Onar Films is a small company from Greece that specializes on Turkish genre cinema. They release a limited number of copies of each title, numbering each on the back cover. Their latest releases are limited to only 500 copies, such as this film - Kadın düşmanı aka Woman Despiser. This film from 1967 often refereed to as a "Turkish giallo", although Italian gialli were just starting to become popular in Italy, peaking with Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in 1969. The stylish slasher have some distant similarities with Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace, but is totally original for the times it was made. The first 10 minutes are almost without any dialogue and features two gruesome murders of Turkish beauties, featuring a killer who has fondness for Halloween masks and necrophilia. Unfortunately, working with Turkish cinema can be a problem - they don't have a preservation of older films and locating good quality print is sometimes very hard. With what they had to work with for this release, Onar Films did an excellent job. The most likely only surviving print didn't go through costly restoration, but progressive transfer is watchable. There are lots of marks on the print and some damage, one scene has some alignment issue that is corrected after 30 seconds (see last capture), but once again, we should feel lucky this title survives at all - many Turkish films from that era no longer exist, monochrome prints were melted down to extract silver and original negative prints are non-existent.

The sound is adequate and English translation is very well made and easy to read. At one scene, there is a 2-seconds snippet of Four Tops singing "Reach Out I'll Be There" on a radio. As usual for Omar Films, they provided some interesting extras with this film - an 11-minute 3rd part of a documentary about Turkish Fantastic Cinema, with some clips from other films and talking heads of people working in the Turkish film industry. (Part 1 is on their "Kizil tug Cengiz han" disc and part 2 is on "Korkusuz Kaptan Swing") Also included on the disc are a photogallery, trailers for 4 other Onar Films DVDs, and several text screens of biographies-filmographies for the director Ilhan Engin and film's star Ekrem Bora. There is also a two-page insert with a reproduction of the film's original poster (similar to the image on the cover). This film is recommended for those who love fantastic cinema and think they have seen everything there is to see. DVD is recommended with some reservations, but Onar Films should be applauded to their efforts to bring Turkish cinema into the digital medium with such love and dedication. Check out the trailer on YouTube and decide for yourself if you may enjoy it HERE. 

  - Gregory Meshman