necessary evil, though to be fair this is not always the case and sometimes he is definitely heroic, here he is unquestionably the villain and the Turks are clearly the good guys. This takes us to the title (in Turkish). The Deliler were an Ottoman light cavalry unit, formed in the mid-15th Century, that were used as shock troops and often deployed in the Balkan region.

as children

The film starts with a voiceover that describes how the Ottomans were a force for justice against cruelty and then describes how Vlad II surrendered two sons to the Ottomans (Radu is ignored through the rest of the film) and shows Vlad (played young by Berkecan Akkaya and adult by Erkan Petekkaya) and Mehmed (I’m not sure who plays him young but played as an adult by Ruzgar Aksoy) and it becomes clear that, even as a child, Vlad is a wrong-un and, within the sequence, we see him casually crush a songbird.

nailing the turban

This childhood cruel streak manifests into his adulthood and, of course, there are impalements but we also get a sequence where a messenger attends Vlad’s court to give him the message that the Sultan will give him one last chance to forgo his cruel ways but Vlad, instead, becomes offended at the fact that the messenger refuses to remove his turban and so nails it to his head (hammering it in himself). Mehmed has clearly had enough.

deliler leader

He consults Father Sultan (Yetkin Dikinciler), who appears to be some form of mystic – the exact nature of this and the relationship is never fully established and perhaps I am missing a bit due to cultural ignorance. However, it is Father Sultan who summons the seven members of the deliler (or six and an apprentice on his first mission) and sends them out to go and stop Vlad. The leader of the deliler wears large wings and this is authentic, an affectation that I guess was meant to cause fear in the warrior’s enemies.

Erkan Petekkaya as Vlad

Meanwhile Vlad is being dismissive of any other power (so he refuses a crown sent by the Pope, for instance) and his wife/consort, Elizabetha (Gülsah Sahin) seems frustrated by this and there is an unspoken implication that she is an agent of Rome but that isn’t explored. Vlad actually gets to the point of calling himself the Son of God. He also has an alchemist working up a biological weapon of rats infected with “red moss plague”, which he intends to deploy against Constantinople.

battle scenes

The film lays on the Ottomans as the good guys quite thickly with gypsy caravans and rescued locals alike declaring that they have a friend in the Ottomans. Yet this probably only feels thickly laid on because the normal Western trope is to label the Ottomans as the bad guys and it was actually rather refreshing to look at this through the other lens. Unfortunately, the story was a tad confused and, as I mentioned, the dubbing horrible. The battle scenes were fun enough – though, in the final battle, the fact that an exploding haystack seemed to be positioned behind any participant making a killing blow or battle pose was an aesthetic too far.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK