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Jacaranda Joe (2022)

★★½ — Jacaranda Joe (2022)

By 1994, George Romero was in a commercially uncertain period, some years removed from the high of the original Dead trilogy and still a decade before Land of the Dead would revive his fortunes. That context makes Jacaranda Joe a curious footnote: a short film produced with Valencia College in Florida, made on a minimal budget with a largely non-professional student cast over roughly ten days. The project was itself a revival of an abandoned 1970s concept called The Footage, which suggests Romero had been carrying the basic idea (a mock talk show dissecting grainy creature footage) for the better part of two decades. The fake-TV-news format and the jab at Geraldo Rivera-style sensationalism fit neatly into the early 1990s media scepticism of that moment.

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.

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

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