DAY TWENTY ONE:
ZOMBIE MONSTER SEALIZAR

Written by Jonathan Wojcik

This review went up on the third wednesday of October 2020, and the third wednesday of October happens to be International hagfish day! I couldn't possibly pass up an opportunity to acknowledge that in these reviews, and I can think of no Ultra kaiju more suitable than this cutie from Tiga.

In a likely reference to "globsters" and a rather novel setup for an Ultra story, this kaiju is first encountered when it washes ashore already long dead and heavily decomposing! The giant, slimy corpse stinks horrendously enough to sicken people miles away, and multiple attempts are made to try and move it...but once cables are fired into its pulpy mass, the carcass starts to move. It lurches itself to its feet and begins to wander mindlessly, threatening all the havoc you can expect from a shuffling, putrid mass of carrion that weighs several thousand tons.

Sealizar's rancid muckiness and inability to feel pain are a tricky combination; missiles fired into it simply get lodged deep within its reeking guts, and don't even phase it...but an attempt to melt the monster down with extreme heat only rereleases and detonates those very same missiles, which destroys the equipment they were using to dissolve Sealizar, but doesn't destroy Sealizar, whose unliving tissues can regenerate unless they're lit on fire. Whoops! It's only by a similar twist that the monster is ever defeated at all, as Ultraman's energy attacks finally ignite an entire oil tanker it had sucked into its body, because oh yeah, it also deliberately sucks things into its body, which is honestly even worse than an undead monster actually "eating" things. It is seen rubbing its tummy after doing so. Did I also mention its grotesquely extendable neck?!

Sealizar isn't an especially malevolent monster and it doesn't have any unusually threatening powers compared to what we've seen over the last twenty entries, but the idea of a kaiju we've only ever seen in a dead, rotting state is a fun one, its abilities are suitably unpleasant and its design is quite appealing. You can see how it might have been a fairly "generic" giant lizard-fish monster when it was alive, but now its oozing flesh is barely hanging on to its skeleton, and its bony face has the same sad, pitiful cuteness as, well, pretty much all animal skulls.

There's also the interesting and still unanswered question of why. This is a continuity with SO MANY monsters, so many aliens, so many weird phenomenon, we may never know whether this monster was "zombified" by its own innate powers or by something else entirely.

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