On a distant planet, the evil Lord Doom (Michael Guerin, voiced by Jerry Lentz), a sort of cut-price cross between Marvel’s Doctor Doom and Masters of the Universe‘s Skeletor, lives in virtual isolation with only the diminutive Chamberlain (Jon Simanton) for company. Tiring of the cold and the desolation of his home world, Doom sets his sights on Earth, planning to wipe out humanity using a giant monster known as Kraa (“intergalactic world wrecker for hire”). Standing in his way are intergalactic police force Planet Patrol (all four of them…) who wear Star Trek hand-me-down uniforms and operate from what appears to be a version Death Star so beloved of the Star Wars films built by the lowest bidding contractors. Doom incapacitates their base using a laser leaving the fate of the Earth in the hands of a strange, mollusc-like creature named Mogyar (voiced by J.W. Perra) who crash lands in a New Jersey diner en route to Italy and spends the rest of the film speaking the worst Italian accent since Super Mario.

This extraordinary nonsense was brought to you by Charles Band and his Monster Island Entertainment company. The script, by Neal Marshall Stevens using the pseudonym Benjamin Carr, is so sloppy and disjointed that three competing plot strands quickly emerge held together only by the most tenuous of connections. The first focuses on our bargain basement guardians of the galaxy (Stephen Martines, using the name Coltin Scott, Candida Tolentino, Anthony Furlong and Alison Lohman, later star of Drag Me To Hell (2009) here making her film debut) who spend most of the film trapped aboard their ailing base telling us how dire the situation is before beaming down to Doom’s planet of Proyas for a badly choreographed fist fight. The second follows Mogyar as be befriends two Earthlings, diner waitress Alma (Teal Marchande) and decaff tea drinking biker Bobby (R.L. McMurry) as they get up to some nonsense or other involving government agents and a nuclear power plant. And the third follows Jon Fedele dressed in a rubber monster suit as be portrays Kraa’s rampage around New Jersey.

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The script is suspiciously similar to “Carr”‘s earlier, and equally terrible, Zarkorr! The Invader (1996). It’s over-flowing with idiotic moments and terrible dialogue and it blatantly ransacks science fiction film and TV history for what few ideas it has. Every so often, Carr tries to inject the proceedings with some humour – most of it involving Mogyar – which is as clumsy and wide of its intended mark as anything else in the film. But the script could have been a masterpiece and it would still have been let down by the dreadful acting, the cheap and shoddy set design and dreary photography and direction. Kraa itself is a ridiculous sight but not without his low-rent charms. It’s quite endearing in a “man-in-a-cheap-rubber-suit” sort of way but the largely immobile Mogyar is a bit of a mess. We mostly see it in large close-ups where its mouth movements rarely match the words supposedly coming from it. And the less said about that accent the better.

Kraa! The Sea Monster (we never actually see him in the sea by the way – a more accurate title would have been Kraa! The Space Monster) tried to ride on the bow wake of Roland Emmerich’s disastrous Godzilla (1998) remake (Kraa even smashes through a billboard advertising Emmerich’s film) but it more accurately resembles an episode of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (1993-1996). It certainly has that same disjointed feel about it – the Power Rangers had been culled from various Japanese sentai series (Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger (1992-1993), Gosei Sentai Dairanger (1993-1994) and Ninja Sentai Kakuranger (1994-1995)) with newly shot American footage clumsily inserted into the action and Kraa! feels similarly like it was footage from at least two different sources clumsily bolted together. The three storylines sort of have something to do with each other but the Planet Patrol cast members never interact directly with Mogyar and his pals and no-one is seen alongside Kraa for any length of time – indeed although the direction is credited to Aaron Osborne, the end titles credit Dave Parker as the director of the Planet Patrol and Lord Doom sequences, suggesting that they were shot indeed separately and may even have been intended for an entirely different film. The ending sort of sets up a sequel that we only be extremely grateful never happened.