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Kraa The Sea Monster (1998) is what happens when Godzilla’s sleazy cousin crawls from a Jersey swamp in a rubber suit that reeks like a stale Domino’s pizza box.
This was Full Moon’s grand attempt to ride the coattails of Godzilla ’98, and they don’t even try to hide it. There’s literally a Godzilla billboard in one of the destruction shots, like the movie itself is sighing, “Yeah, you probably should’ve watched that other garbage instead of this garbage.”
The setup is threadbare: Lord Doom—Doctor Doom’s knockoff brother from a Halloween clearance bin—sends Kraa to stomp Earth into submission. Planet Patrol, a team of photogenic twenty-somethings squeezed into lycra on what looks like a rejected Death Star set, can’t make it to the fight. S
o the job falls to a biker, a waitress, and, best of all, a clam-shaped alien puppet who talks like he’s auditioning for Super Mario Bros. Supposed to land in Italy, he crashes in New Jersey instead, so of course he speaks in a cartoon Italian accent.
And the monster? Kraa ambles through miniatures like he’s shopping for groceries. Sometimes you’ll catch timecode still burned into the frame, or a green screen that never got finished. The rubber suit itself was later sold off to collectors—proof that someone out there paid actual money to own a piece of Full Moon’s sweat-soaked kaiju history.
Planet Patrol could’ve been the saving grace. They’re pretty, they’re in lycra, and they radiate late-night-TV charisma. But they barely show up, leaving us stuck with Earthlings nobody cares about. Worse still, when the monster footage arrives, it’s so bland you almost miss the biker and waitress. Almost.
Here’s the problem: Kraa! isn’t gloriously inept like Plan 9 from Outer Space, and it isn’t stylishly wild like Starcrash. It’s self-aware bad. It winks at you. And nothing kills camp faster than a movie begging to be in on the joke. It’s the cinematic equivalent of the kid in high school rehearsing comebacks in the mirror, never realizing that trying too hard is the least cool move of all.
In the end, Kraa! The Sea Monster is a kaiju flick without menace, a parody without guts, and a spoof without bite. Watch it if you’re curious, but don’t expect “so bad it’s good.” This one’s “so bad it’s boring”—and boring is the monster no one can beat.
Found on movies@piefed.social
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