More than the monumental gold statues, the peasant-doctors, or the old women toiling away with shovels as he passed, it was probably North Korea’s highway that bewildered Frank Zagarino most.

The way that, in the stillness of the Pyongyang night, a streetcleaner would sweep the road and its empty lanes—and the next morning different workers would return, tidying the already spotless tarmac all over again.

“Everybody had to have a job,” Zagarino says, “so strange things would happen.” 

But even in a country as bizarre as North Korea, he probably had more reason to wonder than most. 

For if most foreigners come as seasoned diplomats or academics, Zagarino spent nine weeks in the country as an actor, shooting scenes in North Korean harbors and shooting villains in North Korean paddy fields. 

Yet if that image of Zagarino—blonde, Californian, 6’2” and muscular—unleashed on the hermit kingdom is fantastical enough, the film he starred in is even more outlandish.

The invention of a North Korean despot and an Italian director, the 1988 movie “Ten Zan: The Ultimate Mission” is perhaps the oddest film to ever emerge from the country. 

But for all that, it is still worth seeing—and not just for the comically nonsensical plot. Even in its gaping amateurishness, “Ten Zan” speaks to a North Korean fascination with the moving image that stretched back decades. 

And though its themes poke at the darkest national obsessions, it is hard not to smile at the utter weirdness of it all, as if those streetcleaners on the highway were somehow swallowed up and distilled into 84 minutes of film.

By 1986, Ferdinando Baldi was desperate. The movies that had bankrolled his career for decades—wild romps with names like Carambola! and Smooth Velvet, Raw Silk—quickly seemed to be slipping towards irrelevance. 

Italians like Baldi, after all, might have become famous for mixing trashy violence with surreal direction, but what was that when compared to American money?

Not even gimmicks like 3D glasses—worn by punters for Baldi’s 1981 Western Comin’ At Ya!—could compete with Indy shooting Nazis or killer sharks let loose on the beach at Martha’s Vineyard. 

Yet Baldi stumbled on, in 1986 making Warbus, an action flick set during the Vietnam War. The film itself would soon be forgotten—but not before Baldi brought it to the Cannes Film Festival. And it would be there, among the palmtrees of the Midi about 9,000 kilometres from Pyongyang, that the journey to Ten Zan would begin. 

Approached by a group of North Koreans after a screening of Warbus, Baldi was asked to make a movie in their country. 

He quickly agreed, for, as Zagarino describes it, the North Koreans were offering “everything and the world” to Baldi and his Italian crew. For Baldi, then, Ten Zan was just the push he needed to revive a lagging career. 

But the North Koreans had their own reasons to approach him. After all, they had been developing their own movie industry for decades, especially after Kim Jong Il took charge at the propaganda ministry. 

The 1988 movie “Ten Zan: The Ultimate Mission” is perhaps the oddest film to ever emerge from [North Korea]

A cinephile himself—he reportedly had a library of over 20,000 videos—Kim wrote a treatise on cinema in 1973 and recommended classics to his people. A few years later, he famously kidnapped Shin Sang-ok, a distinguished South Korean director, forcing him to make a number of movies before his eventual escape in 1986. 

Kim Jong Il boosted North Korean filmmaking in other ways too. If earlier attempts were pure propaganda—lionizing DPRK conscripts and educating civilians in the “correct view” of the Korean War—he had more subtle tastes. 

“Kim Jong Il wanted to create a new film industry for the entertainment of the people,” says Antoine Coppola, a filmmaker and professor at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul. “In that sense, more diversity appears in North Korean films, with the propaganda more in the background.” 

A few movies made during these years, in fact, were genuinely impressive. “The Flower Girl,” a 1972 film set during the Japanese occupation of Korea, was praised throughout the communist bloc. 

The DPRK experimented with action films too. By the mid-1980s, North Korean cinemagoers were able to watch the illegitimate son of a nobleman battle ninjas in Hong Kil Dong or a giant monster save peasant rebels in Pulgasari. 

All the same, North Korean cinema had plenty to learn, especially now that socialist allies like China were trialing newer techniques. Even with Shin Sang-ok, at the helm, 1985’s Pulgasari still feels fist-bitingly inept, the eponymous dragon more armored sheep than terrifying demon.

For Johannes Schoenherr, author of “North Korean Cinema: A History,” Ten Zan likely began as an excuse to learn more about Western filmmaking. Baldi probably had to hand over his sophisticated equipment before leaving, he notes.

Zagarino makes a similar point, describing how North Korean cinematographers, stuntmen, and makeup artists enthusiastically shadowed Baldi and his crew on their trips across the North Korean countryside. 

And if Baldi was eager to film in the DPRK for the sake of his bank balance, the North Koreans themselves may have had similar ideas. 

As Coppola points out, the Scientific Educational Korea animation studio had unofficially been hawking North Korean filmmaking to the highest bidder for several years.

“I think Kim, after failing to compete with international films, tried to create secret business with the international film industry, lending his facilities for films that didn’t even mention they were made in North Korea.”

That would certainly explain one of Ten Zan’s many foibles: the setting. Though it was clearly filmed in the DPRK, Korean signs were pasted over with Chinese alternatives, while characters vaguely allude to East Asia without pinpointing a country. 

After kidnapping his love interest about halfway through Ten Zan: The Ultimate Mission, one of the main villains explains how he knows that Frank Zagarino—or rather Lou Mamet, his ex-commando character—will try and save her.

“The stranger will come for her, and do you know why?” he asks, grinning maniacally, his eyes like embers. “Because the girl—is still a virgin!” 

If you want to appreciate how strange Ten Zan is, simply understand this: that moment, totally unsignposted and irrelevant to the story, is probably only the third or fourth most baffling of the film. 

The story goes like this. Lou Mamet is hired to defeat a Lithuanian scientist who kidnaps women and uses their “youthful DNA” to create a race of supermen. Dozens of explosions, several lobotomized conversations, and one mildly homoerotic scene with a watering hose later, he succeeds. 

Yet you leave Ten Zan with more questions than answers. Why, for example, is the organization that recruits Mamet known, of all things, as Final Solution Research? Why, come to that, does the Lithuanian eugenicist hire Manet to destroy his own operation? 

And why, when the East Asian setting is kept so nondescript, are there several references to the fact that badass mercenary-for-hire Lou Mamet hails from—where else—Mattituck, Long Island?

Even when explanations are forthcoming, they make little sense. Preparing to storm an enemy base, Mamet and his sidekick Ricky (played by Romano Kristoff) have a moment of reflection: 

Mamet: “It’s time. I’ll see you at Ten Zan. That’s what the Marines said when at Iwo Jima.”

Ricky: “The mountain of paradise. Instead it turned out to be hell.”

Mamet: “It was a way of saying good luck.”

Ricky: “I’ll see you at Ten Zan then.”

That, of course, clarifies the title. But why this arbitrary reference to a battle the Japanese and Americans fought over 40 years before Ten Zan was made?

On that point, at least, we might have some answers. Baldi later claimed that he had planned to make Ten Zan about the Pacific War for real, but the North Koreans overruled him.

That would probably explain the jumbled plot. An unnamed producer, perhaps Kim Jong Il himself, rewrote the script into a joke, though the horrible editing was done back in Italy. 

These last-minute changes may also shed light on the dreadful acting—so bad, jokes Zagarino, that watching himself play Mamet on YouTube makes him almost want to shoot himself. 

Yet listen to Zagarino talk and you get the sense that Ten Zan turned out as such a mess for more than the specifics of the casting or the plot. He remembers, for example, that one of the crew members was taken ill at their hotel in Pyongyang.

But when a doctor was called, he was too busy picking vegetables in a field to come. Or how his route to the studio was blocked by a 40-foot gold statue of Kim Il Sung.

Or how, instead of setting up a fake front for a scene, Baldi’s North Korean helpers would meticulously build an entire house. 

If these eccentricities can be dismissed as amusing or annoying, other dealings with the North Koreans hurt the movie in more direct ways. 

The foreigners were promised cars and drivers to take them to filming locations outside Pyongyang, but often had to manage with small minivans. Extra cameras or more lights were unavailable too, while Baldi was stopped from scouting out shooting locations in advance. 

“It was like they were all trying to give us as little as possible,” says Zagarino, “because they would have to answer to the person above them.” 

Language was another problem. Zagarino was the only American on set, so had to contend with a confusing trifecta of Korean-Italian-English translations. And though the movie was filmed in English, with Baldi adopting the suitably Hollywood moniker ‘Ted Kaplan’ in the credits, some of the Italian actors struggled with the language. 

You can notice this even now. Mark Gregory, the actor who utters that immortal virgin line, occasionally feels like an eager schoolboy reciting Cicero—with plenty of enthusiasm, in other words, but without much idea of what is actually going on.

In the end, Ten Zan was a failure, and not just artistically. Though it was meant to rekindle his career, it would be the last film Ferdinando Baldi made before his death in 2007. Nor would Ten Zan enjoy much of an audience. Apart from a few screenings at small European film festivals, it was basically forgotten. 

The cast ended up similarly obscure. Mark Gregory is supposedly working as a marketing specialist in Milan, while Romano Kristoff was last rumoured to own a restaurant in the Philippines. 

Frank Zagarino, for his part, owns an outdoor movie rental company in the same sleepy pocket of Long Island as Mattituck. Now in his sixties, hearing him talk of his kids or his business makes that long-ago trip to Pyongyang feel like a dream. 

So as the credits roll, and Lou Mamet literally sails off into the sunset, are you able to use Ten Zan to learn any wider truths about North Korea or its cinema? Schoenherr thinks not. 

Apart from some interesting locations—the Koryo Hotel or the Pyongyang subway—he argues that it’s just too muddled to analyze properly.

“Ten Zan is very different from North Korean films. In North Korean films the plot makes sense.” 

Other experts, though, do see something worth studying amid the madness. For one thing, says Coppola, its preoccupation with eugenics is unsurprising in a country that allegedly kills disabled citizens at birth. 

Referencing the national ideology of the Kim regime, meanwhile, Coppola notes that Jucheist men are “supposed to be a superior race.” 

More broadly, Ten Zan might also tell us something about how Kim Jong Il imagined—and his successors still imagine—North Korea as a perfect society. 

As Hyangjin Lee, a professor of intercultural communication at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, explains, the very fact that Ten Zan was assiduously set outside the country might be an implication that violent shootouts are impossible inside the peaceful, prosperous DPRK. 

Speak to Zagarino, though, and his reflections are more personal. He recalls, for instance, how he would pass old women in their seventies and eighties with shovels, building sidewalks on their hands and knees. 

These sorts of images, he admits, are just impossible for most Americans to understand. Yet Zagarino ultimately emphasizes that the regular North Koreans he met were, whatever their circumstances, caring and humane. 

He would spend his nights off playing pool with them in his hotel—and when he finally came to say goodbye, he broke down in tears. 

“They were fantastic people, moral people. They cared about their families like we care about our families.”

Amid the absurdities of Ten Zan—let alone the regime that birthed it—that is probably worth remembering. 

Edited by Oliver Hotham