Image copyright © by Marcus Trahan

Pulgasari

(North Korea, 1985)

One of the weirdest movies ever made, and not just because it is terminally awful. The story behind it is almost unbelievable. You find yourself thinking, “Who could make up shit like this?” Well, how about the human carcinoma, little fat-faced Kim Jong-un? You think The Interview was the first time North Korea got into the movie business? Think again. He is just following in his loathsome father’s footsteps.

Fat-face’s old man, Kim Jong-il (who never took a leak or a dump in his life, and could control the weather), while he was still waiting to fill the slippers of his monstrous dad, Kim Il-sung, was a huge movie fan. His favorites were James Bond, Friday the 13th, and Japanese Kaiju films, like Godzilla. He liked the movies so much that he had a famous South Korean actress, Choi Eun-hee, kidnapped in Hong Kong. When her film director husband, Shin Sang-ok, went to HK to look into it, he was kidnapped, too. (The North Korean sub-humans do this all the time. They have kidnapped thousands, and no one has ever done anything about it.) Shin was put in jail for some years, and then let out to direct this piece of shit. It makes Godzilla look like Citizen Kane.

Pulgasari is a Korean legend, here shown as a cheap Godzilla knock-off, a man in a hilarious rubber suit. He is initially two inches tall, made from a handful of dirty rice by an imprisoned blacksmith. But he eats metal, and boy does that sucker grow! He also shrinks, and grows again, as the perspective varies wildly. He is on the side of the poor exploited peasants, and against the yellow-bellied, sniveling, degenerate king. (Historically, Koreans are widely known for funny hats. The king wears one that looks like a ping-pong table for gerbils.) There is a lot of weeping and wailing, and lots of shouting. Like Japanese in historical films, all the men speak in a guttural voice from deep in the belly, sounding like they’re about to cough up a big lunger. All the women speak demurely.

The rest of the plot is too lame and predictable to get into here. The only thing remarkable is seeing the tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of extras charging back and forth as one army or another gains the advantage. Some of the shots look very dangerous to those folks. Oh, well, there were plenty more North Koreans where those came from. Life was cheap to Kim Jung-il, as it is to his fat-faced son.

Watching this movie is one of those instances of me doing something so you don’t have to. It is available in its entirety on YouTube. I started watching it shortly after the fuss about The Interview, and did it in ten- or fifteen-minute snatches, on nights when I couldn’t sleep. Watching it straight through would probably make your eyes liquefy and run down you cheeks. As it is, I sort of wanted to open my skull and scrub out my brains with a toothbrush.