SPACE MONSTER WANGMAGWI (1967) – SOUTH KOREAN MOVIE

SPACE MONSTER WANGMAGWI (1967) – This attempt by South Korea to compete with Japan in kaiju films came out the same year as the much more famous Yongary, Monster from the Deep. Space Monster Wangmagwi was produced by an all-South Korean team, while Yongary was made with Japanese assistance.

Obviously, neither of those South Korean movies redefined the genre, but in my opinion Space Monster Wangmagwi, despite being in black & white, is nearly as much fun as Yongary, Monster from the Deep. That former flick begins with aliens from the planet Gamma arriving near Earth in an interesting-looking spaceship. Not revolutionary, but eye-catching.

The Gammans have oddly-colored faces but that’s all we can see of them in their suits of armor, which are like the Tin Man meets the Cybermen. The conversation among these aliens as they orbit our planet is the usual grim but hilariously contradictory alien gibberish in kaijus about how Earth stands no chance, or maybe we do, and their monster Wangmagwi will eat everyone on Earth and THEN the space fleet will move in. Or he’ll attack in unison with the fleet. Hey, just keep it cazh, dude!

The Gamman leader claims his people have been preparing to invade our planet for 10 years but then makes remarks indicating they have no idea what they may face from Earth’s military. Now THAT was a productive 10-year preparation period. These guys make the Mysterians seem like a model of efficiency!

At any rate, the invaders state they have selected South Korea as their initial target because an approaching monsoon will help provide cover for their space vessel. Wangmagwi was ejected from the Gamman craft and fell to the South Korean countryside.

We viewers are told that Earth’s gravity and air pressure is so much lighter than on Gamma that Wangmagwi will grow to enormous size immediately. The monster does this and goes on a rampage amid the usual models of towns and cities that we all love seeing stomped in kaiju films. 

The South Korean government canceled all leave for its service members and ordered all of them to report to their base. Nam Koong Won played our lead character, airforce pilot Jeong-Wan Oh while Seon-kyeong Kim portrayed his anxious bride to be Ahn-hee.

Ahn-hee and her mother prove to be idiotically detached from reality by going through their preparations in anticipation of having the wedding take place the next day as originally planned. HOW?! Seoul and other cities are being evacuated!

Ahn-hee’s dramatics and tears boggle the mind as she and dear old Mom delude themselves that the ceremony will go off without a hitch. As Wangmagwi’s rampage continues, Ahn-hee and her mother STILL show up at the temple, with the former in her elaborate wedding gown.

Seoul is mostly a ghost town by now, with no wedding guests on hand and the groom still flying in the repeated attacks on the monster at large. When Mom tells Ahn-hee that even the minister has failed to show up, the two ladies finally accept reality and try to flee the city in tears.

What can I say about Wangmagwi? His kaiju costume is so low effort he just looks like a giant guy who wrapped a football field’s artificial turf around himself. The monster’s mask presents a fanged, ugly face and gaping maw, while his clawed hands are so awkwardly made it looks like he is constantly flipping off the viewers and all of South Korea.

When Wangmagwi crosses paths with Ahn-hee and her equally foolish mother, the monster picks up the bride in one hand/ paw and carries her along with him for the rest of his rampage. Why, I don’t know. Nor do I know why – despite all the damage he’s causing – Wangmagwi has yet to eat any Earthlings like the Gammans claimed he would do.

As the Gammans’ Operation Whatevs continues, this movie gets its regulation Little Kid side hero like Japan’s Gamera always had, as did South Korea’s Yongary. In English, the kid (Sang-cheol Jeon) is called Squirrel. For my money, he’s the best supporting kid character in ANY kaiju movie from ANY country.

Squirrel not only does NOT wear short pants he also does not side with the monster wreaking havoc! This kid has guts and he climbs up Wangmagwi’s body to his head, then enters the marauding creature’s ear.

Our ballsy homeless kid literally unzips his fly and pisses in Wangmagwi’s ear (!) in a scene that challenges Yongary’s rectal bleeding for sheer “Why the hell is this in the movie?” weirdness. Next, Squirrel uses his trusty knife to SLICE THROUGH both of the monster’s ear-drums while holding on for dear life and dodging artillery from the armed forces attacking Wangmagwi. 

At one point, Squirrel loses his footing and nearly falls through the monster’s mostly empty head and out one of his nostrils like we’re getting an homage to North by Northwest. Eventually, the kid falls into Wangmagwi’s outstretched palm, which still holds Ahn-hee.

Why the creature so delicately holds these two tiny creatures for so long is never revealed and we fans of bad movies wouldn’t have it any other way. Oh, and I forgot to mention Wangmagwi’s long-range weapon – his forehead has a hole in it which shoots foamy chemicals that set buildings on fire as he stomps along.   

So, while our monster continues its rampage, which consists largely of stomping the ruins of buildings he’s already leveled rather than focusing on new targets, Ahn-hee develops a protective attitude toward Squirrel in Wangmagwi’s palm prison.   

Scattered here and there throughout the movie, we viewers have been subjected to incredibly lame comic relief from some of the fleeing victims of the space monster’s destruction. Two groaningly broad middle-aged men make a series of bets with each other about their comparative courage in the face of danger. One of them even wagers his own wife! 

Even weirder, in one tightly-packed mob of refugees, a businessman takes the general order to evacuate VERY seriously. He can’t keep his bowels in check any longer and desperately steps to one side, lowers his pants and craps onto a newspaper. Seriously.

If you’re wondering where he got the newspaper, he grabbed it off another guy who – I swear to God – PUNCHED a boy shining his shoes and stole it, only for Bowel Man to take it from him in turn. And, as hard as this may be to believe, when Crap Man was straining at his stool his face was intercut with the strained face of a nearby pregnant woman who was giving birth in that same crowd of evacuees.

Elsewhere, a looter gets trampled to death by a panicked crowd before he can get away with his loot. I’m assuming this is not meant to be funny but who can be sure in this flick?

As Space Monster Wangmagwi hurtles toward its finale, we rejoin our heroic pilot and groom to be as he and his military superiors exchange the most inane non-sequitur remarks about what their next plan of attack will be. Hilariously, little of it makes sense and some of it is contradictory.

At length, the only definite development seems to be that if South Korea’s wonder-weapon fails against Wangmagwi, they’ll have no option except using nukes on the monster. None of this is belly-laugh funny, but it’s genuinely comical as these woefully indecisive military men half-ass their way through the crisis. 

Our male lead Jeong-wan Oh gets the glory of flying his jet with whatever the wonder weapon is inside it right into Wangmagwi, while simultaneously bailing out. As he descends via parachute, he scoops up Ahn-hee and Squirrel in his arms in comically unconvincing fashion, thus freeing them from the space monster’s loose grasp. 

As the trio make their way to safety, they see that the plane-with-wonder-weapon ramming into Wangmagwi … did nothing but start a small fire on part of his torso. HOWEVER, the Gammans make the truly defeatist move of giving up, stating that the Earthlings are more dangerous than they thought they were. (?)

Not only do they decide to retreat back to Gamma, forever abandoning their planned invasion of our planet, they push the button that detonates an explosive they strapped to the monster’s back, blowing him to smithereens. Hey, and we thought the Earth forces were ineptly run!

And so, the world is saved, Ahn-hee and Jeong-wan Oh reschedule their wedding and they decide to adopt the heroic street urchin Squirrel. The End.

Space Monster Wangmagwi is low on destroyed models, even lower on logic toward the end, and, though dismissed by some critics as boring, I feel it deserves So Bad It’s Good status. All of my fellow fans of Psychotronic Movies would likely enjoy this obscure, not always predictable kaiju flick.

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