Before The Blood of the Dinosaurs gets properly started, we see a few seconds of footage where director and writer Joe Badon is chatting to one of the film’s stars, Kali Russell. So, what’s your movie about?’ she laughingly asks, before Badon turns the question back on her: ‘What do you think it’s about?’ In effect, one of the film’s clearest narrative elements is to be found here, and only here, in the question: the film has no other clear narrative elements. Not really. Instead it’s a hugely experimental kind of smorgasbord of animation, puppetry, embedded video, static artwork and live performance. It runs from one thing to another like Adult Swim but lands a couple of times as an Einstürzende Neubauten video. Is that clear? No? Good.
The set-up we get at first (after a charmingly lo-fi rendition of the end of the dinosaur age, as modelled with kids’ toys) is a cable TV show – the likes of which we don’t really get in the UK, but which may be most familiar to people outside of the US from Mrs Doubtfire (1993): I actually didn’t expect to make that reference, come to think of it, but it’s the closest thing I have. Well, except for the fact that this host, Uncle Bobbo (Vincent Stalba) is a faintly menacing young man who intones his words as if he really has been hiding behind his desk for 45 days, as he claims direct-to-camera. It’s a Xmas [and other winter festivals] special, but save for a handful of plastic Santas on set, we wouldn’t know: instead, Uncle Bobbo wants to talk about – tyres. He found one behind the desk while he was down there. Do you know what tyres are made from, he asks the canned laughter kids which form up part of the show? It’s dinosaurs – the blood of the dinosaurs, if you like – and he needs to spread the word about how this impacts upon the world we live in. It’s an ecocritical message menacingly given by someone who seems to be on Quaaludes.
Don’t be fooled, by the way – this doesn’t thereby establish a direction and a plot; it’s just a stop on the tour. The film then heads off on many tangents, stopping by Naked Gun via a segment on the rather risqué action of an oil derrick (there are a few other visual metaphors here which would fit right into Naked Gun, come to think of it) before a run of different sequences, including a Pornhub pastiche which instead of porn features science videos and existential melodrama. As we go, the film worries away at the fourth wall and erodes any real sense of distance between film and audience; it’s hard not to feel a little like you’ve been beaten up by the time the film ends.
If short films are intended to serve as a calling card for what a filmmaking team can do, then the message here seems to be: we haven’t taken your expectations or level of comfort into consideration, take it or leave it. This can be a disorienting experience, but the film is bold, colourful, varied and eccentric, and it’s certainly impossible to be bored as you fathom it out. Oh, and there seems to be another film on the way: this is just a prologue…
The Blood of the Dinosaurs will feature as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival 2022.