A remake of Yongary, Monster from the Deep, when you look at the poster art for this, you can see that they were trying to get ahead of the Godzilla remake. The 1999 version has never been released in the U.S.; the U.S. cut is taken from the 2001 remix, Yonggary: 2001 Upgrade Edition. Why it wasn’t released under that name—the original played on American TV—is a mystery.

Dr. Campbell (Richard B. Livingston) and Dr. Hughes (Harrison Young) find an alien corpse, a dinosaur skeleton and a diamond inside a cave. A few years after that, a UFO appears and starts destroying satellites. This brings in a soldier named Parker (Briant Wells), General Murdock (Dan Cashman) and a journalist, Bud Black (Brad Sergi), who wants to find out exactly what happened in that cave.

Everyone thought Hughes was dead, but he’s been detained by the government. He appears at a new dig, surprising Campbell and his assistant, Holly (Donna Phillipson). She doesn’t believe his stories of aliens and a reanimated dinosaur until Yongary shows up and kills almost everyone. The rest of the film finds the aliens sending their kaiju all over the world to smash cities and kill humans, which means the U.S government decides to drop nukes on them. Well, they would, but the aliens lose control of Yongary and send another kaiju, Cycor, to fight it. 

If they had two kaijum, why didn’t they just send both?

This was the most expensive Korean movie ever made, but it had plenty of help. Financial support came from Hyundai Capital Corp. and Korean Technology Finance Corp., and technical support from the Korean government, which gave filmmakers access to military bases, hardware, and locations such as the Historic War Museum in Seoul. Initially, they were going to use rubber suits, but they replaced all of that with CGI, then redid that for the 2001 version.

Director Shim Hyung-rae would go on to make an even more expensive kaiju movie, D-War, the first Korean movie released in America in thirty years. There was a plan to have Bud Black create a Mecha Yongary for a sequel, which was never made. As you can see when you watch this, it has nearly all Western actors in it, in the hopes of being a worldwide success. It only offered video and cable in the U.S. and was not well-received.

You can watch this on Tubi.