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mst3kproject · 5 years

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1109: Yongary: Monster from the Deep

The first time I saw Yongary was when I was on a Kaiju Eiga binge over Christmas break one year. It was on YouTube, with the sound removed for copyright infringement, and no subtitles. At the time, this didn’t bother me much. I thought I’d seen enough weird monster movies that I could guess what was going on from the visuals. It turned out I really couldn’t. Even now that I’ve seen it with sound, I’m still not sure what happened in this movie.

Korea’s top astronaut has just gotten married when he’s called off to a space emergency – somebody is testing bombs in the middle east and they need a guy in space to watch it. The bombing causes earthquakes that cross the globe until they reach Korea, where the ground cracks open to reveal, what else? An oddly rubbery and humanoid monster! Yongary proceeds to devastate the land, as oddly rubbery and humanoid monsters do, feeding on oil and taking an occasional nap, until the astronaut’s very much younger brother (I think) Icho and future brother-in-law (again, I think) Ilo discover its one weakness: itching powder.

So yeah, there’s a lot to unpack here.

If Yongary has a visual aesthetic, it’s empty pockets and boundless enthusiasm. The production appears to have had very little money and they spread it very thin, resulting in effects that are shoddy and unconvincing across the board… and yet, the people who created them went all-out, absolutely determined to wring every last jeon out of their budget. The monster suit never looks like anything but a monster suit, but they never shy away from showing it. The model cities are large and elaborate, even as they lack detail or realistic lighting. Shots showing earth from space look like a seventh grade science fair project. The matte shots are bad. The itch ray is just light reflected onto things with a mirror. It all looks terrible, but their hearts were in it.

Unfortunately, not half so much effort appears to have gone into the script, which wanders from character to character in a series of events that are connected only by the monster, and sometimes only barely. A number of things are set up as if they’re going to be very important and then are simply dropped, leaving the impression that they were only there to fill time.

What, for example, is the point of the space sequence? They drag the astronaut (whose name I never caught in the movie, and IMDB is no help) away from his honeymoon to observe this nuclear test. Some kind of failure on the spaceship, perhaps related to said test, puts him in danger but after much worry he reaches the ground safely. Wow! Our hero is a great pilot with nerves of steel! Surely this will be very important later. Maybe he will be called to do something dangerous to defeat the monster! Maybe something he saw from space, while he was out of touch with the ground, will be key to saving the day!

Uh, no. He’s not even in the rest of the movie, really, and we certainly never hear tell of the space program again. As far as I can tell, the only purpose to any of this was establishing the nuclear test (because everybody knows those create monsters) and then trying to have some tension before Yongary actually emerges. The whole sequence was filler.

Then there’s the itching ray, which first appears in the hands of little Icho as he plays a prank on the newlyweds. Exactly why Ilo has invented an itching ray, I don’t know. Was it intended to do something else and just ended up being itchy? When Icho swipes it again to use on Yongary, I figured maybe a souped-up itch ray would turn out to be what kills the monster but again, no. The itching ray doesn’t even set up anything important. I think it’s foreshadowing that itching is Yongary’s weakness, but the ray has nothing to do with the chemical allergy that brings the monster down, besides manifesting a similar symptom.

The fact that itching appears in the movie in more than one context probably makes it a motif. Why, out of all the possible themes and symbolism you could put in a movie, the makers of Yongary chose itching, I have no idea. Perhaps it represents something below the surface trying to break free, like the monster itself? If that’s the case, then it’s fitting that the source of the itching is always externally imposed: the ray and Yongary’s allergy induce itching, and the nuclear test makes the earth ‘itch’ so that Yongary breaks out. Whether this means anything deeper than that, I honestly cannot say.

Itching brings us to Icho. I’m pretty sure Icho is the actual main character of this story. He’s there at the beginning, he’s there at the end, and he’s the one who realizes what the monster’s weakness is. He even has a bit of an arc, I guess… he’s nothing but an insufferable brat at the beginning of the film, and while he continues to be bratty throughout he does develop a more mature outlook, coming to understand the need for Yongary’s destruction while still feeling sorry for the monster.

Icho is clearly supposed to have some kind of emotional bond with Yongary, but this is completely one-sided and even less justified than Kenny’s supposed friendship with Gamera. Whereas Gamera saved Kenny from falling to his death, I don’t think Yongary ever even notices Icho – which is probably all for the best, since Icho is doing things like turning off his food supply and zapping him with itching rays. Icho’s defense of Yongary is also a little more realistic than Kenny’s of Gamera. He never insists that Yongary is good and gentle, only that the monster didn’t mean to hurt anybody. This is probably true. Yongary is not presented as a creature with a personality or intentions, he is merely a force of nature, doing what giant rubber monsters do. He does not seem capable even of understanding that he is causing suffering.

What’s kind of interesting about this is that it makes it clear that Gamera, rather than Godzilla, was the primary inspiration for Yongary. The monster emerges as a result of a nuclear bombing that is never mentioned again. It eats oil and is strengthened by fire. Annoying little kids like it for no readily apparent reason. As an attempt to create a Kaiju franchise in 1967, when the genre was already well-established, it was probably inevitable that Yongary would look like a ripoff of something, but the choice of Gamera for a model seems particularly weird when we consider the ending. At the end of Gamera, the monster was sent to Mars where he would presumably continue to live without bothering humanity. This is pretty cool and appeals to children.

In Yongary, the monster dies of internal bleeding while Icho watches. This doesn’t seem to have bothered Icho but it sure disturbed Jonah and the bots, and once I saw it in a context where I understood what was happening, it made my jaw drop, too. When I think back on the deaths of monsters in Kaiju Eiga, they tend to be fairly quick affairs: in Godzilla, King of the Monsters, the oxygen-destroyer pretty much instantly skeletonizes things. Even bad-guy monsters tend to die or be driven off in one final blow or finishing move, as when Gamera throws Gaos into the volcano. When the monsters visibly suffer, like Gamera with the baby Jiger inside him, or Anguirus when Godzilla rips his tongue out, it’s shocking and unpleasant. Maybe this is because we think of these movies as being for children, or perhaps it’s the unavoidable anthropomorphic shape of the creature suits. Whatever the reason, Yongary’s death is a major tonal departure and the ‘happy ending’ that follows it makes it even weirder.

I know basically nothing about the geography of Korea, but people who do have apparently written a great deal about how important the landscape is to Yongary. According to critic Steve Ryfle, Yongary emerges in the northern part of Korea, near where the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed in 1953 – this makes him perhaps symbolic of aggression from the north, marching inexorably down the peninsula towards Seoul. Korean critic Kim Songho noted that Yongary destroys the old Seoul Capital building, a symbol of the Japanese occupation of Korea before and during World War II (the building was knocked down in the 90s for this reason).

Using your giant monster to make a political statement, particularly an anti-war or anti-colonial one, is nothing new, but I don’t think the makers of Yongary intended a unified one by this. The two political messages in the landscape seem opposed to each other: one paints Yongary as a semi-foreign force of aggression, the other as a native being destroying a symbol of foreign aggression. This isn’t a problem for me, the non-Korean viewer, and the two ideas work fine when they’re each considered in isolation, but they do speak to the overall lack of unity in the script.

That lack of unity is probably the biggest single obstacle to enjoying Yongary for what it is, rather than the ironic amusement people like me get out of bad movies. The jarring ending, the space program that is set up and then not used, and the inconsistent symbolism all make Yongary: Monster from the Deep feel like something assembled from parts rather than being a coherent whole. All movies are made by committees, but a good movie shouldn’t feel like it was.

#MST3K #reviews #yongary: monster from the deep #antiimperialist kaiju

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