Dune World (2021) Review

With Denis Villeneuve’s Dune getting its first festival showings, Mark Polonia, (Deadly Playthings, Jurassic Shark 2: Aquapocalypse) is here to cash in with Dune 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, Shark Encounters of the Third Kind) eventually tells us that dust from the minerals mined on the planet acts like Dune’s spice and mutates 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, Dune 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 Dune 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 short review but there really isn’t much else I can say beyond avoid Dune 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.

Dune World is available on Digital platforms from SRS Cinema. There was a limited edition physical release, you can check SRS’s website to see if it’s still available.

Where to watch Dune World