Mark Polonia has been in the cheap movie game since the mid-1980s. Ultra low budget horror and sci-fi is an indelible part of his identity as a filmmaker. For almost forty years (previously with his twin brother, John — rest in peace), he has cranked out movie after movie, some garnering praise above and beyond expectations, while some are gutter trash. But, they are fun gutter trash. As of this writing, he has directed twenty-seven movies in this decade alone, and a whopping seven of them have IMDb ratings below 2.0. That’s not easy to do.
Mark Polonia reminds me of a fellow student at the School of Visual Arts, way back in my haughty fine arts days. He was a slightly below average artist, for what one gets at a place like SVA, but I felt that most of his issues could be solved by slowing down a bit. He was in such a rush to push out all these visual ideas he had bouncing around in his head that he never took the time to step back and refine what he was putting down on canvas. Just taking an extra day or two to stare at and think on a piece would have done wonders for its quality, I thought.
Polonia flicks have that same kind of rushed feeling. Polonia is a professional filmmaker, so there are budgetary and time restrictions on every one of his productions that we viewers never know about. But, margins can’t be so tight that devoting a little extra time and money would be catastrophic, would it? Maybe instead of twenty-seven movies in four years, ten would be the right number. Who knows? Anyway…
Bigfoot Vs. Zombies. Anyone who uses the popular streaming services will have noticed the influx of cheap monster flicks with silly titles (Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus, Ape vs. Mecha Ape, etc). All it takes is watching but a single one of these movies to get a sense of the objective quality of all of them.
Written and directed by Polonia, Bigfoot Vs. Zombies is exactly what the title implies. There is a bigfoot, and it fights zombies.
It all begins at a body farm somewhere in northern Pennsylvania — one of those places where forensic scientists study the decay of human remains. A scientist at the farm, Dr. Peele (Jeff Kirkendall), has developed a substance to make bodies decompose quicker so the 
farm will have increased turnover, thus increasing profits. But, the goo has the unfortunate side effect of reanimating the farm’s corpses into flesh-hungry zombies.
Meanwhile, bigfoot is stomping around out there in the surrounding woods. When the zombies begin overrunning the body farm, bigfoot makes a good guy turn, and battles the zombies on behalf of the living folks at the body farm. That’s it. That’s the plot. There isn’t even all that much expository content from the cast.
Besides Kirkendall, the other notable members of the cast are Danielle Donahue as Renee, another white-coated scientist at the body farm; Dave Fife as Stu, an employee of the hospital that delivers the deceased to the farm; and Ken Van Sant as Duke Larson, a local hunter the farm employs to keep scavengers away from the merchandise.
There are a couple familiar names in there for those who have seen a few Polonia movies. Familiar or not, the acting is atrocious. That is no surprise. Getting anything out of his cast seems low on the Polonia list of priorities.
That’s not fair. Everything in this film was low on Polonia’s list of priorities. The CGI stinks, the music stinks, the location stinks, the makeup effects stink, the sound stinks. By every objective measure of the quality of a film, this flick stinks. This is a movie that must be enjoyed for its mirth, because there is no other attraction. Even the bigfoot costume, cobbled together in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, stinks. And the guy wearing it (Steve Diasparra) looked like he was only about 5’8”. Some bigfoot.
The good news is that this movie is not meant to be taken seriously. Even those involved in making it seemed like they were having some innocent fun. The presence of familiar names in cast and crew makes every Polonia flick feel like a family affair, as if that one eccentric uncle has planned a hellacious holiday weekend for kith and kin, and a shitty movie is the result.
Stay in the spirit of this movie and one can ignore that it earned its low rating. That doesn’t stop it from falling way down into the nether regions of the Watchability Index. Bigfoot Vs. Zombies lands with a thud at #489, displacing The Incredible Petrified World. One has to be in a certain mood to enjoy fare like this.