Space Monster Wangmagwi (1967)

directed by Kwon Hyeok-Jin

South Korea

82 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I started working a night-shift job for the first time in my life recently and to be frank I did not have my shit together enough last month to do Kaijune like I usually do. Fortunately, however, there are two months with "-ju" in the name.

Welcome to Kaijuly.

Space Monster Wangmagwi is a South Korean monster movie. You will often hear that it was supposedly lost, but it was just lacking a home media release; the Korean Film Archive held copies and would screen it on occasion. SRS Cinema's recent restoration and subtitling of the film has exposed it to a wider audience, but it should really be noted that this film was not, as the story goes, fully lost. 

This film is historically important, as it's the first all-Korean science fiction film and the oldest Korean monster movie, but it's also just really fun: it's interesting to watch a film industry do this stuff for the first time ever. 1967 was the year that all of Japan's major film studios produced a kaiju movie (Toho with Son of Godzilla, Nikkatsu with Gappa, and Daiei with Gamera vs. Gyaos), so this movie came at a time when monster movies were very popular. I am a stickler for only applying the term "kaiju" to specifically Japanese giant monsters - I don't think it makes sense otherwise - but I can justify including this film in Kaijuly because most people who are into kaiju stuff would probably also be into this. 

The plot is bare-bones: aliens, having scouted Earth as the perfect planet for their invasion, release a monster upon their targeted landing site (the southern part of the Korean peninsula) to weaken the populace and make it easier for them to take over. Wangmagwi was not originally huge, but the aliens figured things so that it would expand upon contact with Earth's atmosphere until it became a city-destroying giant. Wangmagwi itself is innocent in all this - even when the aliens are wrangling it out of its cage and shoving it out of their spaceship, it's resisting like a trapped animal. It doesn't destroy out of malevolence; it's just a scared, confused creature, out of its element and under attack for reasons it cannot fathom.

What's interesting here is the way the human characters are handled. I assumed that the two we started the film with would be the protagonists: a young woman and her soon-to-be husband, who is an air force pilot. He gets called away when Wangmagwi lands on the night before their wedding, and she eventually is abducted by Wangmagwi, being carried around in its hand for most of the film. But these people are not the main characters. In fact, I don't believe this is a film that has main characters. We follow several disparate people throughout the course of the film, and none of them feels any more important than another. The random street urchin who we're first introduced to after he's broken into some rich guy's house and eaten all his food does far more to wound Wangmagwi than the literal actual military.

I did not expect Space Monster Wangmagwi to be this funny, either. Mentioning this almost constitutes a spoiler because it's better to go into it believing everything will be played straight. It is at first, but then you've got two chuckleheads betting each other's houses and wives on which of them will survive the monster attack, a guy who really, really needs to go to the bathroom in the middle of the evacuation, and the aforementioned street urchin getting stuck in Wangmagwi's sinuses and peeing in there. This is a more accurate picture of how utterly chaotic and disorganized humans would be in the case of a monster attack than most monster movies will provide. Everybody is running around willy-nilly and just generally acting like dumbasses.

So, what about Wangmagwi itself? As I said, it doesn't have a lot of personality other than just being confused and upset. The way it tramples on Seoul is quite cautious, actually; at times it almost seems to be deliberately going around large structures. It takes a long time to even decide that it wants to smash a building. Its design is... well, it's a design, certainly. Kind of an apeish, toothy, weirdly gangly humanoid thing with big ears that looks like it's coated in rubber cement. But I'll tell you one thing that this movie does surprisingly well: scale. It really nails the miniatures, and accents them with shots of people looking up at the monster in horror, so the overall effect of Wangmagwi's size is very convincing.

This movie surprised me in a lot of ways. The SRS Cinema restoration is stunningly crisp and clear, and it's a testament to the craft of the filmmakers that the effects still look good with the patina of time wiped away. The storyline isn't going to win any awards but the human characters do manage to be sympathetic. The cinematography is genuinely good. I'm really, really fond of Space Monster Wangmagwi, and I'm glad it's getting the recognition it deserves.