Look out for Pulgasari!!!! From the bowels of North Korea and Kim Jong-il's long dead brain comes a creature so scary, he'll give you an aneurism.
"Oh, rooook!!! Americans have very large penis!!!"
One of the more bizarre pieces of film-related news from 2014
was of course North Korea's absurdly overblown response to The Interview,
the Sony hacks that went with it, and the potentially-industry-changing
distribution-method shakeup that followed. According to many reviewers (The
Movie Sleuth included), this surreal series of events was far more entertaining
than The Interview itself, and it also cast a very interesting spotlight
on North Korea's relationship with media and popular culture. One can't help
but wonder: if the isolated dictatorship deemed a Seth Rogen flick worthy of
starting an international conflict over, what sort of a role does film have in North
Korea itself, and what exactly is North Korean pop-culture like? Well, at least
one North Korean film is pretty easily available in America for those who are
really curious... and it's exactly the sort of bizarre, unintentionally-camp
propaganda that the Interview madness might have lead you to expect.
From producer Kim Jong-il (seriously, that's not a joke) comes Pulgasari:
a 1985 anti-capitalism propaganda piece... in the form of a rubber-suit giant
monster flick.
Not unlike the case of The Interview, the tale of how Pulgasari
came to exist is far more entertaining than the film itself; it would make a
great movie someday. In the late-70s, when Kim Il-sung was in power, Kim
Jong-il was but a young megalomaniac who happened to have a great love for Japanese
Kaiju (that's giant monster) movies. He wanted to spearhead the production of
propaganda genre films in North Korea, and so he did exactly the logical
thing... he had his favorite South Korean director – and his wife – abducted
and held prisoner, so he could force the filmmaker to direct movies for the
regime. The last – and most notorious – of these movies directed under
imprisonment was Pulgasari: Kim Jong-il's dream-come-true of making a Godzilla
knockoff for the glory of North Korea. Fortunately, imprisoned director Shin Sang-ok and his wife
managed to escape North Korea during post-production on the film, when Kim
Jong-il allowed the two to go to a film festival overseas, and they fled from
the agents who were guarding them. They successfully found asylum in America,
where Shin would go on to produce and/or direct such fine films as the 3
Ninjas sequels (which, while not exactly good, are at least better than
being in a North Korean prison).
"Beware!!! It's the giant Herpes monster with legs!!! Arrrrrghhhh!"
But back to Pulgasari itself.
How, you ask, can a rubber-suit monster flick be turned into North Korean
propaganda? Well, just as the original Godzilla was a representation of
Japan's post-war anxieties and the dangers of nuclear weapons, the Pulgasari
creature represents... you guessed it... democracy and capitalism. And needless
to say, the film presents them as being every bit as deadly as nuclear bombs.
The film's oppressed peasant protagonists at first believe that the monster is
exactly what they need to free themselves from their totalitarian king, but they
have grossly underestimated the all-consuming destructive force that is a
democratic capitalist system... I mean, Pulgasari. In a fairly ham-fisted bit
of symbolism, all Pulgasari does is eat and eat and eat, much to the detriment
of the civilization it decides to snack on.
It's about as subtle as one would
expect from producer Kim Jong-il, with dialogue like “Pulgasari, why can't you
just exercise some self-control, before there is nothing left?” The film also
preaches the North Korean talking point that individuals are unimportant
compared to the whole collective, starting with a hilariously obvious lesson of
an elderly man refusing to stop and drink water until his work for the good of
the village is complete. What is odd about the narrative, though, is that the
film's human villain is, as mentioned above, a totalitarian ruler who to
viewers outside of North Korea will look a lot like a stand-in for Kim Jong-il
or Kim Jong-un, but the film is all about how North Korean people are in charge
of their own destiny. The film is clearly trying to imply that the present
North Korean government is on the side of the people, and against tyrany... but
it seems like it would be easy for the movie to backfire and cause viewers to
see their own ruler in the villain. In fact, since the director was an
imprisoned South Korean being forced to make the film against his will, one
almost can't help but wonder if that was a subversive message that he buried in
the narrative on purpose. I suppose that North Korea is such a propaganda-dominated
state that viewers would be conditioned not to connect those dots, but it is
nonetheless baffling viewing from our perspective.
"Hey baby!!! I'm horny over here!!"
As all of that should imply,
there's quite a bit of camp and unintentional comedy in Pulgasari,
particularly in the first and last acts when the propaganda elements are at
their most heavyhanded. However, it is also undeniably a bad movie, and not
always in the fun way. Some of the martial-arts-style human fight scenes are
competantly handled, and the creature itself – while totally cheesy and
ridiculous – has a certain Ultraman/Power Rangers charm to it, but on
the whole it's totally believable that Shin Sang-ok
was making this under duress. It isn't horribly made; it's just pretty bland
and uninspired. Plus, the forced-perspective and composite shots used to make
the monster look gigantic are woefully unconvincing. It may be worth a look for
the sheer curiosity value, and for the campier moments when the propaganda
messages are most obvious, but when it stops preaching North Korean talking
points and settles into the standard kaiju movie plot formula, it basically
becomes just a very sub-par monster flick, a good twenty years behind the
refinement of Toho's formula. Oddly enough, the stunt actor who plays Pulgasari
is the same actor who played Godzilla in most of Toho's films... and in one
interview he said that at least Pulgasari was better than Roland
Emmerich's American Godzilla remake. That's some food for thought.
