The Blood of The Dinosaurs Review – Wack AF!

By Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)

You need to keep your wits about you while watching Joe Badon’s film ‘The Blood of The Dinosaurs’. Co-written by Jason Kruppa, the film traces humanity’s descent into madness, right from before their existence – when dinosaurs walked about the earth.

The film starts off with a home-video like intro, and just as the viewer adjusts to the rather homely setting of two people interacting on a couch, things shift to outer space where a stop-motion asteroid leisurely heads towards earth. The frames rapidly change at a dizzying speed for the first three minutes and Badon’s eclectic style of filming make it hard to look away from the pop of colors on the screen.

The film is driven by an unsettling protagonist – Uncle Bobbo (Vincent Stalba), who records a video to educate kids about where oil comes from. Stalba’s Bobbo is like a nerdy Ted Bundy, he has a creepy serial killer vibe going, as if he is seconds away from hacking a kid to death. If it weren’t for the bright pastel shades surrounding him, Uncle Bobbo’s disturbing demeanor would’ve fit right into a Sam Raimi horror film. In fact, Badon’s work is a strange mash of Tim Burton’s dark oeuvre and Wes Anderson’s unique visual style. In the director’s words, it’s an ‘adult Swim style surrealist Kids’ Show for deranged adults’.

From corporate greed to pop culture icons, Badon and team satirize a lot of things for an 18-minute-short, so it might get hard to keep track. And while the art-style is quite riveting, ‘Blood of The Dinosaurs’ doesn’t pack much plot-wise. It’s a moody, trippy production that really feeds on the viewer’s perception of things. To some it might seem like a lesson on the origins of oil baked in eccentricity, to others it might seem like a chaotic mess that makes no sense, for those with a philosophical bent of mind the apparent meaningless could be perceived as a nihilistic attempt at summing up life and its pointlessness.