Zarkorr! The Invader

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.

This movie has absolutely no action and a dumb story that is way too long. It could have been cut down to trailer length and you wouldn't miss anything. The only interesting things in this mess are the elderly man who wears a diamond engagement ring and the fact that the writers have no clue what an arc welder is. Ending my sentence with a preposition is better writing than the poop these fools put on film.

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.

"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.

If you are looking for King Kong, you mispelled your search! This is a low-low budget movie that was soley >ment to entertain people in a comic sense. Here is the >most ordinary human who is the only 1 who can save the >world from a 185' 300 ton behmouth. Surely you can see the humor in that.