- Directed by Can Evrenol
- Written by Ogulcan Ereb Akay, Can Evrenol, Ercin Sadikoglu
- Stars Mehmet Cerrahoglu, Gorken Kasal, Ergun Kuyucu
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 37 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9SfWmXQY3o
Spoiler-free Judgment Zone
This starts out nice and calm with a group of police in Turkey hanging out, eating, and having a good time. It builds slowly and goes to some really disturbing places. The visuals and cinematography are great. If you want an unsettling watch, we recommend it.
Spoilery Synopsis
A little boy hears his mother moaning in her bedroom– it sounds painful, so he goes to watch TV. A weird, bloody hand reaches for him. He bangs on his mother’s door, but the hand gets him. Credits roll.
We cut to a police van sitting outside a building. A man wearing a raggy cloak walks in carrying a bucket of meat. Five policemen are inside eating dinner. The bucket man brings the cook some strange-looking meat. The policemen brag about which animals they’ve had sex with, and it’s not clear whether they are all joking or not.
Seyfi, one of the cops, goes into the restroom to be sick while the others try to cause trouble with the cook’s son. Something terrible happens to the man in the restroom, or maybe he’s just going crazy, the police can’t decide. It’s probably just claustrophobia. Seyfi soon recovers, and the five men drive away. We then have a… musical number as they all sing in the van along with the radio.
Eventually, they get an actual police call on the radio and reply that they’ll check it out. Seyfi says he’s heard lots of bad stories about this place ever since he was a child. Suddenly, a naked man runs across the road, and they all get out to look for him. They do find hundreds and hundreds of frogs. They get back in the van and drive on– until they hit something else and crash off the road into water.
We cut back to earlier, in the restaurant, the men talk calmly. The youngest cop, Arda, tells the oldest cop, Remzi, about a childhood friend who saw his father’s soul leaving the body. He was the little boy in the pre-credit sequence. That was all just a dream, but it turns out his friend had been killed by a car that very night. Remzi says to look around; they’re the only ones in the place, and everything gets very strange. It starts raining blood inside the place. He falls backward into the water and wakes up being pulled out of the van, which drove into the river.
Suddenly, a giant of a man appears with a lantern and guides them all back up to the road. The man’s family is there, and they all have buckets of frogs. The cops still don’t know who or what they hit, and they all panic a little bit. The family tells the cops that the place they were headed to is right through the trees. They insist on being shown the way.
The group walks to a big old house, and there’s already a police car there. It was a police station back in the Ottoman days, and then it was a stable; it’s abandoned now. Seyfi starts getting claustrophobic (or whatever it is) again, and Ramzi calms him down. Their guide bails on them, running back through the woods.
They go inside the huge dark building and start searching for the other police. They find one of them who was there earlier, banging his head against the wall. The man is too shaken up to speak, but he does point into the next room. Seyfi follows some frogs and finds a bunch of people chained up in bondage gear, and they attack him.
The other cops go downstairs and find lots of strange ritual things and drawings. Apo finds people chained up and in cages, while Arda finds a freaky butcher. All the men soon find themselves running through caves, being chased by naked animal-people.
We cut back to Remzi and Arda sitting in the restaurant. Remzi admits that he used to see these creatures when he was little, and that this has been going on for a long time.
All the cops wake up in a dungeon, chained to the walls. There’s some kind of bloody orgy ritual going on. There are a lot of people here. Their leader finally comes in, and everything gets quiet. He welcomes them cheerfully; he’s “Father,” and he proselytizes that, “Hell is not a place you go; You carry Hell with you at all times. You carry it within you. “
Father then reaches into Apo’s slit-open stomach and disembowels him. He’s basically a cult leader, and these weird, twisted people are his followers. Yavuz is next, and Father pokes his eyes out– deeply.
Father’s creepy assistant opens a door and a woman wearing a goat mask crawls out. Maybe it’s a mask. They make now-blind Yavuz have sex with her. Yavuz keels over, and a tarantula crawls out of his mouth. Remzi simply gets his throat cut, and this leaves only Arda.
Somehow, Arda gets loose and beats Father to death with his step stool. Arda makes his way back outside, laughing all the while. He runs down the road in the dark
We get a flashback to the pre-credit scene with young Arda and then he gets hit by his own police van– it’s some kind of time loop.
Commentary
Next time I’m vacationing in Turkey, remind me not to call the police. “Baskin” means “Incursion,” if you were wondering. This starts off fairly slow, but once it gets going, it’s way off the rails.
The cameraman earned his pay on this one; the cinematography is excellent, with many interesting viewpoints and perspectives. Father is one of the creepiest movie monsters ever, simply because he really looks like that– minimal makeup and prosthetics were used. And he’s very calm and righteous in his gruesome rituals.
It’s very, very weird.