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The Blood of the Dinosaurs

average rating is 4 out of 5

Critic:

Alasdair MacRae

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Posted on:

Feb 4, 2023

Film Reviews
The Blood of the Dinosaurs
Directed by:
Joe Badon
Written by:
Joe Badon & Jason Kruppa
Starring:
Vincent Stalba, Miles Daniel Handler, Kali Russell

Parodying the format of an educational children’s TV show The Blood of the Dinosaurs is a sharp criticism of modern society’s complicity in the mass environmental destruction caused by the oil industry.

 

Following an abstract prelude chronicling the extinction of the dinosaurs in a chaotic, explosive fashion, director Joe Badon’s surrealist short film (un)settles into its core delivery, a mock children’s TV show, “You boys and buddies are in for a real treat today, that’s right it is Uncle Bobbo’s Christmas Kwanza Happy Hanukah Winter Solstice Annual Sacrifice Holiday Special!”. Talking direct-to-camera Mr. Rogers-like from a brightly coloured kitchen set is the discomforting and deranged Uncle Bobbo (Vincent Stalba). For today’s show, he asks the audience, “Do you know where tyres come from?”. He then goes on to explore the topic via a series of stylised surrealistic segments, firstly a capitalistic religious analogue delivered by a cupboard-dwelling child named Purity (Stella Creel), an in-show clip drawing parallels between pumping oil and sex acts, and finally we take a dive off the deep end in a full-on trope-laden horror climax set during childbirth. Throughout these fragmented visions, Badon draws tethers between birth and extinction, capturing an at-once hilarious but simultaneously deadly serious snapshot of our oil-drenched reality in the early 21st century. One particularly powerful statement underlined the absent-minded cruelty of birthing children into an existence contaminated by oil and then continually showering their youth with plastic toys, a truism that scythes through irony and tragicomedy.

 

The Blood of the Dinosaurs is a wacky comedy-horror that encapsulates the sick joke that is raising children in a world that will be vastly different from the ones their parents grew up in due to irreparable environmental damage. If you don’t laugh you’ll cry… Well, you might do both.

About the Film Critic
Alasdair MacRae
Alasdair MacRae
Short Film
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