'The Great Monster Yonggary')[1] is a 1967 kaiju film directed by Kim Ki-duk, with special effects by Kenichi Nakagawa.

[4] The film stars Oh Yeong-il, Kwang Ho Lee, Nam Jeong-im, with Cho Kyoung-min as Yongary.

In the film, a giant reptilian monster lays waste to Seoul after being awakened by an earthquake triggered by a nuclear bomb test.

The quake strikes Panmunjom, where a photographer takes pictures of the ground splitting, which reveals a giant creature moving inside.

Icho takes a light device from Il-Woo's lab and shines it on an immobile Yongary, which triggers him to wake up.

The screenwriter originally intended for Yongary to be a single-celled organism from space that mutated into a giant monster after exposure from radiation.

[9] Film critic and scholar Kim Song-ho revealed that in the original Korean script the name of the country conducting nuclear tests (the Middle East in the English version) was originally called "Orebia", with the location of the test being the "Goma Desert".

[30] 15,000 lightbulbs were used for the miniature sets,[31] with two-thirds of the available lighting equipment from studios in the country assembled for the film.

AIP attached Salvatore Billitteri to supervise the English version's post-production and had the film dubbed by Titra Studios.

U.S. ownership of the film kept changing: AIP was picked up by Filmways, Inc. in 1979, which merged with Orion Pictures, which was later acquired by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1997.

[36] Toei's name was featured in posters in various territories, leading to confusion that the film was a complete Japanese production.

[47] StompTokyo.com felt the film was too similar to Gamera, the Giant Monster but stated that "Yongary is one of the better Godzilla-inspired rip-offs.

While the effects are rarely very realistic, there are a lot of them, with probably more city destruction than would show up in any of the original Godzilla movies made after this point.

[49] MGM released a widescreen remastered version of the film on DVD as part of their Midnite Movies line in September 2007, paired on a double-sided disc as a double feature with Konga.

[52] Kino Lorber Studio Classics released the film on Blu-ray and DVD in January 2016, which featured an audio commentary by Steve Ryfle (author of Japan's Favorite Mon-Star: The Unofficial Biography of Godzilla) and Korean critic/scholar Kim Song-ho.

[53] Due to the original prints having been lost, the film became unavailable on television and home media in its native country for 44 years until it was broadcast on television in South Korea for the first time on June 19, 2011; however, it was the English version that aired with Korean subtitles taken from the film's original Korean script.

It rises up from the ground in the place where the war stopped and resumes fighting and it swoops down from the North to destroy the city of Seoul all over again.

"[56] Film scholar and critic Kim So-Young published an essay in 2000 where he noted how the evacuation and destruction scenes in the original Godzilla film reminded Japanese audiences of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the evacuation and destruction scenes in Yongary similarly reminded Korean audiences of the Korean War.