Genre Horror

Jacaranda Joe (2022)

Item: Jacaranda Joe
Rating: 2.5
Author: Ross McLaren

★★½ — Jacaranda Joe (2022)

George A. Romero is a name so thoroughly bound up with horror cinema that it can be easy to forget the sheer variety of projects he turned his hand to across a career spanning several decades. Best known for reinventing the zombie film with his Living Dead series, Romero was also a restless experimenter who worked in television, advertising and short-form filmmaking alongside his feature work. Creepshow (1982) showed his fondness for anthology formats and pulpy genre pleasures, while The Crazies (1973) demonstrated an early interest in social commentary wrapped inside genre clothing. Jacaranda Joe fits that same pattern, even if most people have never heard of it.

Made in 1994 and produced through Valencia College in Florida, Jacaranda Joe is a short film with roots that go back even further. Romero had previously attempted a version of the idea in the 1970s under the title The Footage, meaning this seventeen-minute piece represents something of a belated second attempt at a concept that had clearly stayed with him. The premise is rooted in the mock talk show format: a Geraldo Rivera-style programme called Remington, fronted by a suitably sleazy host, is discussing video footage of a Bigfoot-like swamp creature known as Joe. The panel brings together various voices, including a representative of the local Seminole community, and the whole thing builds toward a screening of the creature footage itself. It is the kind of satirical framing device Romero had used before, using popular media formats as a lens to look at how American society processes the strange, the other and the inconvenient. The shoestring nature of the production is not incidental: it was made quickly, on campus, with a non-professional cast drawn largely from the student body.

William Cross leads the cast in what is, by any measure, a modest production. Romero was working without the studio infrastructure or budgets of his better-known features, and Jacaranda Joe exists very much on the margins of his filmography. It was not widely distributed, and for years it circulated mainly among dedicated fans. It sits alongside similarly overlooked corners of his output, such as a television commercial he directed and his later, more divisive genre work, as evidence that Romero kept working and kept experimenting regardless of scale or commercial expectation. What is interesting here is less the finished product than the ideas underneath it: the media circus around the unknown, the commodification of local legend, and the pointed inclusion of a Seminole voice critiquing the cruelty of white American society. For a seventeen-minute student production, it is carrying a reasonable amount of thematic weight.

https://archive.org/details/jacaranda_joe_romero_1994 Honestly... it was made in about 10 days with a shoestring budget and a non-professional cast of students. It's pretty short. It's pretty average, but it shows that signature George Romero style we've come to love. Would have made for a fun full feature.

That link to the Internet Archive is a genuine gift, and it is worth clicking before the internet does what the internet tends to do with these things. For me, the talk show format is what makes it stick in the memory, even briefly. There is something very Romero about choosing a tacky, familiar media structure and then quietly loading it with something pointed. Yes, it is rough around the edges, and yes, you can feel the ten-day shoot in every frame, but a full feature built on this premise, with a proper budget and a seasoned cast, could have been something rather special. As it stands, it is a curio well worth the seventeen minutes of your time, even if it will leave you wanting considerably more.

Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2022 | Watched: 2025-08-27

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