Only those who know about the Spectacle theater enter the Spectacle theater. Tucked off bustling Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in a building that might look abandoned to the untrained eye, it’s the home for the latest in unknown, cult, and cutting-edge hip cinema. And last week, it was home to what might be Kim Jong Il’s masterpiece: the Godzilla knockoff Pulgasari.
Called “bizarre” and “fascinating” by some of the 23 Brooklynites who attended last month’s screening, Pulgasari the film—about poverty-stricken farmers joining forces with a giant beast to fight a tyrannical Emperor—isn’t even as insane as the story of how it came to exist. Author Paul Fischer chronicles the saga in his book, A Kim Jong-il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator’s Rise to Power. “The story of the book is such a serious one,” he wrote in an e-mail to Vanity Fair, “tyrannical dictator abducts two people, imprisons and tortures them, to force them to support the brainwashing of the people. But then that whole terrible crime somehow leads to a cheesy monster B-movie. It's so absurd, so ridiculous.”
Before Kim Jong Il was Kim Jong Il, he was a major movie fanatic. While his father, Kim Il Sung, was in rule, Kim Jong Il reportedly amassed a library of more than 15,000 titles and grew to admire the likes of James Bond and Rambo. He even established an underground circuit of bootleg films, as North Koreans weren’t allowed to watch most international releases.
The tyrant in training would eventually come to oversee the entire North Korean movie industry, as he became more involved in government. He came to see the medium as a strategic weapon that would both elevate his country in the eyes of the world and educate international audiences on the communist values of the D.P.R.K. (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea). Unfortunately, he was not impressed with what North Korea had to offer. In his eyes, North Korea’s movie industry was falling behind the rest of the world; the filmmakers lacked technical skills, the actors weren’t improving, and the films were not innovative.
Kim believed there was one person who could save the industry he loved so much: Shin Sang Ok, the hottest director in South Korea. The dictator planned to lure Shin to North Korea through his wife, Choi Eun Hee, who herself was one of South Korea’s most sought-after actresses. Choi was kidnapped first, after she was lured to China under false pretences, and Shin followed in hot pursuit after she went missing. Choi was kept in pampered imprisonment while her husband was sent to a prison camp after multiple escape attempts; both soon realized, though, that pledging loyalty to North Korea was their only hope of getting home. “I hated communism, but I had to pretend to be devoted to it, to escape from this barren republic,” Shin recollected in a 2003 interview with The Guardian. “It was lunacy.”
With Kim as an executive producer who approved all creative ideas, Shin created a total of seven films for “the great leader” with Choi as his leading lady. Their final collaboration together, the one that helped them eventually escape, was Pulgasari.
Said to be inspired by Japan’s The Return of Godzilla, Kim urged Shin to create a monster movie that would equally impress Westerners. Though Kim despised the Japanese, he set aside his pride and flew in the special-effects team of the original films, along with Kenpachiro Satsuma, the man inside the Godzilla suit. According to Satsuma, he and his crew members thought they had been hired for a film shooting in China when they landed in North Korea instead. “There were thousands dying in North Korea,” Fischer wrote via e-mail, “but at the same time here comes Kim Jong Il, and his idea of advancing the regime’'s purposes is to kidnap two South Korean filmmakers, trick some Japanese film crew members, drown them all in gifts and luxury, to play with rubber monster suits and make a Godzilla rip-off.”
The titular monster of Pulgasari is not, like Godzilla, born of nuclear energy; an elderly blacksmith, starving in a prison cell, molds him out of rice and his daughter’s blood brings it to life. Hungry for iron, Pulgasari eventually brings down the villainous emperor, but then threatens the very resources of the farmers who supported him. Fischer described the film as “unique and demented,” which speaks largely to its dueling ideologies; Kim saw the film as a metaphor for “the people’s struggle against greed, private wealth, and oppression,” Fischer wrote in his book, but included a dictatorial emperor character who, apparently unintentionally, mirrors Kim himself. For current, American viewers, the main takeaways are more about the film’s shoddy workmanship and camp value; it’s difficult to take the film seriously when the film from the 80s looks like it was made in the 60s, and the baby Pulgasari sounds like a rabid squeaky toy.
Despite its many visible flaws, Pulgasari was a hit in North Korea, and Kim thought it a masterpiece. For Shin and Choi, it was the film that saved their lives. Allowed to travel to Vienna on a business trip, the pair escaped to the U.S. embassy. Kim retaliated by dropping Shin’s name from the credits of his films, labeling him a traitor, and ordering all his films, including Pulgasari, to be banned from theaters, according to Fischer’s book. (Pulgasari is still not shown in North Korea theaters, though it has likely made the rounds as a bootleg DVD or illegal download.)
It would be many years before Pulgasari developed a fan base through limited circulation. ADV Films, a U.S. anime distribution company, released a VHS copy in 2001. Since then, underground and indie theaters, like the Spectacle, have continuously hosted screenings. In the past couple of years alone, the Projection Booth Cinema in Canada, Columbia University’s Liberty in North Korea group in N.Y.C., and The Cuban bar in Bristol, United Kingdom have witnessed its magic. You can even watch the whole thing on YouTube.
Or, for maximum cool points, at the Spectacle theater. Even though the Spectacle only had three total screenings of the film, a representative claimed its patrons couldn’t get enough of it. “Not to be a capitalist pig, but I bet audiences would go crazy for plush baby Pulgasaries.”
