11th Mar2022

‘Sand World’ DVD Review

by Jim Morazzini

Stars: Samantha Coolidge, Ryan Dalton, Drew Patrick, Houston Baker, A.T. Tomas, Jeff Kirkendall, Cassandra Hayes | Written by John Oak Dalton | Directed by Mark Polonia

[NOTE: With the film now out on DVD, here’s a reposting of our review of Sand World, formerly Dune World, from its digital review last year]

With Denis Villeneuve’s Dune getting its first festival showings, Mark Polonia, (Virus Shark, Shark Encounters of the Third Kind) is here to cash in with Sand World. And not only is it bad, but it may also be a new low even by his standards!

After a debate about marriage, “I believe marriage should be between two men and two women.”, the crew of the mining ship Robert Indiana, flying the Martian flag, are struck by a strange energy blast and crash on a desert planet.

Babylon (Samantha Coolidge; Noah’s Shark, Children of Camp Blood), Kondor (Ryan Dalton; Invasion of the Empire of the Apes), Kidd (Drew Patrick; Return to Splatter Farm), Chafe (Houston Baker; Queen Crab, Jurassic Prey) and Link (A.T. Tomas), an android that needs to go on a diet, trudge along in front of a green screen until they find a plastic trash can lid pretending to be a hatch that leads down to a school basement pretending to be a base.

Along the way, we get a stupid-looking sandworm, visions of a hooded figure chasing Babylon, and The Oracle (Jeff Kirkendall; Amityville Island, Natasha Nighty’s Boudoir of Blood) spouting cryptic nonsense. There are also visions of Raven (Cassandra Hayes; Necropath, ZillaFoot) the ship’s previous and now deceased, captain. All of this footage is repeated multiple times to pad the film’s runtime out to seventy minutes.

The script by John Oak Dalton (Scarecrow County, Peter Rottentail) eventually tells us that dust from the minerals mined on the planet acting like Dune’s spice and mutating those exposed to it. And, the spirits of the previous expedition take over the bodies of this expedition’s dead Planet of the Vampires style. If something had been done with these ideas, Sand World actually could have been fun. But all that happens is a lot of running around on the way to a non-ending.

To be fair to the writer, judging by the amount of reused footage in Sand World I doubt there was the budget to do anything but have them run around. Even for one of Polonia’s films this feels cheap and rushed. So little happens that it actually feels incomplete, as though it’s missing scenes or a whole subplot.

I know this is a fairly short review but there really isn’t much else I can say beyond avoid Sand World at all costs. There’s no plot, no action and no reason to watch it, it isn’t even unintentionally funny. I can only hope the next film Polonia and Dalton collaborated on, Noah’s Shark, is better. Because with a title like that, I know I’ll have to watch it.

Sand World is available on DVD now from SRS Cinema.

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