For any of our punk readers out there, you know that your standing amidst your chosen music-based community varies depending on the type of punk music you listen to. It’s stupid that a genre of music that was created to unit the disenfranchised and angry youth in a culture of hatred for authority and disdain for the sheep of society has broken down into so many splinter groups, as if it were one of those things where nobody can agree on the same thing, yet they all live their lives under the same tent of blind obedience. You know; religion. Only instead of “-isms” or “-anities” though, punks try to sound cooler by making their various clans end in “-core”, like hard-core, nerd-core, ska-core, albi-core, and so forth based on the variations of punk music they most associate with. Well, the next time you’re amidst a group of punks and somebody asks you what “core” you are, just tell ‘em you’re “Zarkorr(!)” and flash the following sign:

Yeah, I know that was a long way to go just to make a bad joke about the title of the movie, but I followed it up with an additional joke about gang signs and I included a graphic to go along with it. Hopefully that’ll be enough to justify the last minute or two of your life spent reading it. If not, well, you’ve got my permission to go to bed 2 minutes late tonight to make up for it. Thank your father, kids.

After Kraa! The Sea Monster, I don’t know if I’m ready to tackle the second half of this Full Moon double-feature. I talk a big game when it comes to these roundtables, but I can’t help but think that my dingy is taking on more water that it can handle and my little paddle boat of sanity is quickly losing its buoyancy. Oye. Oh well, whatever doesn’t kill us only makes us wish for sweet Mother Oblivion to tuck us back into her squishy womb and put an end to the pain, so let’s get this crappy kaiju back-to-back over and done with.

Full Moon sure loved to tag exclamation points on the ends of their titles in the late-90s. Zarkorr! Kraa! Hideous! The Dead Hate the Living! Frankenstein & the Werewolf Reborn! Prehysteria! I don't know why there were so many declarative statements being made by Charles Band back in the day. Maybe Chucky was doing a lot of crystal meth and everything seemed exciting. Maybe he was constantly in a panic because he was slipping into the deep end of the debt pool. I really couldn't say. I originally reviewed Zarkorr(!) back in the H.O.P.E.L.E.S.S. days, circa 1999-ish. It was a miserable excuse for a bad Godzilla knock-off that only warranted a single paragraph about how much it resembled a fetid bucket of camel vomit. I was hoping never to have to watch it again, but it looks like I won’t be going a decade without doing so. Has my seething hatred for Direct-to-Video hemorrhoids softened in that time, since studios even cheaper and less inspired than Full Moon have managed to thrive in this time of cholera/DVD? Let’s make like Brer Rabbit on Viagra™ and hop to it.

First sign of a bad movie experience-to-be? The flick was produced by Charles Band under the pseudonym “Robert Talbot”. For those who don't know what “pseudonym” means, it's a Swazi word that means “to hide one's shame”. If Charles Band, who’s tagged his dirty Hancock to some of the worst movies ever made, is too ashamed to put his real name on a movie, you can already feel the fear creeping up your legs and trying to put its icy cold decaying touch down the front of your pants. Batten down the hatches boys and lassies, I don’t like the looks of them clouds…

At 10:10pm, from out of the (fiberglass) Mount Aurora bursts the rubber suited menace known as Zarkorr(!) who, by the title, is apparently in California on some invading business. Surrounded by fire (well, the suit's flame retardant, so we can at least give 'em that), the great beast roars a bit and steps on a farm supply store. Yay. Across the country in Newark New Jersey, at 11:30pm (so, that would make it now 3 hours earlier than the scene we just witnessed?!), while other people are probably being shot and killed in the streets, a camera flies through a little model city before coming to a stop in the apartment home of everyday postal worker Tommy Ward. TomTom is visited in his home by a 6” tall mental projection of a woman that has come predicting the doom-fated arrival of our title monster. Think of her as the New Jersey mall skank cousin to those little island girls in the Mothra flicks. The mini-tramp tells Mr. T that he's been hand selected by an outer space coalition to defend the Earth from Zarkorr(!) as a test to see if mankind is fit to be the ruling class or not, by using the most average guy they could find. Enter Tom's. I don't mean that literally, I just mean that he's been chosen as Mr. Average. In fact, I'm surprised the movie's not trying to get this point across a little more blatantly by calling his character Joe Shmoe.

Anyway, Tom needs to save the planet. Naturally he doesn't believe it at first, but when he finally turns off the cartoons and checks out the news, the little tramp's story is legitimized... or at least the part about the giant monster. I'm still a little skeptical on the whole “Tommy is our hero” thing. Hilariously enough, there is one thing I'm certain of: the “live” news report that's show on TV of a reporter relaying info from street level is the same one used in Kraa!, only re-dubbed... I'm so amazed that I fear I may piss myself right here and now.

As part of the test, Zarkorr(!) will be able to home in on T-Bag and thus will track him down no matter where the mild manner mailman tries to hide. Zarkorr(!) is also immune to any and all weapons created by mankind, thus no military will be able to stop him. Despite this, there is still a means of killing Zarkorr(!), but Tommy's gotta figure that out for himself. The one hint he's allowed? Zarkorr(!) himself will provide the answer to his own destruction. So, with any luck, it'll turn out that Zarkorr(!) has a penchant for foods that are high in saturated fat and cholesterol and all it will take is a family size bucket of the Colonel's Extra-Greasy Recipe to send Big Z(!) to that big spit roast in the sky.

While Zark(!) is busy smashing various Playskool™ toys that would be better served in a Toys For Tots bin than as fodder for this flick, Tom tries out his “crazy postal worker” routine and kidnaps Dr. Stephanie Martin, a Crypto-zoologist he thinks may be able to help him out in his battle with the unknown refugee from Planet X. Fortunately for Tommy, a sympathetic “X-Files” loving cop named George helps our hero out of a mens' room stand-off and provides him with his very own police escort. Steph points them to a hacker named Arthur to add to the cast, because you can't save the world without an unkempt, wheelchair bound reject from “The Lone Gunmen” who laughs like a nauseating spaz... I'm starting to remember why I hated this movie so much aside from the grade school giant monster crap.

Because the fairly accessible pace of the movie for some reason needed to be tripped up and slowed to a crawl, a lot of techno-babble commences for the next few minutes as the geek, the dame, the cop, and the mailman troll over piles of information and try to figure out what will finally stop Zarkorr(!). What they eventually find is a big deformed satellite dish that Tom pulls a Perseus with, deflecting Zarkorr(!)'s eyebeams back on himself, turning him into a ball of light that then flies off into space. When Tom wakes up he’s in the hospital and the world hasn’t been destroyed, so it looks like the big alien turtle shell thing worked. He’s the hero of the world and everybody in the country wants him to become president… because everybody already knows the electoral process is a joke and, honestly, he couldn’t have done any worse than the glorified Mr. Potato Head we’re stuck with now, right? Sadly it looks like a sequel, Mr. Ward Goes To Washington… And Fights Margroog! The Destroyer, will never see the light of DVD. Did I say sadly? Oops, I meant to say “thank all that is un-fucking-holy in the world”.

As bad as Zarkorr! The Invader is, it’s not nearly as terrible as I remember it. Maybe I’ve softened with time (though that’s not what your mother thinks *rimshot*), maybe it’s just because I finished watching Kraa! the other day and Zarkorr! is a good 6 or 7 feet better on the craptitude scale in comparison, or maybe the years of barf bag friendly CGI giant monster flicks over the last decade have just made me so hard up for good rubber monster suit action that I’m opting for the old “any port in a storm” mentality. Either way, I can't believe I'm saying this, but Rhy Pugh actually surprised me with how entertaining a performance he puts forward! Granted, it's a bit over the top, but it works with the ridiculousness of the movie and the situation his character's been put into. Here he kinda reminds me of a young Bruce Campbell, before Mr. C became synonymous with the whole “cocky, big chinned, macho good guy” caricature he seems to have since become. It could just be that I need a good backhanding from Morgan Fairchild (in a see through nightie, please!) to bring me back to the reality of how lame this movie really is, but right now it ain’t nearly as bad as it was when I first watched it. Go figure. That doesn’t meant it doesn’t suck in it’s own respect though…

The flick may work on a ground level with the oddball human cast, but last I checked the movie was supposed to be centered around a giant killer dinosaur from beyond the red planet! As such, much like Kraa(!)'s escapade, you can't have a giant monster movie without scenes of military intervention or at least a second rubber beastie for the main monster to tango with. Is it really easier to get congressional approval to invade another country than it is to mobilize a few tanks and troops to stop a rampaging super-monster!? If Zarkorr! and Kraa! are any indication, the red white and blue are red white and screwed if we’re ever targeted by a real 200ft tall engine of atomic destruction! Granted, attacks against the monster are referred to, including a napalm strike, but there's no point to it if we don't get to see any of it! There is one, and I do mean ONE thing that The Sea Monster can hold over The Invader’s head: at least Kraa(!)'s theme music wasn't half the auditory fisting that Zarkorr(!)'s is. Doubt me? I’ll be brining the end credits from the movie to our YouTube channel sometime next week to you can find out for yourself. Your ears probably won't talk to you for at least a few days afterwards.