• Directed by Aaron Osborne (with Michael S. Deak)
• Written by Benjamin Carr
• Starring
  • Rhys Pugh
  • Mark Hamilton
  • De’Prise Grossman
  • Charles Schneider
  • Torie Lynch
• Produced by Sally Clarke, Michael Deak, Kirk Edward Hansen, and “Robert Talbot” (Charles Band)
• Executive produced by Albert Band

There are plenty of direct-to-video B-movies out there constructed around pre-existing stock footage – military aircraft, some short snippets of monsters or spaceships, or an incomplete Asian action movie. The producer or director of the “new” finished product then comes up with a storyline which can tie the stock footage together. It’s unwieldy substitute for the creative process, but because the pre-existing footage is already paid for, it’s cheaper than shooting it fresh.

Leave it to Charles Band (excuse me, “Robert Talbot”) to find a way to bring the same “creative” process to bear on original footage. From all indications, Band hired special effects creator Michael Deak to shoot some original kaiju-style monsters in action – and only after he had that footage in hand did he venture out in search of a story. And of course, he ventured out in the direction of Benjamin Carr, everyone’s favorite Band stable whipping boy.

Well, Carr sometimes manages to pull a rabbit out of a hat (a mangy, undernourished rabbit, but a rabbit nonetheless) when faced with limitations of location, budget, props, and premise. But here, the story he came up with to tie together the five minutes or so of kaiju footage is simply abysmal. It’s bad enough that it makes Kraa! The Sea Monster (the other movie produced in the same fashion, with Carr again filling in the blanks between the monster shots) look good by comparison.

Tall, dark, and… well, two out of three.

At least the movie puts its best foot forward – a gargantuan, scaled foot. Out introduction to the titular monster comes as he bursts out of the side of Mt. Aurora in California at night, and the monster doesn’t look half bad. It’s a man in a suit, obviously, but in that regard neither the creature nor the miniatures he constructs are worse than classic Godzilla setpieces (in fact, if comparing to the Godzilla films of the ‘70s, Zarkorr comes out ahead).

Then we cut to Carr’s contribution – New Jersey. (All right, I guess I can’t blame him for New Jersey as a whole, but at least for its presence in this movie.) Nebbish postal worker Tommy (Rhys Pugh) is shlubbing around his apartment at midnight, watching cartoons, when a five-inch-tall teenaged mall tramp appears (Torie Lynch). Actually, she’s a telepresenced emissary of a galactic federation, called “Proctor” in the credits, and only assumes the appearance of a mallrat to keep from alarming Tommy. (Yeah. Doesn’t work.) She then proceeds to ruin Tommy’s day by a) informing him of the monster’s presence, which he would have known if he had been watching any channel but the all-cartoon station; and b) declaring that he personally had been chosen to stop it. Why him, an average joe? Precisely because he is average – the Space Brothers have sent Zarkorr as a test to gauge the worthiness of humankind, and have thus chosen the most absolutely average human being as champion of their species. Of course, one has to wonder why the plot requires Zarkorr to be from space when he’s clearly shown bursting out of a mountain; but similar puzzlement could be directed to the sister film Kraa! The Sea Monster, in which the finned and fishy Kraa is also from outer space.

And just to cement the predicament that wild-eyed Tommy finds himself in, she helpfully informs him that there isn’t a weapon on Earth that can stop Zarkorr. But don’t worry, she says – Zarkorr carries the key to his own destruction. She then winks out.

Why didn’t they have those in specially-marked cereal boxes when I was a kid?

Tommy flips channels anxiously, trying to find out what he can do in Jersey to stop a monster in California (which will be coming after Tommy, having been programmed to fight him), and in the process sees an awful lot of really bad “news anchor” segments. Seriously, you’d think that nobody involved in this production had ever actually seen a news show. Eventually, though, he finds what we out in Bad Movie Land know to be the planet’s salvation: A cryptozoologist talking to a reporter. Not just any cryptozoologist, mind you; this one, Stephanie Martin (De’Prise Grossman), is young and slender, with repressive academic clothing, her hair done up severely, and black-rimmed glasses. So you know that not only is she going to prove an invaluable aid to Tommy, but she also will turn out to be a hottie when she sheds the tweed blazer and glasses, and lets her hair down.

Tommy therefore gets himself to the TV studio and sneaks in past security, then corners Stephanie and starts blabbering about being visited by alien projections and having been given the charge of defeating Zarkorr. You know, all of the stuff you expect to hear right after, “I know this sounds crazy, but I’m telling the truth!” When Stephanie quite rightly treats him as a mentally deranged stalker, Tommy grabs a gun from one of the security guards and holds her hostage, gun to her head. Yeah, THAT’LL endear our hero to the viewing audience.

The plot shows every sign of spinning completely away from the “giant monster” angle (kept alive only in well-spaced “Meanwhile, back in Zarkorr’s path” segments in which Zarkorr does some generic kaiju damage) by the time a couple of police officers show up at the station. Tommy again goes through his lame repetition of his calling as reluctant savior of humanity (counting the projection’s original explanation, we’ve gotten to hear the same thing three times now, part of padding the movie out to feature length), and in a stunning twist, one of the cops believes him. To Officer George Ray (Mark Hamilton), the idea that aliens would choose a median member of the human race as its champion is absolutely logical, so much so that he stands down his partner and cuffs him in the lavatory to help Tommy escape. With Stephanie, who’s pretty much withdrawn into a shell of “I don’t believe this” by now.

Man, even the Jedi Kid would be a better “last hope” than this.

By the time George has helped Tommy and Stephanie get away and has hidden his squadcar, Stephanie has pretty much become a believer; how much of that is being convinced by radio broadcasts of the monster’s invulnerability and how much is response to the psychological trauma of being a hostage, I’m not sure. At any rate, she gets Tommy in to see her friend Arthur, a wheelchair-bound genius hacker whose social skills are second only to Zarkorr’s himself. Much of the movie is nothing more than padding, but the scenes with Arthur are Grade-A cotton batting, moving us further from the opening credits without getting us much closer to the ending. And thanks to Arthur’s giggling, abrasive demeanor, a sequence which could have been merely dull is rendered as annoying as lemon juice on road rash.

Eventually, after puttering around with search engines, poring over hardcopies, and making bizarre comments about the loss of Stephanie’s virginity (really stretching to fill those screenplay pages, weren’t you, Benny?), Arthur hits upon a bunch of nonsense babble that supposedly moves the plot forward. He finds radar records that show that Zarkorr touched down (and presumable burrowed into a mountain without being noticed) four hours before he burst out and started causing havoc. At that precise moment, there was a second radar blip showing that something else touched down outside of Yuma, Nevada. By Tommy’s reasoning, this second blip must be something meant to help him destroy Zarkorr, since he was told that nothing on earth would be able to do it. What this doesn’t explain is how the aliens could count on Tommy to take hostage a cryptozoologist whose hacker friend would be able to find this information. It also doesn’t explain why in the world this whole part of the movie has been set in New Jersey.

So Tommy and George get some new suits, and the three of them fly to a small town outside of Yuma. Why new suits? Partly because Tommy’s still in his postal uniform and Jay’s still in his police uniform, and partly so they can be easily mistaken for government sp00ks when they arrive to find a miniature flying saucer crashed through the ceiling of the local diner. By “miniature,” I mean about five feet across, and light enough (though ungainly) for one man to lift. The heroic threesome takes possession of it, giving George a change to… um… pad the script with his obfuscations for the benefit of the local law enforcement. (Carr’s so well-practiced at stretching a thin concept out to just-barely feature length, it’s unusual to see a script whose fluff content is so blatant, even for him.)

“Do NOT grab the boobs, Mr. Mailman!”

And what do they do with the saucer? Well, they drive it toward Yuma, where Zarkorr is currently stomping buildings flat. At least, they tell us it’s supposed to be Yuma; it looks more like “Generic, Vaguely Tokyo-Inspired City” to me. Couldn’t they have set the action somewhere that has more office towers and such? Someplace like, I dunno, Phoenix?

The highway patrolmen stop them at a roadblock and tell them the city’s been evacuated; Tommy manages to leave the other two behind and speed through with the saucer in his trunk. (The patrolmen shoot at his departing car. Why? “Stop! Don’t head toward a big deadly monster, or we’ll open fire!”) And once he gets there – yippee! Our protagonist finally interacts with Zarkorr!

Well, sort of. It’s pretty clear that he’s been superimposed at sidewalk level into shots of Zarkorr’s rampage. But I guess that’s how they would have done it even if they had known what they were using the footage for when they shot it. Oh, and by the way, those highway patrolmen have a funny definition of “evacuated,” since there are dozens of people running past Tommy, away from Zarkorr’s feet.

Oh, and the ultimate climax? The solution to the riddle about Zarkorr holding the key to his own destruction? Tommy holds the disc above his head, and when Zarkorr shoots his eyebeams at it, they bounce back and disintegrate him. The end.

“Who ordered the extra-extra-large with anchovies?”

And none too soon. Where to begin? Is there any enjoyment in watching a movie whose script has to play keepaway with the sparse monster footage? The premise of the “most average human” may have sounded good in a single-sentence pitch for the project, but in practice it seems more like one of those Saturday Night Live sketches in which no one realizes that the gag wasn’t funny, and they try to cover for it by extending the sketch to ridiculous lengths. Unlike Kraa!, we don’t even have the dubious charms here of an Italian-accented mollusc.

Kraa! and Zarkorr! constitute the entire output of the Monster Island Entertainment label. Given the ill-conceived production concept behind them – competent but generic kaiju footage, ensconced in a cheap script which tries to make the monsters into something they’re not – I don’t know of anyone who mourned the lack of further titles.

A Notable Quotable:

“We’re superior beings, so our moral code allows us to do whatever we want to do to you.”

- The Proctor

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 1, plus several National Guard units wiped out off-screen
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 55
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0