Synopsis
Banned for a decade!
In feudal Korea, a group of starving villagers grow weary of the orders handed down to them by their controlling king and set out to use a deadly monster under their control to push his armies back.
1985 ‘불가사리’ Directed by Shin Sang-ok
In feudal Korea, a group of starving villagers grow weary of the orders handed down to them by their controlling king and set out to use a deadly monster under their control to push his armies back.
Bulgasari, プルガサリ, 大怪獣プルガサリ
Pulgasari is legit!
Pulgasari is authentic spectacle!
As melodrama, Pulgasari is totally ham fisted and overplayed. Oh the weeping and wailing! As communist propaganda, however, this movie’s message is far less clearly revolutionary than I expected.
Pulgasari itself is a juche weapon of liberation, yet it's created through the sheer will of an unjustly jailed and starved-to-death farmers’ blacksmith, a man who would never have created a weapon himself. Pulgasari is an overthrower of the corrupt ruling class but it also consumes the workers tools and destroys their means of production. Pulgasari is animated to life, and later saved, by the blood of an innocent youth, but then that same innocent must - spoiler - sacrifice her own life to…
"Pulgasari" is a 1985 fantasy epic film directed by Shin Sang-ok. At face value it holds some heavy kaiju looking energy, like a makeshift "Godzilla" (1954) which "Pulgasari" holds a very similar candle to in appearance, but as some Kaiju destruction is in this film, it easily takes a backseat to a romanticized, verging on propagandic, fantasy folk telling story in primary energy. Why is that, well because this is a notorious film in history that was a production of North Korea. Birthed in a bizarrely laden tale of strange aspirations circling around the country looking for new ways to gain global revenue and resorting to literal kidnapping to achieve their goal, "Pulgasari" holds more weight in the annals of…
North Korea tackles its very own zip-up suit King Kong flick (not their first film, but possibly the most universal for its monster appeal) inciting the struggle of the working man and the uprising against the imperialist swine. Pulgasari is the bloodborne embodiment of the fight for freedom, and in a very awww-inspring way, chewing every piece of iron in its path saving lives and growing even bigger. While most of the time this felt like a school funded video you'd watch with the substitute teacher, slowly drifting to your notebook to doodle, then gazing up to see yet another battle ensuing, I think is better merited by the way it came about and the meaning behind it. Serves as…
"Nations that chart a self-defining course, seeking to use their land, labor, natural resources, and markets as they see fit, free from the smothering embrace of the US corporate global order, frequently become a target of defamation. Their leaders often have their moral sanity called into question by US officials and US media, as has been the case at one time or another with Castro, Noriega, Ortega, Qaddafi, Aristide, Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Hugo Chavez, and others."
"So it comes as no surprise that the rulers of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) have been routinely described as mentally unbalanced by our policymakers and pundits. Senior Defense Department officials refer to the DPRK as a country 'not…
Pulgasari is probably the most widely known North Korean film, which I admit might not be saying much, that's probably like talking about Moldova's most famous pop act, but here we are. The story of its making, whereby agents of Kim Jong-il kidnapped Shin Sang-ok, a famous South Korean film director and imprisoned him and his wife in a re-education camp for several years before forcing him at literal gunpoint to make movies for the state before they finally escaped seems almost too crazy to be true, but it isn't. I'd recommend people read up on the backstory, but what about the film itself? The first thing to say about Pulgasari is that it's not very good, in terms of…
Banned for a decade!
The VHS promotional art proudly proclaimed this fact, under an image of our rubbery monster. Coming across that image in a copy of Fangoria during youth, my imagination ran wild with all the possibilities for its prohibition. Beyond Britain's toxic political climate of the 80s, my introduction to banned cinema - Video Nasties - usually promised a lurid cocktail of perverse stories and hitherto unseen ultra violence. You had to do a lot to get banned, and forbidden meant wallowing in spectacular filth. How could you get that much gore into a giant monster picture? Did this Minotaur have a power drill the size of a condo - and how could he jab it into people's…
waging guerilla war with class-conscious kaiju allies -- smash the palaces of all tyrants, consume the paper tiger's wretched weapons -- viva pulgasari and his hideous visage!
An utterly fascinating film that will be talked about on Wednesday’s Ranking the Monsters podcast (a The Twin Geeks production), alongside Bong Joon-ho’s The Host.
Find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever fine podcasts are found.
1st Shin Sang-ok
A very interesting nationalist attempt to replicate the popular success of Godzilla in Japan, especially after the-then recent interest generated by 1984's Return of Godzilla. The history of Pulgasari has rightly attracted more attention than the film itself, mainly for the fact that it was made by a kidnapped South Korean director. In fact, this was his last film before making it back to South Korea. Reading about the troubles Sang and his wife went through to get back are harrowing, but recently a film was made about the entitled 'The Lovers and the Despot' if you're interested further in it.
Besides that, Pulgarsari is not a bad imitation of the Godzilla films. It helps that the…
Ah! The notorious Pulgasari! Kim Jong-il's loving tribute to Godzilla made by a kidnapped director! Pulgasari's behind the scenes back story is fascinating and really the only reason anyone would track this down and watch it. It is a time capsule of cultural lunacy, made by a power mad Jong-il a few years before he would become supreme leader of North Korea. It is a propaganda piece, showing working class farmers rising up against destructive, evil capitalists, supported by a giant metal-eating monster (representing Kim Il-sung perhaps?). Propaganda aside, it's much like any Japanese monster movie, baring a striking narrative resemblance to Daimajin. Except there's the horrific, knee-pounding torture of an old lady and a fair bit of blood. Most…
This was actually better than I thought it was going to be.
I got a huge Diamajin vibe from it.
Evventhough it was lensed in the mid eighties, it looks like an old Shaw Brothers movie.
It kind of drags in places, and characters sport some of the most fake looking beards in cinema history
Who knew brutal Korean overlords were into giant monster flicks?
Mondo Cinema out.....