The Polonia Powa has always banked on an off-putting atmosphere of awkwardness, confusion and undeniable enthusiasm. Teenagers when making this one, you get that trifecta of blissful inanity in abundance. Three brothers (Mark, John and good buddy Todd Michael Smith portraying the adopted sibling) suffer from violent visions when their mother leaves for work. Why? Fuck if I know but I ain’t mad about it. Awkward teenagers do awkward things and perform it with a kind of alien emotion that points to a quiet comfort of performing in front of people who know you and always refuse to add any criticism to their summation of your performance. After lazy plot explanation, lazier character crafting and attempts at something that may be comedy or just may be teenage boys on the brink of adulthood showing the audience what life simply is, a phone call from a creepy voice warns of oncoming awfulness. Bad dreams follow. A man in a monk’s robe appears to mentally slow Mark and nobody else and John thinks the family cat has been slaughtered but the blood-stained chainsaw he saw in the cellar has vanished. John gets sick and takes a nap. He dreams about crapping out a butcher’s knife which, naturally, castrates him and bloodies up the toilet. After putting his blood-soaked underpants back on, he pukes up his guts. It’s dirt cheap and immensely disgusting. Mark looks for his cat in the cellar and hallucinates about a ghoulish version of his adopted brother taking a big knife to his throat. John explains to Todd that it’s more than nightmares plaguing the house (IT’S HALLUCINATIONS) and Mark cries over a photo of his missing cat. Todd is struck next when he hallucinates about being tied to a bed and attacked by a man with a sack over his head. He’s smacked around, gagged with a tie (clip-on), whipped with twine and then sliced at the crotch by a big-ass knife. The three brothers agree that all these hallucinations are really weird. Todd blames Mark, John comes to his defense and Mark just thinks they need to stick together. Possible psychic powers, a severed leg in a fridge, unsettling mustaches, uncomfortable crotch fixations, a bloody fetus attack, dismemberment, Freddy Krueger’s budget-strained yet way more horrifying Serbian cousin, an elf doll pisses on stuff, the Grim Reaper’s discount store brother and a shower scene featuring a butt-naked Polonia attacked by a phallic monster brought to life with HVAC material and sculpting clay hammers home the idea that we’re in a snow-covered no man’s land where enthusiasm clashes with sexual confusion and is mostly exploited to ease boredom. A very strange film from a very strange group of humans who somehow managed to capture the more deviant thought projections most of us folks tend to suppress deep down. It’s weird. It’s not at home in this dimension. It’s Polonia.
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