*Originally published on 8/5/10
You might recall a while back, I wrote a quick review of a film that audiences have dubbed "Turkish Star Wars". It was one of the most incoherent, poorly made messes of a film that I have ever had the displeasure of watching. When it comes to media so abysmally bad that you can feel your sanity start to slip as you experience it, you know that you've hit an all time low. Movies like Transformers 2 and Catwoman were so terrible they caused you physical pain, but you could get through it with your mind intact. Not so with the foreign film, which, as mentioned before, blatantly steals footage from Star Wars: A New Hope to pad out it's "plot".
I recently stumbled upon the film's literary equivalent, a piece of Harry Potter fan-fiction called "My Immortal". While it starts off as such, it gradually devolves into something beyond words. All of the characters take on drastically different personalities, heck most of them even go by different names by the end of it all.
People give works like Twilight or The Da Vinci Code flak for sub-par writing, but this is on a different level entirely. The grammar is atrocious, all of the characters names are spelled wrong and that's just scraping the surface. I told my roommate about the story after I read it. He made it two chapters before having to give up.
When pit against each other, it really is a tough decision trying to think of which one is worse. Turkish Star Wars was cheap, lazy, and it's guilty of blatant copyright infringement. My Immortal is a badly written piece of dreck that starts off terrible and only gets worse.
Yes, as bad as the story is from the beginning, it gets worse. One of the fan theories is that the author was a troll who started it as a joke, but that the story wore away at her sanity to the point where she was no longer coherent. I don't know why I love the idea of an author being driven insane by his or her own work, but I do.
As far as incoherence goes, I didn't think you could top "Turkish Star Wars". There was no story, no characters and things just randomly popped out of nowhere every five minutes. Nothing about it made any sense. Shockingly, My Immortal gives the movie a run for its money in this department. It really is uncanny.
Honestly, you're better off avoiding both of them. The only good that comes from watching this movie, or reading this fan-fic is that you become immune to the mind breaking effect of looking at Cthulu. Really, after seeing stuff like this, a giant squid monster from another dimension just doesn't seem as scary. It certainly isn't enough to drive you insane. In fact, if Cthulu were to read this story, I think he would be driven mad.
The good thing about movies is that you can kind of zone out and ignore the horror that is unfolding before your eyes. Reading, by its very nature, relies on you staying focused. As such, My Immortal is a much bigger chore to sit through as you kind of have to keep your brain turned on. Sure, you can scroll and skim, but if you're going to do that, you might as well just move on to a different page.
Of course, comparing a terribly written fan-fiction to a crappy foreign film is like comparing a rotten apple to sour grapes. They're so different, and both so bad that you're better off just saying no to both.
Even if you're a glutton for punishment like I am when it comes to this sort of thing, do not; I repeat DO NOT try to go through both of these in one day. After watching "Turkish Star Wars", I needed to take the rest of the day off to recover and "My Immortal" is an affront to all that is good and pure. To try and endure the pain and suffering that both hurl at you in one sitting is asking to be driven to the furthest outlier of madness.
Another thing to consider is that sitting through movies or literature this bad actually does become physically draining. Much like exercise, over extending yourself and trying to take on more than you can handle can have dire consequences.
While I recommend staying away from both, if you have to pick, I gotta say you should go with the movie. It's taxing on your sanity, to be sure, but you can zone out and shut off your brain as a defense mechanism; reading a novel sized fan-fic doesn't grant you that luxury. Also, while the movie feels like it's five hours long, it's really only ninety minutes. It will certainly take you a lot longer than that to read the aforementioned story as it is quite lengthy.
You can watch Turkish Star Wars here https://archive.org/details/TheManWhoSavedTheWorldturkishStarWars1982
You can read My Immortal here http://myimmortalrehost.webs.com/chapters122.htm
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