Kaiju Film Thoughts - Zarkorr! The Invader

My wife, Michi, and I finally got around to watching the 1996 Full Moon Features kaiju flick, "Zarkorr! The Invader." And because I love you all so very much, I decided that I'm going to share my thoughts on it with you all. Zarkorr! The Invader... is... a movie... that exists. I guess... The movie is actually rather promising at the start. Especially for those of you who want the kaiju to be in the film right away. A neat sequence is shown with a mountain bursting with red light to reveal the title monster, which, admittedly, isn't really that bad looking. Zarkorr has a pretty decent design and the suit is actually of fairly decent quality. Zarkorr almost seems to be an Ultraman quality kaiju. So, I was impressed at the get go.

Then it all fell apart.

All of the actual plot parts of this movie are garbage. All of the acting is subpar, with really unfunny jokes jammed in for good measure. The characters are all flat as can be expected and take up the majority of the film. More often than not, I'm a defender of human interaction scenes in kaiju movies. But not here. Oh certainly not. Whenever Zarkoor is not on screen, this movie is really boring. I wish it was "So bad it's good." It's not. I've seen movies that were of that sort. "Reptilicus" and "The Giant Claw" come to mind. But those movies were fun, at the very least. This movie almost put us to sleep. And you'd better learn to like these characters, because outside of the beginning, two brief appearances in between, and the ending, Zarkorr is barely in this movie. I mean Godzilla in 2014 had more screen time.

Now let me address the kaiju scenes. Each scene is maybe about 2 minutes long. Maybe. While I stand by my opinion that Zarkorr himself looks pretty good, the miniature work was not. The buildings looked flimsy and unconvincing and random things would explode without Zarkorr even touching them. I'm pretty sure I saw Studio lights in the background of one scene. Some instances, Zarkorr would just destroy one building and the scene would end. And to show this movie's budget restraints, there were ZERO military scenes. In fact the only time Zarkorr was attacked by the military, it went unseen, as a radio news broadcast. Couldn't afford one model tank or one model airplane on a string? That's awful.

The ending of this film, I won't spoil. But it's so abrupt. The monster's defeat just... happens. The entire time I wanted Ultraman to come out and be the movie's real savior. Not even the beautifully wretched "Zarkorr" ending credits theme (Check out the video at the bottom of this post.) could save this turd of a movie. When "Reptilicus" and "The Giant Claw" are better kaiju movies than your film, you know you did something wrong.

So if you're looking for an awful movie to riff on with a group of friends, Zarkorr! is a good choice. But I can NOT recommend this as a good, or even so bad it's good, kaiju flick. It's just... bad.

I'm SO not looking forward to watching Full Moon's "Kraa! The Sea Monster."