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| All images courtesy: Visual Vengeance |
Visual Vengeance serves up a double-feature of dinosaur madness by the Polonia Brothers on their new disc of Saurians (with The Dinosaur Chronicles as the B-side feature). For those not well-versed in shot-on-video cinema lore, Pennsylvania-based director Mark Polonia has had an absurdly prolific career, helming 104 low-budget films to date between the mid-80s and now, most of which he made with his late brother, John Polonia. The brothers’ breakout film was the 1987 SOV cult favorite Splatter Farm, and they (or since John’s passing in 2008, Mark) have been cranking out multiple low-budget films a year ever since, commanding a small but respectable cult following. Saurians is among their earliest films, released in 1994 but principally shot quite a bit earlier. It is also unique among Polonia Brothers features in that it was actually shot on film: super-8mm, to be specific. Mark Polonia shot it this way because the special effects consist heavily of stop-motion animation, which wasn’t feasible to do on tape at the time. Visual Vengeance have assembled an absolutely stacked special edition for Saurians, making a very strong argument for the elevation of the film to cult-classic status – something that I think this delightfully wacky and lo-fi creature feature absolutely deserves.
THE FILMS:
SAURIANS (1994) is a true homegrown DIY feature, in a very charming way that screams cult-classic-material. Everything about its production is rough around the edges and clearly zero-budget, but in a way that feels very endearing. There is definitely a “so bad it’s good” quality about the whole thing, with awkward quirks of the lo-fi production causing unintentional comedy on a regular basis. But the way it is clearly the result of young filmmakers ambitiously trying to make a marauding-dinosaur movie with no money but lots of conviction and enthusiasm… you can’t help but root for it. The “let’s get the gang together and make the best movie we can” vibe is so strong. Is it a good movie? Absolutely not. Is it infectiously fun and silly in a way that the right type of cult-film fans will love? Definitely.
Mark Polonia and his wife Maria Davis, both in their early-20s at the time and looking like college kids, star as archaeology grad students working on a dig, searching for dinosaur fossils. They get more than they bargained for when careless construction workers at a nearby site get a bit too heavyhanded with explosives and blow open a long-sealed cave, where a strange phenomenon caused a T-rex and a stegosaurus to become frozen in time, mid-fight. The two dinosaurs wake up and immediately launch back into the prehistoric brawl, with their fight spilling into the nearby town, threatening death and destruction. Our two intrepid nerdy archaeologists must save the day, and figure out how to stop the dino rampage.
Mark Polonia was certainly ambitious in his plans for this film, attempting to bring the dinosaurs to life using stop-motion animation as much as possible. And in their best moments, the stop-motion creatures are indeed pretty impressive and cool, in a very homemade, amateur-production way. However, he wound up not being happy with how all the stop-motion worked, so for the final version that was eventually released, some of the rougher shots were replaced with additional hand puppets and models (though interestingly, the original mostly-stop-motion cut is an extra on the disc). The result is a campy, hilariously incongruous hodgepodge where the dinosaurs look completely different based on whether you are seeing the puppet, the model, or the stop-motion version. The continuity between the various iterations of the T-rex and stegosaurus is just… no continuity at all. The techniques through which they are put into scenes with actors are also hilariously rough. When they are superimposed using green-screen compositing, the dinosaurs are always surrounded by big, messy matte lines. There are also scenes where Polonia tries to get away with the “small dinosaur model close to the lens, actor standing far away” perspective trick to try and make the dinosaurs look huge, but almost always one or the other is clearly out of focus, destroying the illusion and landing the shot in unintentional comedy territory instead. Absolutely none of these things are complaints from me, though. If, like me, you’re going to enjoy Saurians, you need to be the kind of viewer who sees these goofy moments as features and not bugs; essential parts of the lo-fi, C-movie charm.
These hilariously, charmingly rough-around-the-edges aspects extend to every facet of the production. Having been shot on a consumer-grade super-8 camera with a loud motor right next to the on-board mic, Saurians was filmed with no usable audio, and the whole thing had to be re-dubbed and mixed with foley effects in post. The entirely-dubbed soundtrack is unconvincing to a hilarious degree. Not for a moment does it sound like these are the voices of people outside in nature; they are clearly in a studio speaking directly into a vocal mic. And convincing voice acting is an art… an art that these amateur filmmakers-turned-actors do not have. Line deliveries are wooden and stilted, in a very camp way. But again, this is all part of the goofy fun.
The stilted, overdubbed line deliveries just serve to accentuate Polonia and Davis’s endearingly awkward performances. They both play their characters as awkward introverted nerds (I suspect not far off from real life), who not only must rise to the occasion of becoming unlikely heroes, but who also have a shy, geeky romance. They are definitely not your typical leads, and feel like obvious self-insert characters, reflecting the earnest geekiness of the filmmakers themselves. This earnestness definitely contributes to making the movie as likable as it is, despite its flaws and overall cheesiness: you can tell that this isn’t a movie that was half-assed or deliberately made to be cheesy, and was instead the result of these fully sincere nerds doing their best.
While the choice to shoot on super-8mm film was made out of necessity, it absolutely elevates the film above its shot-on-VHS peers. It’s a pretty well-shot movie too, for what it is, with some ambitious camerawork, and even a couple dolly shots. For all the ways in which the effects or audio are rough around the edges, Polonia clearly knows how to shoot a movie and make it look good on a budget. The super-8 cinematography also makes it one of Visual Vengeance’s better-looking discs that I’ve seen, allowing for a pretty clean-looking restoration, even though the film was only shot on super-8m but edited to tape.
Saurians isn’t a good movie, but it is goofy and cheesy and amateurish and rough around the edges in all the right ways. It’s a totally earnest and sincere, infectiously fun movie that is trying to do a lot with nothing, and while it doesn’t really succeed, the attempt is so enjoyable and so easy to root for that it’s hard not to have a good time, if you’re into microbudget campy genre fare. It absolutely is one that has cult-classic written all over it.
THE DINOSAUR CHRONICLES (2004), on the other hand, does not. Another dino-themed Polonia Brothers feature from a decade later, this one is unquestionably the B-side in this double feature, and it’s a dud. To begin with, its conspicuously odd structure immediately tips the film’s hand to what it is: two entirely separate shorts, made years apart, slapped together into an anthology film of sorts, just to get the runtime to feature length. The first of the film’s two stories occupies about 50 minutes of its 68-minute runtime, and involves the tale of two brothers and one of their friends who, while on vacation, find themselves shipwrecked on an island full of dinosaurs. In the extras, Mark Polonia admits that this segment consists of footage shot for a feature that was never finished, and… that tracks, with the choppy, unfinished quality of the piece, and its awkwardly not-quite-feature-length runtime. Bringing The Dinosaur Chronicles to feature length is a second 15-minute short, set in a post-apocalyptic dystopian future, where a couple gunslingers try to fight through a wasteland inhabited by zombies and dinosaurs. It quite conspicuously doesn’t fit with its predecessor segment, having been shot in a different aspect ratio on a higher quality video format, further leading the viewer to suspect that this is actually two separate shorts and not one single film.
Credit where credit is due, the second post-apocalyptic wasteland short is actually quite cool. It boasts some good camerawork and fun visuals, some solid Mad Max adjacent post-nuke-dystopia vibes, and some fun lo-fi effects work. It would be much better off if it had just been released as its own short, and if anyone checks The Dinosaur Chronicles out in the extras, I suggest they do skip to this one and treat it as its own short.
The first story in The Dinosaur Chronicles is what makes the film quite bad. Even with it being just 50 minutes of an unfinished feature, it feels too long, with sluggish pacing, repetitive character comedy, and too much wandering the island, with not enough dinosaurs. The movie leans too heavily on the one-note comedy of the comic-relief brother being a bumbling alcoholic who always has a bottle in hand, even when being chased by dinosaurs, and the cheap and obvious comedy just doesn’t work.
And then there’s the issue of the dinosaurs… when they show up, they are clearly being spliced in from several pre-existing sequences made for other films. I don’t even know if any of the dinosaur footage was made originally for THIS film, but I kind of doubt it. The dinosaurs look completely different in each sequence, and the footage is often obviously older than the scenes it’s spliced into, sometimes coming from discolored film sources with print damage. With the entirely different image quality, it is very clear that the dinosaurs are nowhere close to being in the same footage as the actors, and it’s pretty distracting.
Unlike how Saurians is rough around the edges in a way that is charming and fun and campy, The Dinosaur Chronicles is just messy and not very good. Nothing pushes it into ‘so bad it’s good” or camp territory, it’s just deeply forgettable. And while Saurians at least was clearly the result of young filmmakers trying as hard as they could with no resources, the splicing in of recycled dinosaur footage here just feels half-assed. The second short is the best part by a mile, but (while arguably worth a look on its own) it comes too little too late. Unless you’re a die-hard shot-on-video or Polonia brothers fan, probably skip this one and just stick with Saurians.
THE VISUAL VENGEANCE SPECIAL EDITION:
As per usual, Visual Vengeance has assembled an absolutely stacked special edition for Saurians, and this time they have even put together some cool physical extras, with a mini poster and an actual strip of an 8mm print of Saurians in every package. With the slipcover artwork making a big point of the film’s super-8mm origins, they really are leaning hard into the cult-classic potential of this release, in a fun way.
The transfer looks quite good – as good as possible, with the source-material limitations. Since the film was edited to tape with substantial green-screen compositing, a film transfer going back to the 8mm negative was not possible, and they had to settle for a tape-based transfer instead, but it still looks impressively good, with reasonable detail and a nice color grade. The film is also available in two cuts: the final cut as released in 1994, or an earlier cut, from when the film was originally finished and got a home video distribution deal that fell through. The original cut is a few minutes shorter, and features all of the original mostly-stop-motion dinosaur effects, as well as the original audio track. When that distribution deal fell through and Polonia had more time to work on the film, he decided to tweak some things he wasn’t happy with, redoing some of the effects sequences, shooting a few new scenes, and totally re-dubbing the film, having not been happy with the first dub. The final version is “better,” but both cuts have their pros and cons, as there is something to be said for the shorter runtime, and the original effects, though rough, are definitely charming. It is cool that both cuts are included!
As far as extras go, both films on the disc have commentary tracks (Saurians has commentary tracks on both cuts) and behind-the-scenes featurettes. Polonia and Davis are both refreshingly honest and candid about the production of Saurians in the extras, freely talking about what doesn’t work and why, as well as talking about their attempts and intentions when it comes to the film’s effects work. Polonia clearly has a lot of issues with the finished film, and is open about the things he isn’t happy with and doesn’t think worked, but he also provides some great perspective on what they were trying to achieve with so little money, and he clearly enjoys knowing that the movie has its fans who view it as a cult classic of sorts. They are very fun extras which will add to one’s appreciation of the movie. Saurians also has a couple more cast and crew interviews on the disc, as well as outtakes and raw 8mm footage of the movie’s effects work.
Saurians is a very fun – if goofy, cheesy, and definitely not “good” – microbudget creature feature. It won’t be for everyone, but for the kinds of cult-film fans who enjoy this kind of stuff, there’s a lot to have fun with. The Dinosaur Chronicles is mostly a waste of time, but since it’s the B feature, that’s not the end of the world. Visual Vengeance has put together a great special edition, and even with the second feature being a weak link, I would definitely recommend this disc to anyone who enjoys this kind of charmingly cheesy homegrown horror.
- Christopher S. Jordan