One of the few advantages of yesterday's evening lecture fiasco was that its cancellation left me free to go and check out a free screening (in a bar in Sanlitun, arranged by the fine chaps from Koryo Tours) of this 'cult classic' - a rarely seen 1985 monster film from the DPRK, generally referred to, not surprisingly, as 'The Korean Godzilla'. I love the cheesiness of those Japanese rubber-suited monster films (most of them were shown on teatime TV during my late '70s childhood). And I've never seen any product of North Korean cinema before. So, how could I refuse?
The film is chiefly notable as being - ostensibly - the climactic achievement of director Shin Sang-ok's controversial stint of working in North Korea. Shin (who later moved to America, where he continued to direct under the name of Simon Sheen) was a South Korean film-maker who claimed that he - and his actress wife - had been kidnapped at the end of the 1970s on Kim Jung-il's orders, and brought to the North and forced to work for him there to try to raise standards in its fledgeling film industry. The couple finally managed to escape around the time this film was being finished, but Shin found himself widely disbelieved and vilified in his home country - hence his move to the States shortly thereafter. Hence also, perhaps, the elaboration of his claims about the amount of duress he and his wife had suffered, and his attempt to assert that he had only worked in a consultant/executive producer role and not actually directed anything for Kim himself. The North Koreans, I believe, maintain that Shin directed this (and several other propaganda pieces), although they acknowledge that some scenes and the post-production work were handled by a North Korean director after Shin's flight.
Yep, the background story is much more interesting than the film.
The film is, however, as with most of these monster romps, a damn good laugh - even if mostly unintentionally so.
As Simon Cockerell (of Koryo) said in his introductory remarks last night, "It was made in the 1980s, but looks like a 1960s film - which, actually, isn't bad for North Korea." Indeed not, given that even today most of country still looks as if has barely made it into the 1960s.
Outlining the plot is really not going to take anything away from anyone's potential enjoyment of this, but purists should be aware of possible SPOILERS below.
At an unspecified point in Korean history (looks like 1700s or 1800s to me - anyone know if this is inspired by actual events?) there is a peasant rebellion against an unjust governor and an uncaring king (well, I'm not sure if there were two characters or one, actually: the subtitles seemed to start off talking about the governor, but later on it was the king....). The king/governor orders his soldiers to confiscate all the peasants' farm implements, to melt them down for new weapons - thereby exacerbating the famine they are suffering. (Later, the rebels - having taken refuge in the hills without pausing to take any food with them - are reduced to making grass stew and peeling the bark off trees. This does all seem rather too uncomfortably prescient of the famine the DPRK has suffered in the past couple of decades, and of KJ's 'Army First' policy which has arguably made this even worse. However, I suppose this must be just a cruel cosmic irony. I suspect Mao's 'Great Leap Forward' was the intended reference.) The local blacksmith refuses to cooperate in this, and starves to death in prison. His dying act is to craft a tiny statuette of the mythical monster Pulgasari. Later, this statue comes to life when the blacksmith's daughter pricks her finger while sewing and drips some of her blood on to it. The little critter proves to have a voracious appetite - for metal. It grows very rapidly as it devours more and more iron, and soon it is a 60ft tall monster battling on behalf of the rebels. However, of course, this creates a dilemma for the rebel farmers - since their would-be salvation threatens to chomp up all of their cooking utensils and farm tools, just as the evil king's soldiers had been doing.
It is, thus, a pretty interesting allegory. I imagine that KJ intended it as a commentary on the ills of capitalism: yes, it might improve the lot of the peasants and help to displace feudalism, but its relentless appetite for raw materials would lead to colonialism and international wars, and eventually engender its own destruction. A nice enough thesis - except that it is industrialization rather than capitalism that creates the appetite for raw materials, and communist regimes have proven just as likely as capitalist ones to pursue aggressive colonialist/expansionist foreign policies. A rather muddled and unconvincing metaphor, I fear.
The overall look and feel of this is rather like a Hammer Horror film - a bit creaky at the seams, but not too badly done. And with just a bit of Hong Kong wushu cinema thrown in too. Oh, and Godzilla, of course (it is indeed the wonderfully-named Satsuma Kenpachiro - who played Godzilla and a number of similar monsters in most of those Japanese classics of the genre - stepping into the rubber suit once more). There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of extras in some of the battle scenes - so, at times, there is almost an epic sweep to the thing; unfortunately, these scenes are not very well staged, and most of the combatants seem to be charging around aimlessly rather than actually fighting. Also, the special effects are considerably less than special: some of the back-projection is laughably atrocious. That having been said, though, Kenpachiro knows how to get the most out of that rubber suit, and the classic Godzilla stuff - smashing things up - is actually rather more realistic than in most of the Japanese films in the genre (perhaps because here he's trashing ancient palaces and temples rather than modern skyscrapers: wood and brick splinter and pulverise so much more impressively!).
The film drags in places, and at 95 minutes it is a good 10 minutes or so too long. There are a few lapses in narrative coherence (too many of the characters look too similar, I found, which is certainly not a help to following what's going on). There is some truly terrible acting. There are a few amusing glitches in the (mostly very serviceable) English subtitles: "Get into the cage already!"
The main obstacle, though, to taking this film at all seriously is that the monster is just way too cute. When he first appears, he's only 3 inches high - and everybody says how cute he is! And it's true. It's the same costume and the same actor throughout, just rendered at different scales; and even when he's 60ft tall and squishing people underfoot, he's still CUTE.
Apart from the film's place as a 'landmark' in North Korean cinema (to date, still their only 'horror film', I believe), and apart from the fascinatingly melodramatic background to its making, and apart from the hours of discussion you can indulge in about its political subtext - this is basically just a thigh-slapping romp that will give you a tears-of-laughter good time, if you watch in the right circumstances and the right spirit (I would recommend: heavily drunk and/or stoned, along with several of your buddies).
Trivia challenge: How many times do they say the monster's name in this film? I wasn't counting - but I'd guess it's well over 100!
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