Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s give the nod to Pulgasari, the title character of a 1985 North Korean—that’s right, North Korean—giant-monster movie, a sort of gigantic, scaly, bipedal, fanged ox that eats metal…
Pulgie is the creation of a poor blacksmith in 14th Century Korea. Imprisoned by an evil warlord for refusing to make weapons, the man gives his daughter a tiny horned figure shaped from rice. Soon after, the girl pricks her finger while sewing & accidently drips some blood on this figurine, which comes to life & starts eating—first the needle, then the door latch, then bigger & bigger items, including the weapons of the warlord’s forces.
The more he eats, the larger he grows. Before long the Pulgster is Godzilla-sized, & a Golem-like champion of the peasants against the oppressive warlord.
It’s really a rather charming fantasy—with obvious communist allegorical subtext—but the movie is less famous for its story than for its bizarre backstory: The producer-director, Shin Sang-ok, was a South Korean cinema bigwig who claimed he had been kidnapped in Hong Kong in 1978 by agents of Kim—like many dictators, a fanatical movie buff—& held in North Korea to build up the North Korean movie industry.
After making several films including Pulgasari for Kim, Shin managed to escape, along with his actress wife, to the U.S. Embassy in Vienna while on a business trip in 1986. He ended up in Hollywood, where he directed and/or produced stuff like 3 Ninjas Knuckle Up under the name Simon Sheen, before returning in 1994 to South Korea, where he died in 2006.
Years ago I went to some trouble & expense to obtain a bootleg copy of Pulgasari, but you, if you wish, may watch the movie in its entirety on Youtube, starting here.
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