Kim Jong-il memorial edition

So. Farewell, Kim Jong-il. Mourned only by latter-day Stalinists, the Dear Leader inflicted unspeakable barbarities on his people: his love, as Philip Gourevitch says, was indistinguishable from contempt. But besides being a terroristic dictator, Kim Jong-il was also, improbably, the world's most evil cinephile.*

And he wasn't content with passively enjoying his collection of 20,000 tapes and DVDs. No, sir, Kim went out there and made films, none more famous than the subject of this review, the 1985 creature feature Pulgasari. Gojira rip-off though it may be, Pulgasari, in all its glory and inadequacy, remains a weirdly chilling testament to both the horrors and the odd ambition of North Korea.

Kim, who had written On the Art of the Cinema in 1973, was concerned about the North Korean film industry even while his father was still alive. His flunkeys could churn out turgid communist propaganda, but they lacked the grand vision the people's republic required.

Shin Sang-ok (1926-2006) was one of South Korea's most successful directors. With a string of hits during the fifties and sixties - the Golden Age of Korean cinema - Shin was praised even in the North for the 'dedication and faith in the people' his works displayed. When the military regime of Park Chung-hee closed down Shin's studios in 1978, Kim Jong-il saw an opportunity. His agents abducted Shin's ex-wife, the actress Choi Eun-Hee, in Hong Kong, then nabbed the director himself when he went to investigate.

If kidnapping is the sincerest form of flattery, Shin had little cause to appreciate the compliment at first. Making several attempts to escape after his arrival in Pyongyang, he was confined to prison for four years, where he subsisted on grass, salt and rice. It wasn't until 1983 that Shin and his ex-wife were released and reunited at a party organised by Kim. There, the Dear Leader's heir apparent explained his plans. The couple - who soon remarried at Kim's suggestion - were to live in luxury while Shin directed films for the regime, Kim overseeing him as executive producer. The arrangement worked for several years, until Shin and Choi managed to flee to the United States in 1986.

Their most prestigious - and most lavishly budgeted - project was Pulgasari. A giant monster film, Pulgasari grew naturally out of Kim's obsessions: besides gangster films and the Friday the 13th** series, he was also a fan of the Japanese Gojira movies. Korean gwoesu ('giant monster') films, based partly on the Japanese daikaijū tradition going back to King Kong, partly on native Korean storytelling traditions, were already a popular genre in the South. (The film was, in fact, given a limited release in Seoul in 1998, where it bombed.)

In fourteenth-century feudal Korea, the peasants are oppressed by an evil king (Pak Yong-hok). Rebels, led by Inde (Ham Gi-sop) are harrying the king's forces from the mountains. The governor (Pak Pong-ilk) has decided to melt down the peasants' farm tools and cooking pots to make weapons; this leads to a riot in which the village blacksmith (Ri Gwon) is arrested. He's starved into submission in prison, while his fellow prisoners go on hunger strike in solidarity. (It's worth noting the film was made before the famine of the 1990s killed millions of Koreans.) With his last strength, the blacksmith moulds a small figurine of a reptilian monster out of rice, and when he dies his spirit lives on in the creature.

Soon, the blacksmith's daughter Ami (Chang Son-Hui) and her brother Ana (Ri Jong-uk) discover that the figurine is alive, and hungry: having devoured Ami's needles, it begins eating all the available metal at the forge and turns into a rather cute child-sized creature ('Little Man' Machan, a Japanese actor and former midget wrestler). Pulgasari - the name of the creature, after a legendary monster - saves Inde from execution by the king's forces and joins the rebel army. The task facing General Fuan (Ri Riyonun) is to stop the gigantic beast through increasingly implausible schemes before it helps the ragtag bunch of rebels overrun the whole country.

As in most gwoesu films, the monster appears early and receives a great deal of screen time. Kim clearly decided nothing but the best would do, thus guaranteeing the only reason anyone outside North Korea ever saw Pulgasari: the monster was created by the legendary Toho Studios, the home of Gojira. By guaranteeing safe passage, Kim managed to convince Nakano Teruyoshi to sign on as special effects director, while Satsuma Kenpachiro, who'd played Gojira before and would do so again, was the man in the monster suit.

Satsuma gives by far the best performance in the film. Compared to the overacting of Ham and Chang (on whose distraught face Shin lavishes countless close-ups), Satsuma manages to convey a range of emotions using body language alone (the other actors seem to have redubbed many of their lines). But he's overshadowed by the terrible monster design (it's sort of like Gojira, only with horns and worse in every single way) and the too-obvious special effects trickery. Pulgasari is virtually never seen in the same frame as the actors, except when human-sized, but I'd love to see the six-foot needles they must have used for an early scene.

Pulgasari is revolutionary propaganda: the monster creates a fictional scenario in which agrarian communism triumphs over the evil of feudalism. But there are rather sinister undertones to this superficially simple narrative. In the course of the film, Pulgasari increasingly overshadows the human characters both literally and metaphorically (Inde, our ostensible protagonist early in the film, is eventually killed by the king's soldiers in a throwaway scene). What's more, any 'faith in the people' is rather undercut by the fact that they're shown to be quite helpless until bailed out by a hundred-foot reptilian monster that singlehandedly accomplishes the liberation mere human resistance couldn't.

For this reason it's tempting to read the film as a fictionalised version of the DPRK's founding myth, with Pulgasari as a metaphor for Kim Il-sung. In that case the film's ending becomes even more intriguing. After killing the king and establishing a peasants' republic, Pulgasari - who, recall, turns swords into sustenance without going by way of ploughshares - begins to consume all the metal in the land. Soon the peasants are forced to offer Pulgasari their pots, pans and tools. Realising that the monster is unwittingly destroying the people, Ami convinces Pulgasari to turn to stone (or something like that: the ending is terrifically unclear).

It's otherwise a watchable film: not good, certainly, but Shin's work is competent at least, and the scene of Pulgasari's creation is really quite beautiful (if hindered rather than helped by the soundtrack, a very 1980s combination of synthesizers and traditional Korean music). The martial arts choreography, too, is efficient even if it never shines (the hundreds of extras are real-life North Korean soldiers, apparently). But beneath the feel-good propaganda of Pulsagari, a Stalinist horror lurks.

*In a world where Michael Bay and Eli Roth continue to find funding, that's saying something.
**I, of course, prefer the morally much less objectionable Halloween series.

Big trouble in little California

Even if Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958) was any good, the producers would have set the bar impossibly high for themselves. The film has, perhaps, one of the most awesome titles in cinema history, and the famous poster - one of the terrific, prolific Reynold Brown's greatest creations - promises a heady mix of titillation and large-scale destruction no motion picture could ever live up to.

The inevitable disappointment is the perfect distillation of the dazzling, sleazy world of B-movies, for Attack of the 50 Foot Woman is not good. It is, in fact, an extraordinarily terrible film: despite being a slim 65 minutes long, it contains relentless padding - domestic drama, painfully unfunny comic relief, and technobabble - and no more than ten minutes of giant woman mayhem. For this reason alone I cannot in good conscience recommend it to anyone.

The sheer badness on display is no surprise, for Attack of the 50 Foot Woman is a knock-off of a knock-off: after Jack Arnold and Richard Matheson struck critical and commercial gold with The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), the concept was immediately inverted for Bert Gordon's The Amazing Colossal Man; and a year later director Nathan Juran (under the nom de plume Nathan Hertz, indicating Juran's embarrassment) and producers Jacques Marquette and Bernard Woolner decided to rip off Gordon, replacing a titanic soldier with a towering woman in her knickers. But where The Incredible Shrinking Man cost a respectable $750,000, Juran's knock-off was made for a mere $88,000, and boy, does it show.

So! We begin with Exposition TV, where a sarcastic news anchor (Dale Tate) explains that a 'satellite' has recently been seen in various places around the world and might be over the California desert right now! And so we cut to the desert, where wealthy heiress Nancy Archer (Allison Hayes) encounters the egg-shaped UFO. A giant emerges and reaches for her ('A thirty-foot giant? Oh no!', says a copper later), but Nancy manages to flee back to Tony's Bar where her husband, Harry (William Hudson), is blatantly cavorting with his floozy Honey Parker (Yvette Vickers), and scheming how they might be rid of his wife and get their hands on her fortune.

It turns out that the couple have previously separated and reconciled, and Nancy has spent some time in a 'private sanitarium' (Honey is more honest in calling it a 'nuthouse', obviously forgetting that poor people are mad while rich people are eccentric.) Her wild giant-spotting claims afford Harry an unprecedented chance of having her committed again, and so Harry accepts her request to drive her out to the desert. There, they eventually encounter the sphere, and Harry panics and flees while Nancy is grabbed by the giant. Harry gets home and packs his bags, but when their butler, Jess (Ken Terrell) demands to know what happened to Nancy the two end up struggling in the worst stage-fighting this side of Star Trek: The Original Series.

We are now 29 minutes into a 65-minute film, and Nancy has still not grown to giant size, let alone attacked anyone.

Harry's attempt to flee with Honey is foiled by the police, who have recovered Nancy. She's been infected by some sort of alien substance from the sphere, and her physician, Dr Cushing (Roy Gordon), calls in his friend, Herr Doktor Heinrich von Loeb (Otto Waldis), to help with examining her; still, both squints are astonished when, at minute 38, Nancy finally turns gigantic (well, there's a giant papier-maché hand, anyway). They put the increasingly distressed woman in chains to prevent her going after Harry, who is still conducting a shockingly public affair with Honey and hanging out at Tony's Bar. There's much wheel-spinning, and then - 56 minutes in! - Nancy finally breaks loose and goes on a roaring rampage of revenge.

Attack of the 50 Foot Woman has, at most, ten minutes' worth of plot, stretched out for more than an hour, and only very little is in any way related to a giantess in skimpy clothing stomping on people. I can't begin to imagine how a 1950s audience, lured in by the poster, reacted to this. Screenwriter Mark Hanna attempts to paper over the thinness of the storyline by introducing random subplots - for example, Nancy has one of the sparkliest diamonds in the world, the famed Star of India; much is made of this, but it could be cut in its entirety - and by piling on wretched pratfalls, courtesy of Charlie the obnoxious comic relief (Frank Chase). Have goofy cops ever been funny?

Then there are the not-so-special effects. I daresay most of the film's budget must have been spent on truly stupendous amounts of papier-maché for the enormous hand props menacing the actors. It certainly can't have been invested in the effects work for the scenes of giant Nancy wreaking havoc, for the same couple of shots are recycled over and over. I kept wondering why the giants were transparent, until I realised the filmmakers were just incompetent. If you can see right through the front image, you're doing composite imaging wrong, chaps.

The film's gender politics, on the other hand, are oddly fascinating. 'You'd make a wild driver, Harry', purrs Honey; and from her name to her blatant voracious sexuality, the script clearly wants us to hate her and long for her to be punished. I can't remember the last time I saw this obvious a cinematic representation of the madonna-whore complex - if one with a twist, since the madonna, Nancy, grows fifty feet tall and goes off to crush her philandering husband and his whore. 'Maybe Mrs Archer, who has recently been feuding with her husband... has finally found a man from out of this world, a man who could love her for herself', the news anchor deadpans, and so it seems.

If Attack of the 50 Foot Woman deserves that much thought, that's thanks to the performances: Allison Hayes gives Nancy a depth not required or rewarded by the script, while William Hudson's smarmy villainy makes the merciless padding at least somewhat endurable. Their work even gives the ending - ripped off from King Kong though it may be - a certain poignancy. But the next time a science fiction vehicle wishes to waste our time, it shouldn't look so deceptively appealing.