SOME MOVIES are so bad they're good. And some movies are so bad they pass through being good and go back to being bad. The Man Who Saves the World (colloquially known as Turkish Star Wars) rolls over that particular odometer so many times it's hard to say where it ends up. The premise is great: Two schlubby space aces do Turkish judo on an army of skeletons, chicken-bears, and the occasional robot. There's an evil wizard and some blonde lady and a bunch of villagers who get killed by mummies. The Death Star shows up a few times. That all sounds fine on paper. The problem is that everything is written, filmed, and edited by crazy people.

Some moments are amusing cheese, but the majority is probably unwatchable, if not profoundly disturbing. Filmusik has done an admirable job then, in transmogrifying this Anatolian fever dream into an enjoyable 90 minutes of augmented cinema. Filmusik's shtick is to run the film silently and recreate the audio live: They pretty much fill the Hollywood Theatre stage with actors, an orchestra, and things to punch, and while the setup sounds clunky, it works. At a recent preview screening, voice acting was just good enough and just bad enough that I forgot it wasn't coming from the film. The sound effects were great and largely practical: boots and knives and coconuts for the horses. I asked one cast member why they had a cabbage, and she told me it was for "when the bear-things get their arms ripped off," which is totally a thing that happens. The score manages to thread together the disjointed narrative into a trippy audiovisual groove, sort of like Philip Glass' Koyaanisqatsi score, only with horse-riding skeletons. Turkish Star Wars is either so bad it's good, or just flat-out bad—but Filmusik's production of it is good.