Zarkorr: el destructor

First, let me make it clear that I'm a big fan of bad sci-fi, especially when it involves gigantic, city-stomping monsters. But this one is so fantastically lame that I can't even like it for being bad. They apparently didn't shave enough money off the budget by skimping on the props (the only prop we have to indicate the size of the alien girl is an oversized novelty pencil, available at Spencer's Gifts for about fifteen bucks), they also decided not to outlay for concept or plot. The monster DOES look okay, in my opinion, but it doesn't have enough interaction with the backgrounds, i.e. not enough destruction to suit most fans of the genre. The general rule of giant monster movies is: If you don't have a lot of fake-looking buildings to smash, then you'd better have another fake-looking monster to wrestle with. This movie has neither. I can't make my final complaint about the movie without giving away the ending, but suffice to say the origin of the monster, and the method found to get rid of it, just don't hold water. Not even as well as most of these movies. Skip it.

OK, so it's a silly movie, but I think they knew that when they made it. And there are some neat little twists on the otherwise tired, overdone "Godzilla"-type genre. Borrowed a tape just because I knew someone in it, but I did loan it out to a couple pals, who also kinda liked it.

Yes, this movie sucks. But it's still a lot of fun to watch. Especially if you want to get rid of those annoying friends who only hang around you because they think your taste in films is "unique" and "cool", and they think the language you speak is "hip". Basically, if you've got someone hanging around you trying to absorb your personality, invite them over and make them watch Zarkorr! with you. This movie is loaded with inside jokes of a bizarre nature that the uninitiated simply WILL NOT GET. Come ON! An alien race presents itself to a postal worker, in the guise of a tiny mall chick? No one else found that funny? Or the interviews FOLLOWING the film, where the director EXPLAINS the monster camera angle? Don't see this film to entertain yourself. Rent this film to get rid of stragglers and door-to-door evangelists!

"Zarkorr" is a colossal beast (over 180 feet tall) unleashed by an alien intelligence and let loose on Earth. These same aliens select the most average doofus in the U.S. of A., a postal employee named Tommy (Rhys Pugh), to be the saviour of the human race. They give him the bare minimum of information through the use of a hologram (played as a miniature valley girl by Torie Lynch), and tell him that if he tries to avoid responsibility, Zarkorr will track him down and destroy him. Tommy's mission gets off to a VERY bad start, but he does convert a cryptozoologist (Deprise Grossman) and a cop (Mark Costello) to his cause.

Even at a fairly brief running time of 76 minutes, this Full Moon debacle is a hard slog for a while. Its hero is a useless, whiny lump who only becomes more engaging as a character towards the end. But the hacker character - excuse me, "cybernaut" - played by Charles Schneider is far and away the most intolerable idiot in this turkey. You can't wait for his scenes to be over. The scientist and the cop were the two main characters who didn't get on this viewers' last nerve.

Unfortunately, too much of the running time here is devoted to uninspired banter between the unlikely heroes as they endlessly talk about how to defeat the creature. (Apparently, there's not a single man-made weapon on Earth that can harm it.) Zarkorr itself is fun - for a bargain basement knock off of Godzilla, anyway - but its admittedly cool scenes of destruction only take up about 10% of those 76 minutes. And those 76 minutes don't exactly fly by.

Die hard devotees of these types of films may find more value here, but this viewer found it too tiresome overall.

Four out of 10.

This is an utterly forgettable picture. A friend of mine picked it up in a bargain bin at a local rental place for $.50. He should have demanded a refund. Or at least a discount.

The plot is something like this: A giant monster threatens the earth and aliens decide that the most average human being on the planet must be chosen to save the earth. Thus a tiny holographic space alien appears before a postal worker and tells him that he's "it."

The devil is in the details when it's time to rate a movie, and on that count Zarkorr! The Invader fails miserably. The monster Zarkorr only has a few brief moments on the screen, totaling maybe 5 minutes tops (with a generous estimate). The cute alien hologram has even less screen time and might be the most interesting character to look at, and only because she's wearing a "teeny bopper" stereotype outfit, complete with a teasingly short pleated skirt. The climactic final battle with the monster is over before you can say "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, over." In the next moment you are left to ponder whether you've just experienced a train wreck or if someone just drained 3 pints of blood out of you.

Admittedly though, this movie did deliver one line that my friends and I to this day still repeat and laugh at and was about the only bright spot in this otherwise abysmal picture. As the cast of "protagonists" is being "interrogated" by the fuzz, one of them responds to the questions with the statement "What are you, some kind of a question asker?" It is delivered in such a preposterous manner that if you're sitting with a group of friends (who won't be your friends long if you actually talked your friend into watching this) you may actually experience a howl or two of incredulous laughter.

While this is no Manos or Eegah (It's not even bad enough to be classically bad) this movie will still bore you with its awful dialog, unimaginative characters, and nonexistent special effects and still deserves to inhabit the bottom 100.

1.5/10