A certain short-lived company called "Monster Island Entertainment", a group of people who apparently loved kaiju films, decided to live their "low-budget made for video" dreams by making this movie here. Only after having a fun time with rubber suits, explosions, model building destruction did they finally put a plot to it. The result is a rather impersonal movie involving people talking about a monster you rarely see. Oh well, at least Zarkorr still blows stuff up on occasion.

To test the human race, a group of supposedly "superior beings" send a monster to Earth, and they decree that the only person that is able to stop it is the most average person on the planet (a postal employee from New Jersey). After given his mission from a miniature "mental projection" of a mall rat, he sets out to find help from a crypto-zoologist, who of course thinks he’s crazy when he reveals the rather silly plot to her. Eventually he does get help from her as well as conspiracy theorist policeman and an eccentric wheelchair-bound hacker. After procuring an alien device located by said hacker, he points the shield-like device at the invading monster (as it was trashing a random city), reflecting it’s eye-lasers and saving the world.

I guess you can say the biggest issue with the movie is that it’s a half-hour plot extended to 81 minutes. The result is that they have a tendency of repeating the same conversations over and over again even though 50% of the audience has already figured the whole thing out (then again, the other 50% will be even more confused then the characters). The bad acting and plethora of awkward moments don’t help out much either. Still, the movie does get better as it goes on, and there is plenty of campy humor to be had.

So the question on the mind is rather or not sitting through the boring yet occasionally interesting plot is worth it to see some giant monster action. Well, the answer is "not really". It’s not that the special effects are done poorly (in fact, they’re pretty good), it’s just that there is very few scenes to watch. Every once in a while Zarkorr trashes a few buildings, but the majority of the "action" is seen off-screen with radio news reports and stuff. The "fun stuff", like seeing plastic tanks and planes attack Zarkorr, never happen. Still, the bit at the end with the large model city was decent and there is certainly enough explosions and building-punching. The monster moves a little slow at times, and perhaps it’s more "realistic" to move slowly, but it does make an exiting scene seem more boring. The good news though is that Zarkorr itself is a rather nicely-designed monsters, and the eye-lasers look great.

Considering that you can find this movie on video in the bargain bin for about three bucks, it’s actually not a bad deal. Fans of campy daikaiju movies will be somewhat entertained, as long as they don’t expect much out of it. It’s slow paced, it’s awkward, and we don’t get much action out of the monster, but it’s still not all that bad. Perhaps it’s just a case of ambitious people not realizing how small their budget actually was.

The plot was occasionally interesting
The special effects were pretty good
A number of silly characterizations to note
Zarkorr is a cool monster, and he even has his own theme song!

Lot’s of bad acting
Slow-paced and awkward at times
Not enough Zarkorr for a movie named after him
So this is the "average" human? We’re all doomed!

Credits