Yonggary (1999) – Review

The 90s were something of a banner decade for Kaiju, with numerous genre efforts thundering into town on a yearly basis. Not only did Toho manage to bring Godzilla’s Heisi Era home in style by publicly killing the King of the Monsters, it managed to resurrect him too with the kick off of the Millennium Era. Elsewhere, both Mothra and Gamera got brand, spanking new trilogies, with the latter standing head and shell above the rest as one of the definitive clutch of Kaiju movies ever made and the only shadow cast across the entire experience was the bungled effort that was Roland Emmerich’s American take on Godzilla that gave us a confused Matthew Broderick, a Puff Daddy single and a poor attempt at the Big G that saw him love tuna, get pregnant and be embarrassingly vunerable to missile strikes.
However, while the 1998 version of Godzilla seemed like a woeful low point in an otherwise healthy decade, there was one other Kaiju film release that made Roland Emmerich seem like the ghost of Ishiro Honda. You see, somehow, Yonggary returned…

Somewhere in Southeast Asia, the stern Dr. Campbell and the benevolent Dr. Hughes lead an archeological exhibition into some caves to make the stunning discovery of alien remains and hieroglyphics leading the location of a huge skeleton of a enormous dinosaur. After a mystery explosion, Hughes is presumed dead but his obsessed and wildly overacting colleague launches a full scale excavation of the remains, much to the worry of his assistant, Holly.
Two years later and while the maniacal Campbell is losing workers daily to freak accidents, the gargantuan fossil has almost been fully uncovered. But despite the fact the deranged doctor has gone so far as to hire shifty photojournalist Bud Black to document his findings, his thunder may be stolen by the fact that an alien space ship is in orbit around the earth and are happily picking off satellites like drunken rednecks on a shooting range. Their endgame, unsurprisingly, is total domination of the planet and their weapon of mass destruction is the freshly reanimated monster skeleton which now boasts unconvincing CGI flesh and is named Yonggary. While the aliens teleport Yonggary around the world in a random attempt to equate the conquest of a planet with major property damage, the military throw everything they’ve got at the fire breathing monster, including attack choppers, fighter jets and even gung-ho warheads with jetpacks on their backs, but nothing seems to have much of an effect.
However, when Dr. Hughes reveals he’s not quite as dead as we all first thought, he and Holly may discover how to end Yonggary’s reign of terror once and for all.

The more you look at the details of Yonggary’s existence, the more illogical the movie ends up being as virtually nothing about the projects origins deem to make any conventional sense. Those who know their obscure Kaiju lore will know that the original Yongary surfaced to make rubbery trouble back in 1967 when South Korea tried their luck at crafting a giant monster movie. The results weren’t exactly great and certainly didn’t give Godzilla any sleepless nights fearing that his throne was in jeopardy. Fast forward to 1999, and presumably spurred on by Emmerich’s take on the King of the Monsters, the Koreans once again figured it was nigh time to throw their swimming pool-sized hat into the area and shovelled a whole chunk of change into the blockbuster, apparently making it the most expensive South Korean production ever at the time. They should have saved their won, because it becomes fairly apparent from the get go that maybe that 98 Godzilla wasn’t so bad after all…
The first thing you realise is that despite Yonggary being a South Korean movie financed by South Korean money, the filmmakers have bizarrely decided to make all their main characters white, English speaking Americans and cast them with people who clearly don’t know how to act. Thus begins a showcase of hideous performances that could easily rival those seen in the likes of Birdemic or Tommy Wiseau’s the room and it would be pretty funny if every single line reading didn’t register to the human psyche like nails down a blackboard. While my first instinct is to suggest that almost everyone in front of the camera is just unaccustomed to acting, a more accurate accesment is to suggest that even pretending to be vaguely human is a stretch more most of these pod people, and when the only actor you recognize is the old bloke that Matt Damon morphed into at the end of Saving Private Ryan, you know you’re in deep shit.

It certainly doesn’t help that the dialogue is so clunky, it makes your average Asylum entry seem like it has the dancing wit of Billy Wilder in its corner. “If that thing was any meaner, I’d swear it was my wife!” garbles one guy while another utters the legend “Compared to this guy, Godzilla is a pussy!”. But even the most subtle and quiet of lines are delivered with all the nuance and care of a coked-up, 80s wrestling promo and after about fifteen minutes of it, you become numb to all the leaden exposition.
But surely the sight of Yonggary himself, stomping across a cityscape manages to elicit a bit of much needed awesomeness, right? Well, not really and apparently being the most expensive movie in South Korea doesn’t actually buy you that much as the titular Kaiju offers up some of the worst CGI the 90s had to offer. Worse yet, this is the improved version as, in yet another bizarre wrinkle, the movie was re-edited and re-released abroad in 2001 as Reptilian with updated visual effects. Even weirder, old-school monster suits were made and filmed for Yonggary and his climactic opponent, the crab-like Cycor, which might have given the whole deal a more forgivable, throwback nature, but the fact that we got a ton of embarrassing computer generated imagery instead is just the last nail in a battleship-sized coffin.

The fact that the plot makes no sense actually seems to be the least of Yonggary’s problems (if the aliens have another, fully formed Kaiju ready to go in the form of Cycor, then why bother resurrecting Yonggary in the first place? And why does the main monster immeadiately turn benevolent once the aliens control is broken?) and after watching the creature duck yet another salvo of missiles in an excuse to blow up more model buildings, Independence Day style, for the umpteenth time, you’ll agree that maybe Godzilla ’98 isn’t quite that bad after all.

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