D-War director Shim Hyung-rae has no money

[adrotate banner=”1″]If you were hoping for a sequel to D-War to materialize anytime soon, keep wishing on that star, because director/producer Shim Hyung-rae is all out of money, is being sued for money he says he doesn’t have, and has a batch of legal problems beyond the no money.

Shim Hyung-rae was a former comedian who made mad dough with his comic character Younggu – the namesake of his company Younggu-Art Entertainment. He also directed the Ureme series and the Yonggary remake. His latest attempt was the gigantic flop The Last Godfather. But by July of 2011, Younggu-Art Entertainment was broke and folded, with Shim claiming to be 41 billion won in debt (~$35 million) He’s now being sued by former employees for 890 million won ($760,000) in unpaid wages.

In addition, Shim faces weapons charges for having an illegally modified gas gun (what the frak??!) and is being alleged by his spurned ex-employees that he has a gambling problem and bribes politicians and businessmen with prostitutes.

What all this means, is no more D-War. A sad day for Korea, and a sad day for America.
Shim Hyung-rae
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D-War (Review)

D-War

aka Dragon Wars: D-War

2007
Directed and written by Shim Hyung-rae

D-Wars aka Dragons Wars is the film that was announced years ago and everyone though it was crazy. Writer/director Shim Hyung-rae sounded pretty insane with his talk of an epic Korean movie set in LA with dragons blasting everything, and rumor was this was a giant money pit. But investors were hooked, film was created, and soon a trailer emerged that showed dragons and lizard armies marching around LA while a giant snake thing slithers around. This created instant buzz, but it would be another year before D-War hit theaters. Internet weirdos like myself were salivating at the thought of a big-budgeted extravaganza that would either be incredibly awesome or incredibly terrible. Little did we know that we would be getting both in the same movie! For fifteen glorious minutes D-Wars becomes the best movie ever made. However, those fifteen minutes are stuck in the dead center of some of the crappiest writing, acting, logic, and cinematic efforts of the decade. But that’s a good thing, as it makes this review more interesting.

We got Korean dragons. We got subtitles. We got American second rate actors. Shim Hyung-rae is the man responsible for the remake of the Korean daikaiju film Yonggary which became known as Reptillian. The love for this man of giant lizards trashing cities would seem weird were it not for Japan. Still, the concept for D-Wars sounded pretty far out. It depends heavily on Korean myth as well as some random new things. Yuh Yi Joo, Imoogi, Bochun, Atrox, Buraki, Dawdler, the vocabulary you need to learn for this movie reads like some second rate Pokemon/Yu-Gi-Oh crap! The amount of plot-related alphabet soup words is above and beyond the norm for a giant monster movie. It is distracting, and leaves the audience confused and angry. I don’t want to be angry when watching a monster movie, I want to see giant lizards f-ing things up!

And boy do things get f-ed up! The level of utter chaos here during the money sequence is beautiful. Shim Hyung-rae manages to take to school a squad of previous genre failures. Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla only wishes it had this kind of great monster sequences. For those of you upset over the lack of helicopters vs. dragons the posters for Reign of Fire promised us, despair not, for your cup runneth over in D-Wars! Did you wish that the Gungan army in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was really an army of metal-clad badasses who blow the crap out of innocent villagers? You better start believing in the Blue Fairy because we got there here as well!

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Dragon Wars to Fish War?

[adrotate banner=”1″]I’ve been waiting for the Korean movie D-War for over a year, as it looks like it will be a gigantic mess of a film, but it’s also becoming one of the most expensive Korean films in history. (UPDATE: Here is the full review!) A film where dragons attack in modern day that might not be as terrible as Reign of Fire is intriguing. Hyung Rae Shim is the director, but it looks like he had plans of a different film to do afterward. A writer for Twitch got a hold of a book that mentioned the next film…Fish War!

The synopsis:

In the deep, bottomless sea … There are undersea cities where mutated fishes with highly developed intellectual power live together peacefully. But, they got into rage and swore revenge against human beings who continue to catch fishes indiscriminately. One of those days, mysterious events started happening, such as pleasure boats at sea sunk and submarines exploded in the sea. Finally, fishes declared a war against human beings on land and came out on the ground to conquer the human beings with highly advanced weapons and military strength, several times more developed than those of human beings. Human beings was defeated instantly by fishes equipped with bombers shaped like a stingray, battle tanks like an octopus, and special forces like a seahorse, and finally put the world under the control of fishes, not of human beings anymore. At court, Dr. Octopus sentenced human beings who habitually tormented fishes. At a sushi restaurant, a catfish, puffing cigars, waited for dishes made of human beings. And fishes caught and refridgerated human beings as exactly human beings did to fishes and completely controlled the whole world. In Japan, meanwhile, Yamamoto family, the well known sushi master in business for 3 generations, became an most infamous enemy of fishes.

Fish War Poster
Fish War Poster