North Korea has recently berated US President Barack Obama for letting the controversial movie "The Interview" open in theaters this past week. According to BBC, the National Defense Commission (NDC) has also accused the US of shutting down North Korea's internet, and has compared Obama to "a monkey."

Sony Pictures originally pulled "The Interview" from theaters after receiving threats and undergoing a cyber-attack. However, Obama criticized the decision, and the movie was able to open in select theaters and online.

As a result, North Korean leaders are furious, as the comedy depicts the assassination of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un. The Guardian reports that the NDC (which is led by Kim and is the country's top governing body) has since claimed Obama was behind the release of the movie, and has described the film as a "dishonest and reactionary movie hurting the dignity of the supreme leadership of the DPRK [North Korea] and agitating terrorism."

An official statement from the NDC reads, "Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest," and "[he] is the chief culprit who forced the Sony Pictures Entertainment to indiscriminately distribute the movie." The statement then went on to blame Washington for the intermittent outages of North Korean websites this past week, and "groundlessly linking the unheard of hacking at the Sony Pictures Entertainment to the DPRK."

The US Government has since declined to say whether it was behind the shutdown, prompting a North Korean commission spokesman to say, "...the US, a big country, started disturbing the internet operation of major media of the DPRK, not knowing shame like children playing tag."

An analysis from BBC reads that North Korean defectors sometimes smuggle USB sticks with films and soaps into the closed-off country, and there is a view in the south that these are a particularly powerful means of undermining the regime in Pyongyang. For these reasons, the showing of "The Interview" could actually pose a great threat to North Korean regime, and helps to explain why it has been taken as a serious offense.