Pulgasari (1986)

There are films that earn their notoriety through quality, and then there are films that earn it through sheer circumstance. Pulgasari (1986) belongs firmly in the second category. Produced in North Korea under the supervision of the state's film apparatus, this feudal monster picture tells the story of oppressed villagers in ancient Korea who find themselves with an unlikely ally: a small, iron-eating creature that grows, battle by battle, into a colossal beast capable of tearing apart the armies of a tyrannical king. On paper, it reads like any number of creature features from the era. The reality of how it came to exist is rather more unsettling, and that backstory has followed the film everywhere in the decades since its release.

The production history of Pulgasari is, to put it plainly, one of the strangest in cinema. South Korean director Shin Sang-ok, a prolific and well-regarded filmmaker in his home country, was reportedly abducted on the orders of Kim Jong-il in the late 1970s, along with actress Choe Eun-hee, and brought to North Korea to bolster the country's film industry. Shin is credited here alongside Chong Gon Jo, and the film was produced through a joint arrangement involving Korean Film, Shin Film Productions, and Toho Eizo Bijutsu, the latter lending a certain tokusatsu flavour to the creature work. The film was shot in Japanese rather than Korean, which only adds another layer of oddity to its already peculiar origins. Monster suit and effects work drew on the tradition of Japanese kaiju cinema, a genre that had produced some genuinely inventive creature features over the previous three decades. If you have any interest in that broader 1980s horror and fantasy landscape, you might find some useful comparison in our look at Re-Animator (1985), another genre film from the same period that plays with horror, camp, and creature-feature conventions in its own distinctive way.

The cast is led by Chang Son Hui and Ham Gi Sop, with Jong-uk Ri, Gwon Ri, and Gyong-Ae Yu also featuring. None of them were known quantities outside North Korea, and their performances exist in a register that is very much of a piece with state-sanctioned dramatic work of the period, broad, physical, and pitched at a collective rather than an individual emotional register. The film runs to 95 minutes, and was released to limited international awareness until Shin Sang-ok and his wife eventually escaped North Korean custody in 1986, an event that brought renewed attention to everything they had made under those conditions. For those curious about how politically charged contexts shape the films that emerge from them, our reviews of Sugar Cane Alley (1983) and Mustang (2015) both touch on cinema produced under or around conditions of social and political constraint, albeit in very different ways.

A-Z World Movie Tour North Korea Pulgasari is a film shrouded in infamy. A North Korean kaiju movie made under bizarre political circumstances, reportedly with help from a kidnapped South Korean director and crew. Shot in Japanese (which adds to the confusion of its origins), it feels less like a proper film and more like a strange cultural artefact, a mix of revolutionary propaganda, monster mayhem, and outright camp. The story follows a tiny metal-eating creature born from the curse of a dying old man, brought to life by the blood of a young girl, which grows into a giant beast meant to liberate the oppressed from a tyrannical feudal regime. In theory, a potent metaphor. In practice, a mess. The creature itself, Pulgasari, is actually quite well-realised for a low-budget suitmation and stop-motion hybrid. Its design is eerie and memorable (a spiky, rat-like beast with glowing eyes and a gaping maw) and some of the destruction sequences have a crude charm. But everything around it is painfully unconvincing. The sets are obviously miniature, the villages look like cardboard, and the constant close-ups of screaming peasants can’t hide the fact that most of the action takes place indoors, under flat lighting. The acting is wildly over-the-top, with every line delivered like a revolutionary rallying cry, even when no one’s listening. It’s clear the film is meant to be taken seriously. A tale of people’s power rising against oppression, with the monster as both saviour and eventual threat. But the tone veers wildly between solemn propaganda and laughable spectacle. Once Pulgasari turns on the people who created it, there’s a moment of potential tragedy, but it’s drowned out by repetitive battle scenes and increasingly absurd destruction. It’s not without historical curiosity or a certain so-bad-it’s-fascinating appeal. But as a film it’s poorly paced, poorly acted, and weighed down by ideology and technical limitations. The monster is cool. The rest is just noise. A bizarre footnote in cinema history, worth watching once for the story behind it, but not for the film itself.

For me, the curiosity factor is real, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't find something perversely enjoyable about sitting with a film this strange and this compromised in its origins. But curiosity only carries you so far, and once the novelty of the circumstance wears off, what's left is a film that struggles to justify its runtime on its own terms. The monster design genuinely has something going for it, and I keep coming back to those few moments where the creature effects do land with a kind of rough charm. The rest, though, is a slog dressed up in revolutionary theatre. Sometimes the most interesting thing about a film is the story around it, and Pulgasari might be the clearest example of that I've come across.

Rating: ★★  | Year: 1986  | Watched: 2025-08-05

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Trailer

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