What: 3 Dev Adam (“Three Giant Men”), a.k.a. Turkish Spider-Man vs. Captain Turkish America, a 1973 Turkish film featuring the long-awaited team-up of Captain America and Mexican lucha wrestler Santo against a surprisingly evil and overweight Spider-Man. Here it is in its entirety, without the burden of subtitles:
Why: 3 Dev Adam starts the way most Spider-Man films do: with your Friendly Neighborhood Wall-Crawler burying a woman neck-deep in sand and then killing her with a motorboat propeller. This brings Captain America and Santo flying in from North America to stop him from… well, doing that again. This Spider-Man is an Istanbul art thief with giant eyebrows, who likes stabbing people with switchblades and strangling people in the shower. This has to stop, so Captain America and Santo split up to find him. Santo stuffs things in his pants and fights martial artists in a dojo, while Captain America hangs upside-down and cat-slaps his foes. Finally Cap and Santo kill Spider-Man… but wait! One of Spider-Man’s only powers is to regenerate instantly from death. This happens again and again, until our heroes trap him in a set of train tracks and run over his head with a cart full of cinderblocks. That squashes the Spider dead. Turkish justice is served.
Impact: Fresh off their success with Turist Ömer Uzay Yolunda, in which the USS Enterprise picks up a Turkish hobo, the production company Renkli joined three of North America’s greatest heroes in 3 Dev Adam. Stunningly, 3 Dev Adam was the very last time Captain America and Santo teamed up against Spider-Man. Meanwhile, Captain America portrayer Aytekin Akkaya did not fade into obscurity. Instead, he stole the show as the leader of the Sand People in the 1983 blockbuster Yor, The Hunter from the Future. Attention Chris Evans: Keep it up, and this can happen to you!
Personal Connection: As the developer of six Marvel games to date, it falls to me to be aware of all the continuity concerning the Marvel Universe throughout its eighty-plus years of storytelling. So when you ask “Which Marvel superhero is known for sending a pair of guinea pigs through a tube to eat his victim’s eyeballs?” I can confidently say “Why, that’s Spider-Man!” It’s just one of the handy services I provide.
Other Contenders: Roger Corman’s emotional take on the Fantastic Four; Killer Condom, the Troma film based on a German comic about carnivorous prophylactics; Halle Berry’s bold reimagining of a comic book legend in Catwoman; George Lucas’s epic Howard the Duck, in which you will believe a duck can’t fly.