Unseen Terror 2020: Day 5

I'll admit that I wasn't planning on knocking out my mandatory "kaiju" flick this early into my yearly marathon, but I figured that a quick break was sorely needed before I dived back into the Texas Chainsaw franchise (specifically the remake and its ilk). There was one major problem however: as widespread and numerous as the "giant monster" genre might be, I was running out of pictures to watch. Hell at this point in 2020, I now own physical copies of nearly every Godzilla or Gamera movie on VHS, DVD, or Blu-Ray (which is something I thought would never happen due to the insanity that is licensing properties with Toho and Kadokawa). Luck would happen to be on my side though via the free streaming service known as Tubi. If you haven't checked them out before, there are some seriously good hidden gems on there from every genre you could think of. In this case, I discovered the 1996 oddity known as Zarkorr! The Invader.

The plot revolves around an average schmo named Tommy, who receives a visit from a pint-sized lady during an average evening of watching cartoons after he has clocked out from his Postal Service job. She warns him of a terrible beast named Zarkorr that has recently been unleashed on Earth, and that Tommy is the one who is destined to stop him. Naturally he has some trouble believing all of this, but all it takes is one glimpse at the news on TV to convince him that he isn't going crazy. With this new task in mind, he joins up with an attractive cryptozoologist and a random policeman in hopes that he can find out exactly HOW he can stop Zarkorr. 

Zarkorr! The Invader comes to us from the oh-so-kinda reliable Full Moon Features, who have blessed the horror community over the decades with stuff like the Puppet Master series and Prehysteria! (a favorite of mine as a kid). This was one of two pictures released under their "Monster Island Entertainment" label, which I'm guessing they thought would be more thriving considering how popular the kaiju genre is. Unfortunately, the giant monster movie genre was in a strange place at the time. Godzilla was dead and Gamera was experiencing a (GREAT) revival overseas that wouldn't hit our shores for a few years. Full Moon themselves had mostly been relegated to the realm of straight-to-video, but that doesn't mean they'd stop trying to make some mindless fun once in a while. In that regard, Zarkorr ALMOST works. The titular monster doesn't get a great deal of time on screen, but he certainly has a nifty look to him (amusingly enough, his roars are that of the Tyrannosaurus from Jurassic Park) and his scenes of rampaging are charming in their nostalgic simplicity. He fares a lot better than the human cast though. Our leads range from irritating to dull, with the only really likeable one of the bunch being Torie Lynch's "Proctor," and even then she disappears from the film after the first ten or so minutes. She plays the aforementioned valley girl-looking tiny advisor who basically explains the entire plot of the flick to Tommy before deciding that she doesn't need to be in the movie anymore.

If you're thinking to yourself "this doesn't sound particularly scary," then you are correct. This was an honest-to-Lemmy mistake on my part, because unlike old school monster pictures such as the original Gojira or Them!, there aren't a great deal of horror elements to be found in Zarkorr! The Invader. It has more in common with weekday afternoon programs like Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers or weekend evening shows on Nickelodeon (I'd say you could show this to your kids but there are some random curse words thrown around and some sexual innuendo). That all being said, it isn't a terribly....uh, terrible movie. It runs for about eighty minutes, has a fun monster, and a fantastically cheesy end credits song. And trust me when I say, it's far less offensive than other Western productions like the American version of Varan or The Giant Claw.

Unlike the latter however, I don't know if our titular monster is "as big as a battleship."