ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Exploitation-film historian A.C. Nicholas, who has a sketchy background and hails from parts unknown in Western Pennsylvania, was once a drive-in theater projectionist and disk jockey. Currently, in addition to being a writer, editor, podcaster, and voice-over artist, he is a regular guest co-host on the streaming Drive-In Asylum Double Feature and contributes to the Drive-In Asylum fanzine. His upcoming essay “Emanuelle in Disney World and Other Weird Tales of a Trash Film Lover,” detailing bizarre and hilarious stories about midnight movies, grindhouses, and exploitation films, will appear in the next issue of Drive-In Asylum.

In the past few decades, the Korean film industry has taken off. Director Park Chan-wook has an enviable filmography with Oldboy, Decision to Leave and Stoker. And Bong Joon-ho, Korea’s best director, helmed The Host, Okja and Snowpiercer before Parasite became the first foreign-language film to win the Oscar for Best Picture. As well as Parasite’s also winning Best International Feature Film, Bong collected Oscars for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. Korean films stand tall in world cinema. But it wasn’t always this way. Once upon a time, there was a Korean monster movie that tried to copy the success of King Kong and Godzilla. Thought lost for decades, Space Monster Wangmagwi (1967) escaped from the Korean Film Archive. It played the 2022 Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal ahead of its first DVD release anywhere. Read further—if you dare—to learn more about a film that will never be confused with any of the great masterpieces of Korean cinema.

Space Monster Wangmagwi, filmed in glorious black-and-white, opens with a shot of a star field in outer space—or more correctly, what looks to be lights shining through pinholes punched in black construction paper to simulate stars. A paper mache spaceship powered by the flame of a matchstick appears, and we meet some aliens from planet Gamma, wearing the ugliest spacesuits you’ve ever seen. The aliens are headed to conquer earth. Their plan, which will turn out to be poorly planned, involves dropping Wangmagwi, a five-foot-something monster, on earth, where, as the Gammarians have calculated, he will grow 100 times his normal size and conquer the planet while under their remote control.

Wangmagwi, literally meaning “devil king” in Korean, lands on earth and does grow to enormous size. I suppose he’s some sort of reptile man, but it’s hard to tell because the monster suit is the worst I’ve ever seen: It looks like paper mache randomly thrown on some Korean guy wearing bedroom slippers with glued-on claws. This formidable space monster starts knocking over miniature buildings, which, while not as nice as the stuff Toho was doing at the time, doesn’t look too bad. But the film’s foley effects are horrendous. Collapsing buildings sound like pots falling out of a kitchen cabinet. 

We next meet someone who should be our hero—but isn’t—a pilot called away from his bride-to-be on the eve of their wedding to fight the monster. He ultimately figures very little in the plot, a bizarre screenwriting choice. 

But the most off-putting and bewildering aspect of the film is its attempts at humor. At one point, when we see the multitude of extras trying to escape the space monster, folks are literally running in circles. This is bluntly intercut (the editing of this film looks like it was done in the dark with children’s plastic scissors) with scenes of two friends who have an idiotic bet about who will be more frightened by the monster, a woman giving birth, and a guy looking for a newspaper so that he can find a quiet corner amidst the chaos to evacuate his bowels. I shit you not. (The punchline is that after he finds a newspaper and takes his dump, the escaping throng pushes him down onto his own excrement. Charming.) 

Our ostensible hero, a small boy, winds up in Wangmagwi’s ear canal. The kid then cuts Wangmagwi’s eardrums while yelling things like “I made you deaf, bastard” and urinates inside the monster’s skull. (I couldn’t make this up if I tried.) Seeing these hijinks left me slack-jawed and appalled. And I thought the scene in that other 1967 Korean monster film, Yongary, Monster from Deep, where the monster was sprayed with itching powder and rolls around in his death throes in a riverbed before bleeding from his anus and dying was the worst thing I’d ever seen in a kaiju eiga. I just don’t get the Koreans’ humor or their fixation on bodily fluids.

Meanwhile, with all this destruction happening, the air force is scrambling its jets, but they don’t attack Wangmagwi. The high command doesn’t want to endanger the populace (more like that would involve special effects that the filmmakers didn’t have the money for or skill to pull off). Anyway, before the fleet of stock-footage jets has to appear in the same shot as the monster, the alien commander intones “it looks like our shrewd plan has failed” (Shrewd plan? These aliens are friggin’ morons.), and he gives the order to have the monster self-destruct, which it does. Happy ending.

I was emotionally scarred by Space Monster Wangmagwi, but I’m glad I saw it… as a form of masochism, I guess. (I’m terrified that I’ll start hallucinating scenes from it the next time I drink too much absinthe.) It’s that rare thing: a perfect object. Perfectly bonkers. Check it out—if you dare—on Tubi.