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Released by: Kino Studio Classics
Released on: January 5th, 2016.
Director: Ki-duk Kim
Cast: Yeong-il Oh, Jeong-im Nam, Sun-jae Lee
Year: 1967
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The Movie:
A Japanese/South Korean co-production dubbed into English and released domestically by AIP, Yongary, Monster Of The Deep, was one of a few giant monster movies to cash in on the success of Toho's Godzilla films and Daiei's competing Gamera franchise. While this one isn't on par with the best of those more original creations, it's still a lot of fun and sure to entertain anyone with a soft spot for rubber suits and flimsy miniatures.
When the movie begins, it's wedding time in South Korea! The goofball little brother of the bride in question goes missing but then find him at the side of the road holding an experimental ray-gun developed by a scientist friend! It's all good, everyone just sort of laughs it off and goes about their business even though the kid was blasting his sister and her new husband with it…. to make them itchy.
As our newlyweds settle down for their first night of married bliss, the groom gets a call from his boss, the man in charge of Korea's space program. It seems that there's an emergency and that he is the country's only hope. He hops into his spaceship and takes flight, and then we find out that there's something going on with some nuclear weapons testing, courtesy of Korea's Chinese neighbors. This causes an earthquake and that earthquake in turn unleashes a monster from the deep named Yongary! From here, the movie follows the fairly traditional kaiju business model - monster trashes stuff, military stands up to the monster and gets its ass handed to them, the cities empty and people deal with the impending end of civilization in various ways. And of course, our little friend from the opening scene and his scientist pal, they get involved in all of this too.
Will anyone be able to stop this monster from obliterating Seoul? Well, that kid did have a ray-gun….
This is undeniably goofy stuff but so too is it a lot of fun. The effects aren't always top notch (you can see the tube in Yongary's mouth that the fire shoots out of, bricks that hit people in the head are clearly boxes, stuff like that) but there are a lot of them. Once Yongary is introduced, and that happens fairly quickly, he sets about trashing a LOT of stuff, more than you'll get out of the competition of the era. Really, Yongary scores seriously high marks when it comes to wanton destruction, and the fact that he seems to eat fire as well as occasionally breathe it is pretty cool. The monster design work is also pretty strong here. He's got a big spikey tail that he uses to advance his destructive agenda and while the miniatures are clearly just that, watching the big green monster take them out is pretty entertaining.
Of course, the whole kid factor comes into play the same way here that it does in some of the Gamera movies, where our young hero strikes up an unsettlingly casual alliance with the harbinger of his country's doom. It's a hokey plot device that's overused in movies like this but at least here our little friend learns an important life lesson about the fragility of life and the inevitability of mortality. He's an obnoxious little kid, but his skills with a ray-gun are hard to ignore.
Video/Audio/Extras:
Yongary arrives on Blu-ray framed at 2.35.1 in an AVC encoded 1080p high definition transfer. By and large, the movie looks pretty good here, though not quite perfect. There is some noticeable discoloration in some spots but for the most part colors look fairly nice here. Detail is much improved over the DVD release, though this also means that the obvious miniature and rubber suit effects work are even more obvious - all part of the movie's charm, really. There are some scratches here and there but these are occasional issues, not constant ones - otherwise the movie is fairly clean. Grain is prevalent throughout the movie but this just serves to make the transfer look more film like. There are no issues with overzealous noise reduction or edge enhancement to complain about either. This is, in terms of the transfer, a noticeable upgrade over what we've seen before.
The only audio option on the disc is the film's English language track, presented here in DTS-HD 2.0 Mono with no alternate language options or subtitles provided Dialogue is audible enough and easy to follow and the monster noises sound a bit more powerful and strong here than they did on the DVD. The score also sounds a little richer and more robust than it has in the past. There is still a flatness to much of the audio that probably won't ever be eliminated but if this isn't an amazing track by any stretch it certainly gets the job done without any serious issues.
The main extra on the disc is an audio commentary by Film Historian Steve Ryfle and Genre Journalist Kim Song-ho that covers quite a bit of ground, from Ryfle's personal connections to seeing the movie as a kid to the involvement of Japanese SFX experts in the production of the film. They also discuss the current situation in regards to elements available for the original Korean version (and it's not good) and how AIP came to take this on, dub it and release it to the US market to decent success. Along the way there's some interesting observations about the effectiveness of certain scenes and some biographical and trivia style information about the cast and crew that worked on the film. Good stuff.
Aside from that we get a Trailers From Hell segment where Joe Dante takes on The Phantom From 10,000 Leagues, a trailer for The Monster That Challenged The World, static menus and chapter selection.
The Final Word:
Yongary, Monster From The Deep is definitely a Godzilla knock-off so don't expect much in the way of originality in this one, but it's a fun watch with a cool monster and some nice city smashing mayhem to go along with it. Kino's Blu-ray gives you the audio and video upgrades you'd expect and throws in a pretty solid commentary track as its key supplement.
Click on the images below for full sized Blu-ray screen caps!
