Two crime scenes, one formula
Every vigilante thriller runs on the same three ingredients: a decent man, an unpunished crime, and a city that stops asking questions once the body count starts climbing. Death Wish (2018) plants that formula in Chicago, where trauma surgeon Paul Kersey — a healer by trade, per his job description in the film — turns hunter after a home invasion destroys his family. Bruce Willis carries the role with his trademark weary stoicism, under Eli Roth's blood-soaked direction.
The Executioner (1975), directed by Memduh Ün, plants the same seed in Istanbul: an ordinary office clerk, an assault that shatters his wife and daughter, and a slow transformation into the stranger the police can't quite catch. Same wound, same grim arithmetic, different call to prayer in the background.
The 43-year head start
Here's where the Mockbusters.tv house joke kicks in — and let's be crystal clear, it is a joke, not film history: we like to pretend our catalog of scrappy, regionally-shot genre pictures are the true originals, quietly ripped off decades later by Hollywood's much fatter budgets. It's a bit, a running gag, a way of tipping our hat to the unsung labor of B-movie crews. Nobody in this newsroom is claiming Eli Roth watched a 1975 Turkish drama shot-for-shot before pitching his remake to Bruce Willis.
But the numbers do make the bit land awfully well. The Executioner arrived in 1975; as we know it here didn't hit screens until . That's a 43-year gap — long enough for the "copy" to be shot, edited, and released well after its supposed "original" had already aged into a cult curiosity. If satire needs a straight face, this timeline hands us one for free.
