Yonggary (1999 / 2001)

Yonggary (1999 / 2001)

Dir. Shim Hyung-rae

Alien intervention on Earth causes a 250 million-year-old creature estimated to be around fifty times the size of a Tyrannosaurus to go on a wild city-smashing rampage.

It's a South Korean monster movie with a plot that's objectively no worse than some of Japan's lesser works in the same genre, but the acting is mostly awful and the creature effects are an utter travesty. And even though it's an East Asian production, the spoken language is English, so every face-palm bad one-liner from the militia hit my cringe-meter directly.

Wikipedia reports that the creature scenes were filmed with suit actors but replaced with CGI in post-production. To me, that's like swapping a potentially worthy vinyl record collection for mp3 versions of the same. To carry the analogy further, the cartoonish look of the CGI is the audio equivalent of a 128 kbs encode, at best. It's doubly depressing when you consider that the miniatures (e.g. city buildings and alien space craft) are pretty good.

NOTE: the text above refers specifically to the 2001 'alternative cut' with 'updated' special effects, known as Yonggary: 2001 Upgrade Edition. As far as I know, the original cut of the film didn't get any kind of  home video release, or I'd have opted for it.