Admittedly, 1983's Turkish thriller Col (Desert) is primarily a revenge vehicle for its brawny lead, veteran action star Cuneyt Arkin. But it's included here because of a scene in which Arkin battles a shark. Arkin, who plays a hired killer, betrays his old bosses and is beaten and left to die in the ocean. While struggling to regain consciousness, he is attacked by what we are asked to believe is a hungry shark, but appears instead to be a large plastic or fiberglass shark model with a stiff but ever-flapping maw (it's reminiscent of the Ideal Toy Company's "Game of Jaws" from 1975), reportedly operated by director Cetin Inanc. Then, to the unauthorized strains of John Williams' score for Jaws, Arkin finds a knife and stabs his rigid opponent, sending it to a watery grave.
The rest of the movie is concerned with Arkin's revenge, but for one brief and hallucinatory moment, it's the best man-vs.-toy-shark scene ever, and why the film is known as Turkish Jaws in English-speaking cult movie circles. And in case you're wondering why the movie is called Desert: according to popular legend, the film's original title was Blue Desert – a reference, one assumes to the vast openness of the ocean — but the printer tasked with creating the one-sheet allegedly didn't understand the title, and simply shortened it to Col. Which makes even less sense, as there's no desert in the picture.
